I was alone in the Canyon of the Dead, the Canyon del Muerto, a canyon in the region known as Canyon de Chelly.
I was sitting on a rock in the middle of the Arizona desert, but here Tsaille Creek was making Cottonwoods available.
The water was rushing over stones below my feet and making sounds like voices underwater.
There was an incongruous feeling in my mind caused by such a desert landscape threaded by that current.
And although the weather was quite cool and partly cloudy, I felt a sort of light- headedness as if the sun was beating down on me and bleaching my consciousness to something thin and porous.
Across the creek, set into the sandstone wall shaped by wind and time into an amphitheatre, stood Mummy Cave Ruin, an Anasazi settlement abandoned eight hundred years ago.
Now its adobe walls and pinon buttresses remained somewhat intact but empty of all life. Still there seemed to be a presence behind its darkened windows.
As I sat there quiet in the canyon stillness, listening to the creek and staring at the ruins, I began to feel that presence seep within my consciousness. It felt as if the rushing water was some embodiment of time itself, convincing me that time only appears fleeting when you're stuck inside the moment. Otherwise, it's always there, like a river stretching from its source to outlet. As the Anasazi are still there. As I am still there.
There is no past and there is no future; there’s only the current.
I was alone in the Canyon of the Dead, the Canyon del Muerto, a canyon in the region known as Canyon de Chelly.
I was sitting on a rock in the middle of the Arizona desert, but here Tsaille Creek was making Cottonwoods available.
The water was rushing over stones below my feet and making sounds like voices underwater.
There was an incongruous feeling in my mind caused by such a desert landscape threaded by that current.
And although the weather was quite cool and partly cloudy, I felt a sort of light- headedness as if the sun was beating down on me and bleaching my consciousness to something thin and porous.
Across the creek, set into the sandstone wall shaped by wind and time into an amphitheatre, stood Mummy Cave Ruin, an Anasazi settlement abandoned eight hundred years ago.
Now its adobe walls and pinon buttresses remained somewhat intact but empty of all life. Still there seemed to be a presence behind its darkened windows.
As I sat there quiet in the canyon stillness, listening to the creek and staring at the ruins, I began to feel that presence seep within my consciousness. It felt as if the rushing water was some embodiment of time itself, convincing me that time only appears fleeting when you're stuck inside the moment. Otherwise, it's always there, like a river stretching from its source to outlet. As the Anasazi are still there. As I am still there.
There is no past and there is no future; there’s only the current.
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