Stones Speak

lava speaks of the rage

of the mountain’s birth

while the seamed granite

speaks of the silence

that followed

I love the Native American idea that stones speak, that they instruct us through their ancient intimacy with the earth. I spend a lot of time hunting for rocks, studying them, trying to listen to them. Rocks are great conversationalists. They're imposing without being condescending, informative without being overbearing, quietly witty without trying to force their charm on the listener.

They bear the marks of unimaginable heat and aeons of wind. Here in the San Luis Valley, which once held a large lake, many rocks also show the softly persistent wear of water. The stones speak of silence, patience and immutable resistance to the elements. Their seams and fissures are like mute mouths; their pock marks are like the scars on a well worn face.

Granite Man

Granite man

lost the urge to be herded

takes shelter in a tin trailer

buries his bottles

sleeps with a gun.

No one has lived in this trailer for years, but I'm fascinated by its nonexistent inhabitant, whom I picture as a grizzled misanthrope. The dogs love to wander around on this property, which was once someone's unauthorized junkyard. There's still a corral and some old sheep sheds to the west of the trailer. Blanca towers over the abandoned trailer, turning this tiny shelter into a thimble.

The Invisible Life of Mountains

Gems from the Road

I once dyed my hair

the rich red of a bloodstone

now the roots are gray

and I dig gems from the road --

quartz, obsidian and granite.

Captivity

snow rims the fence

coffee in a chipped white cup

coyote underground

Frost covers the fence this morning in long, furry crystals, creating a delicate barrier across the wire. Fence upon fence, we create our own captivity.

Blood Sky

Along the dark cloud path

a lifetime sentence begins

as a dead man's blood

rises to the horizon

to paint the sinking sky

Today is the anniversary of a murder that I can't seem to forget. I didn't know anyone involved in the crime, but the circumstances haunt me. Memories of my own mistakes, the rancid emotions and overblown fears. After the murderer was sentenced a couple of months ago, we had a series of flawless sunsets in the Valley, absolutely cloudless, with yellow gradients giving way to blue, and I felt that in some way, these skies held a gift of serenity for the man who died so violently.

La Culebra

winter sun

warms the stone snake

La Culebra despierta

This mountain range is known as la Culebra. In this pale dawn light, on an icy December morning, it really does look like a snake warming itself in the sun. As the sun rises, its light seems to illuminate the mountains from within. Today will be a good sun day; we'll have plenty of heat and power.

La Veta Pass

smoke on the summit

chalk dust on the mountain's cheek

your cool white fingers

Driving over La Veta Pass into the valley near sunset, I tried to capture the faintly rosy cast of light on this mountain. I'm always frustrated by the fact that I can't photograph the scope, color and substance of what I see. If I lost my sight, I'd have to rely on these remembered images, and I'm not sure if my memory would be vivid enough to recreate this beauty. Maybe the mountains have an additional dimension of beauty that can't be captured by any eye.

Memory of Stones

Slow as a fault line

grows the memory of stones;

they recall the shift

of the rumbling mountain

and the sleep of the lost sea.

The growth of the mountain seems infinitesimally slow; the orogeny takes place one millimeter at a time. Then the sudden seizure of activity -- an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a shift in the tectonic plates. There are fault lines at the foot of Blanca, waiting to open. The plates may not shift until long after I'm gone.

I think about everything the stones have seen, how long they've waited to take the form they have, how they're continually being shaped by the wind, and I don't feel so dissatisfied with my own slow progress.

December Wind

Each wind has a voice --

the groan of an empty sea,

the high, panicked breath

of a fleeing jackrabbit,

or a bull snake's dry whisper.

Last week there were several days of brutal winds across the West. Here it was a strafing, relentless wind that slammed the house like the winds on the high seas. Early in the morning, you could see a brown scrim of dust rising around the foot of Blanca. By afternoon, the mountain was completely veiled.

Although we refer to the wind in the singular, as if there were only one, in reality there are many winds, and each has its own character.

