Saturday walk

Horse Skull

"Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."  Ominous?  Not necessarily.  As I was taking my walk on Saturday a friend shared this with me.  We are made of stardust, after all.  Awesome.

I find time in nature restorative, as most of us do.  This is enhanced by my being a nature mystic and more or less an animist.  I see every subatomic particle as infused with the Spirit and Life of God.

So, on another glorious day in Albuquerque I drove a few miles from my house, parked the car, and started walking.  The photo above is a view across the fields of the West Mesa toward the Sandias.

After I had moseyed about two and a half miles down the road, this is the view back toward the car which is hiding just below the horizon.

I loved the back lighting on these grasses lining the road.

Emeralds are my birthstone.  The broken glass here was lovely.

A tree near a culvert.

The view toward the west and the vast expanse of the West Mesa and the New Mexico sky.

As I walked along, enjoying the sunlight glistening on pieces of broken glass in varying shades, my mind assembled them as a long stretch of stained glass.  And I thought of the imagery of the Shekinah scattered throughout creation, longing to be reunited.  My mind then turned back to cosmology.  We have so many mythoi of creation being healed and brought back together.  Yet scientists tell us the universe is expanding ever faster and will eventually become dark and undifferentiated.  I have no reason to doubt that.

If one has lived a comfortable life, as most throughout history have not, that may be enough: to have simply lived.  But if one's life has known misery, starvation, slavery, oppression, war, disease, terror, violence, abuse, chronic pain, etc. then merely having lived hardly seems enough.  We want some righting of wrongs, some healing of ills and suffering, some transformation to give us hope.  (At our worst we seek retribution for our ills, but let us set that aside.) So my rejoicing in simply existing last Saturday (and most days), is the luxury of a modern, bourgeois life that has enjoyed loving and being loved, having my needs met, and generally not being anxious about the future.  These thoughts do not undo my exhilaration but they remind me soberly that very few can feel that way.

Oh, what a glorious day it was.  Wopila!

--the BB