Tag Archives: idaho

Quigley Canyon

I ran today up Quigley Canyon. The dirt road was completely paved in white snow, the hills and mountains dressed in naked veils of the stuff, the wide curving fields that lie between the opposing slopes turned to still rivers of crystal-studded alabaster. The aromatic sage I crushed in my hands at the end of summer now stands stiff and thin, the long-blown blooms poling up above the bush and all of it wearing capes of white. If I said, “Today the sky was blue,” I’d have to find a different word for blue, one that didn’t simply represent the color: that was how blue the sky was today. So blue, all other skies I’ve seen seem to have merely stood for the color like a word, whereas today the sky was the color itself, the signified free of representation. If only that could be said, somehow, without being a fallacy by nature.

I met my brother-in-law and the dog as they were coming down off a hill trail. Hanna, the dog, was wild with joy, snow caked between her pads and her russet fur shining. “I’m heading up the Canyon,” I said redundantly, since that was the only direction the road we were standing on led. Unless I wanted to wade up the frozen crest of the hill, which I did not. Off I ran, with the afternoon sun against my back.

Running on semi-packed snow is like running on sand. My ankles ached, I verged on losing my balance each moment. I hopped between the multiple tire-tracks on the road, trying to find a track that was packed enough to not give as I ran, with partial success. Most of the time, I left divots behind me instead of full prints, because I ran toes-first, finding purchase, leaping a little with each stride, since each stride was a bit like falling as the snow gave way under my weight.

I’ve been running at sea level for three months; I ran a mile or more above sea level today. Heart pounding, legs strong.

There were some prints along the silent fields beside the road. Animal or human, I couldn’t tell. My eyes wept in the cold, in the mild breeze, and I kept pressing the back of my mittened hand to them, to sop up the blurry tears. When I turned around on the road to head back, facing west and the lowering sun, I actually felt colder. The sweat that had risen through several layers of clothing and gathered like a fine, warm mist on the front of my fleece on the way out dissipated and cooled on the way back. I watched my feet more than the hills or sky on the return, wary of my footing.

Later this afternoon a seeming fog crept up the valley and obscured the sky. It’s not snowing, but it looks like it might.

night prayer

The stars in their soft August beauty emerge from both the black velvet sky and the charcoal fur of smoke from the forest fires that has settled along the horizon. There is a “light pollution” ordinance in this small mountain town forbidding porch lights and such in the neighborhoods, and so even the Milky Way is visible. It is 10:30 p.m. The mountains rise from the smoke like the creamy shoulders of a sleeping giant, visible against the sky. I stop in front of a long canyon field that, by day, is gold with ripening grain and flows back between the mountains. By night it is a rustling presence. An intimation of openness. The mountains loom up, the stars populate the sky, and I stand in a sea of night-sounds.

For MF and JL, MP, Mssr. R., SR & MR, MS … I know so many people whose first name begins with an M. The ill, the recovering, the frail, the hurt. I don’t receive many requests for prayers. Sometimes I offer to include people, when it seems appropriate. Blessing is what we do; and while it may be that those of great holiness can more effectively bless, I try not to let an acute sense of my own failings and limitations stop me from offering prayers of healing and hope. I see prayer and blessing as most fundamentally a reaffirmation of our connections and shared existence. An honoring of our mutual and shared life. What other metaphysics work through these prayers and blessings I neither second-guess nor overly concern myself with. To be wholehearted requires both understanding, and suspension of understanding.

May all be well, free from suffering. May all be whole, without illness or disease in body or mind. May we all be at ease, in peace and comfort.

The stars above, Cassiopeia and Cepheus, the deep promise of Quigly’s Canyon between the mountains, the rustle of the grain. Night prayer. For us all.

morning work (living hagiography 8.10.2012)

In the living room, my mom scolds my sister’s puppy, Hanna: “No, I don’t want you up there! No, I don’t want you on the couch…” I gave up disciplining Hanna concerning the couch. She is far more single-minded in her pursuit than I in mine (regarding her, at least) and it also not my couch. I feel less loyalty to it than to Hanna’s pleasures, which so far in her small eager life include lying on couches, gnawing on bones and shoes, and having her belly rubbed while she lies in the cool evening grass.

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I keep trying to write. Anything, other than small stones. To restart the cold mountain series. Or something sustained, with a narrative, a structure: and I keep shying away from it. I cite more looming deadlines as an excuse. I cry exhaustion; it was a long summer in Virginia, in classrooms the majority of the day, with work accompanying it. I flatter myself, saying it’s because I want to write something “good.” But in honesty, fear is the dominating reason for not writing. One of the other students on the program this summer is a photographer. He and I talked a bit about commitment, fear, and intimacy in any creative endeavor. I learned a lot about writing listening to him talk about photographs, going over different photographers with me. How, when I realized intimacy in someone’s work was what I responded to, I began to notice right away when it wasn’t there, and how so. And then I realized I needed to become more honest as a writer, to get up against the skin of things, even inside the skin, if I wanted to write. I won’t say “be a writer.” I don’t know what it is to “be” any one thing. But the commitment aspect, that however you label yourself, you have to commit to not just a particular craft but to practicing it, working at it, cultivating yourself within it: that’s partly where the fear comes in. Because you don’t know what that commitment will demand of you. I say that as someone who has a major commitment in life, has a central vocation, and has had to negotiate the difficult demands it makes of me. I balk at making another commitment. But then I balk again: if I’m not going to commit, then what? The question rears in front of me, and I waver in front of it in return.

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Virginia sunrises were like the breaking of an egg over the world: a sudden crack, and then light ran everywhere, insistently flooding every corner and crack and heating the moisture-laden air. In compensation, the evenings were long blue affairs, the light lingering and deepening until finally the stars began to come out, soft, as if they didn’t want to intrude. In Idaho, however, the dawn arrives a little later and more gently than in Virginia. Here the morning sun is a gentle wash without heat. Yesterday I walked up a nearby canyon. Every color there was velveted, the sharpness gone. Sagebrush dominates the hills here, fragrant, silver-green. I don’t know why I ever left the West, I wonder to myself. I was young, though, and the need to leave was stronger than my ties to the land. Then. Now I feel the homecoming of light and land, and I wonder how I’ll leave this time, and when I can return.