Rabbitbrush

Like a woman's hair

rabbitbrush displays a life,

from its gray, wind-matted roots

to its maidenly green straws

still tufted with yellow stars.

Rabbitbrush, or Chrysothamnus viscidiflorus, is one of the few plants that grow abundantly in our little microclimate, which is low on precipitation and high in altitude. The prairie winds expose the roots of these perennial shrubs, flattening them into shredded whorls on the ground. During rain or snow, the straw-like stems turn plump and green. When the water disappears, their skeletal remains cling to the dust, withstanding the harsh winds until water coaxes them to life again. These shrubs are amazingly hardy, flourishing in this cold, dry, thin air where little else survives in the way of flora.

Morning Snow

Coyote pups call out

in the snowlight, cries ringing

flat against the walls

of a milky winter fog,

questions fading in the brush.

No visibility in this dense white fog; the mountains are hidden. We're getting a little power from a white thumbprint of a sun. The cries of the coyotes on a winter morning are haunting.

Illusions of Distance

Distance is a dream

brought on by shadowed mesas

etched with early snow --

in truth, the bluffs are as close

as the rims of my eyelids.

These layered mesas lie to the South of us. Light creates illusions of distance on the Flats; some features of the landscape stand out with crystalline clarity on certain days, while others are nearly invisible until a specific cast of light brings them out of hiding. I feel that all of these features are much closer than they appear.

Early Sunset

Mars is a lone note of light

in a sky playing out its spectrum.

As yellow gives way to a soft verdict of blue,

I thank the crime that sentenced me

to live through this.

In the Cloud House

Who lives in the vault

of the cloud house?

Only the wind, who shouts

down the light shafts to

the mute mountain.

Masses of clouds over the mountains take the shape of corridors, rooms, hallways. I see vast ballrooms in the sky, and secret passageways, and foyers that open onto stunning caverns of light. Did you ever wish you could live in the clouds?

Stop

Ghosts

Blanca Flats has never felt haunted to me in any way. This spiky, drought resistant ecosystem is alive with spirits -- wind, clouds, mountains, stones -- and with coyotes, snakes, mice, rabbitbrush and prickly pear. But ghosts?

I haven't felt any. Only the ghosts of my own memory. Sometimes they cross my inner vision in a continuous parade, sullen and relentless. Every mistake I've ever made, every regret I've ever cradled in my thoughts, every act of cowardice, every act of neglect. Steeped in solitude, this life forces a constant confrontation with the past.

The wind is an indifferent listener.

The massif is engaged in its own endless transformation.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie

Moon

If I'd never moved out here, I never would have known the intimate revelations of the moon. Its cycles and rituals are more complex than I'd ever imagined.

With each dawn, each twilight, each luminous midnight, I learn something about Nature that humbles me.

Freight Train

You can hear the freight trains coming for miles before their appear. It's a low, steady drone, combined with a gathering vibration that spreads from the floor through the marrow of your bones. Nothing captures the wild, lonely melancholy of departure like the train's whistle.

This photo was taken by EHB in March of this year, before the snow melted on the peaks. Now the snow is largely gone, and the massif will be bald for a month or two before winter starts to rev itself up again.

Loss

Blanca's presence in my life helps me cope with the sense of loss that haunts my subconscious. All of the friends, city streets, casts of light, poems that I've loved, buildings I remember seem to be constantly in the process of disintegrating, the way the mandala in a kaleidoscope collapses into colorful shards and light at the slightest shift of the tube.

Blanca brings the shards into focus. Just knowing that she's there -- always there, barring some act of war or massive geological upheaval -- brings the disintegrating fragments of memory to rest.

Widow

Maybe it's a sign that you've had too much solitude when you start naming inanimate objects. It's not just a matter of personifying them -- you start to seek them out, to rely on their reassuring, silent presence. These old wooden fence posts belonged to a ranch that no longer exists; the ranchers and their livestock have long since vanished, but the posts remain.

I call the post on the left "The Widow." The soft, silvered wood reminds me of a widow's shoulders, curved in quiet defense of her grief. I say a silent hello to the Widow whenever I drive by. She acknowledges me, and I acknowledge her.

Shed

Taken from inside our former neighbor's collapsing sheep shed. There are no livestock in the immediate area anymore. The shed is much older than the house our neighbor built. Old wooden structures like this are everywhere in the Valley.

Rain

This morning the air was suffused with the scents of sage, rabbitbrush and rain. A squall passed over. The wind bangs the screen door against the house. Maybe the moisture will draw the snakes from their holes.

I love these monochromatic mornings, when the mountains and foothills reveal themselves in layers of light and shadow. The mountains recover their memory, remember what they were and what they are becoming.

Greenhouse

This is the greenhouse that Eric has been building. Its plastic "walls" have been delivered and are coming soon. The young herbs and vegetables have been growing in our sunroom, waiting for frost danger to pass. In the San Luis Valley, that doesn't happen until mid-June.

I have an apple tree seedling that I've been cultivating. I found the sprouted seed inside a Pink Lady apple.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie

Subconscious

At first I wasn't happy with these evening shots. Then I realized that the massif's hulking shape is often how it appears in my subconscious. An enormous shadow, an immense and dark substance, still in the process of creation. The massif haunts me.

Truck

An evening ride with the dogs. The mountain comes into full view once we've crested the hill.

Gray

A swollen mass of clouds conceals the peak. When the mountain is masked this way, I feel a kinship to her. I want to retreat behind clouds.

The peaks generate their own atmosphere. Clouds mass around the summit -- I imagine the silent roil of the mist and wish I could be up there, enveloped, hidden.

Azure

A vertical cloud floats in a vertiginous expanse of blue. This dizzying glimpse of the azure reminds me why I love living at 7,500 feet.

Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie

Dawn

I'm learning more about light by photographing Blanca and observing the mountains throughout the day. The light at 7:30 a.m. erases most of her details, leaving her silhouette hovering like a one-dimensional symbol from a dream. The outline of the massif appears to have been scissored out of the pale dawn sky.

About 12 hours later, the alchemy of the setting sun will cast the peaks in gold, turn their shadows midnight blue.

Rabbitbrush

Rabbitbrush is one of the few plants hardy enough to survive in our arid, high-desert ecosystem. This shrub grows rampant in the sandy soils of the Valley, coloring the parched, empty rangeland with a faint suggestion of green.

Clouds and Shadows

Everything that surrounds Blanca reaches for the mountain, somehow. The clouds lower themselves to engulf her. My house extends its shadow to her. My eyes, lungs, heart expand to take her in.

Sometimes I complain that nothing ever happens out here. Yet the clouds' slow drama is ongoing. The sky changes from one moment to the next. In sunlight and moonlight, shadows carry on their intense, silent life.

Evening Clouds

Sullen clouds gathering over the mountains. A walk at twilight. A restless current in the air. The dogs won't settle down -- Jake races straight at me, skirting a head-on collision by about an inch.

One of the clearest memories from my childhood: summer afternoons driving through rural New Mexico on the way to California, evening squalls, air swollen with rain and the scent of sage. Sometimes I think those memories led me here.

Talking

We are off the power grid here, but we do have access to telephone service. Buried cable crisscrosses the ground in a silent network. The phone lines were installed in this sparsely inhabited area of Costilla County under a federal grant, in hopes that all of this open space would be developed and settled.

I don't know that any of our two or three neighbors takes advantage of the phone lines. People out here don't seem to talk very much.

Here, the wind does most of the talking. Howling, whispering, sighing, singing to itself. I think the wind's overbearing voice -- the wind that blasted tons of sand across the plains to create the Great Sand Dunes -- is one reason why the area will never be successfully settled.

Massif

I love the term massif. The word plunges straight from my brain to the pit of my stomach. It holds everything I know about this mass of the earth's crust, which isn't very much.

I started this blog so that I could learn more about her, but I'm not naturally inclined to absorb facts. I tend to forget them immediately if I don't write them down. From my research (and the sticky I left for myself on my desktop), I know that the Blanca Massif includes four peaks, and that the highest -- Blanca, herself -- hits 14,285 feet in less than 5 miles.

When I think of the word massif, let it settle in my mind, I see an aerial view. I see the topography from above, absorb the vertiginous grandeur of her ongoing creative act. She is still in the process of being born.

Because "mass" is a verb of action as well as a noun. Slow, steady, deliberate action, like the movements of the Earth that are creating her, inch by inch, century by century.

When I first moved from California to Colorado, I ached for the ocean. I felt landlocked in Boulder, where I lived at the time. I was afraid I'd eventually suffocate with the sea so far away.

Then one foggy morning, I left my apartment and glanced up at the Flatirons, which loomed over my neighborhood, and I realized that these misted, motionless vertical slabs and peaks were not motionless at all. Like the crests of giant waves, they were rising and subsiding -- only their trajectories required eons to complete. The ocean was with me; it would always be with me, and in the massive crests and crevices of the mountains, I can capture its immense, rolling space with my finite human eye.

Gender

I procrastinated for months before starting this project. At first I attributed the block to my usual bugbears -- lack of motivation, lack of time, mental fatigue, general failure as a human being -- then it occurred to me today that there was another reason I wasn't taking the photos or writing the text.

A 1.8-billion-year-old granite block is too big to be ignored.

This afternoon, it hit me that I was caught up on the gender identity of the mountain. In Navajo tradition, Tsisnaasjini' is male. But I have always thought of Mount Blanca as female. It didn't seem appropriate to use the Navajo name in this blog while referring to the mountain as "she," but it appears that I don't have much of a choice.

Defining the gender of a mountain is like defining the gender of a deity. If there's an internal dissonance between the prevailing concept of the deity and your own, you may drop off the road, at some point. And you'll either follow your own sense of the sacred, or you'll give up your faith.

Or your project, in this case.

As much as I respect the Navajo interpretation of this sacred directional mountain, Blanca is an overwhelmingly feminine presence to me. The comfort she gives me, the shape she lends to my days, the profound sense of reassurance that I find in her vast, glorious indifference, are feminine.

She's the Sacred glimpsed through a window in passing, as well as the Sacred viewed outdoors in frank awe.

Clarity

After a stretch of hazy days, the milk-white sky is blue again. The smoke from the wildfires seems to be dissipating. In Native American healing traditions, some winds carry illness. This morning's Southwest wind feels cleansing. This wind's voice is fierce, but its touch is gentle.

I like to zoom in on the peaks so that I can see the contrasting textures of trees, then the bare expanse of rock above the treeline. Some of that granite is over 1 billion years old. My whole lifetime equals the length of a brief dream in the long, slow sleep of her creation.

Every day I see a new detail, a crevice or a crater that I hadn't noticed before, and my fascination with her deepens.

Veiled by Smoke

You can only see a ghost of her at 7:45 A.M., she's so thickly veiled by smoke from the wildfires on the other side of the mountains. Every morning, smoke masses into the San Luis Valley and settles. By evening, the winds will have cleared the curtain a bit.

Her silhouette hovers on the horizon, a faint etching in the haze.

Her Names

Tsisnaasjini'
Dawn Mountain
White Shell Mountain
Mount Blanca

I've seen her almost every day for the past two years, with the exception of a few weeks out of the country and a few days out of town here and there. She overlooks the sea of dry rabbitbrush, prickly pear and tumbleweeds where I sail in my little A-frame ship.

Tsisnaasjini' is the Sacred Mountain of the East, one of the four directional mountains that represent the boundaries of the Navajo Nation.

Almost every day, I've thought to myself that I should acknowledge her somehow. This is my attempt to express the joy she gives me.