the wind blew all night. High and loud....tent whipping around the poles...breathing in and out with sudden gusts...like a living thing exhaling in anger. I lie in my sleeping bag...somehow soothed and gentled by all that energy rather than troubled by it. It is energy outside of me...mirroring my own excesses and letting me rest from them for a moment.
When the dawn comes...it is slow...the smell of the air is so sharp in my nostrils as I move about the campsite, the sharp pungency of the coffee Shera has brewed on the fire fills me with delight.
She goes back to the tent for a meditation, but I am restless with the wind. I leave the fire burning low...thinking I will just go for a little walk...no such thing for me as a little walk, I guess. I clamber over the rock, climbing higher and higher into the light of the breaking dawn.
Slickrock is like a living thing...with texture and form and fluid motion. It’s hardness is just an illusion...walk on it...on nearly vertical surfaces...and feel it grab your feet with a million little fingers...sand grains from some distant other world beach...a million little sea anemones or a billion suckers from the arms of ancient squid ...just an illusion of inert rock...what else could be grabbing at my tennies that way as I climb up and over around and farther beyond the rock. Slickrock makes me feel young and agile as my feet tread across it with the sureness of a mountain goat. Nothing slips, nothing moves beneath me...all is secure and each foot stays exactly where I place it. Amazing feeling after the crumbling, eroding, slipping bedrock of the old rocky mountains.
The colors are like the flesh of living things as well, nothing but flesh is that soft coral pink, or living red like the newly cut meat of an animal. Looking around me it is hard to believe that the rocks aren’t moving and swaying beneath my feet with the wind. Although my feet are secure, my body is buffeted by the wind. I must struggle to remain upright against it. The sun is just beginning to lighten the horizon in the distance. In the east I see the phallic peak of a mountain...black and then burgundy and purple against the lightening sky. Why does this make me so high so full of life and energy. Absolutely nothing matters in this time and in this place except the air and the color all around me. The sureness of the rock holding me...the energy of the wind surrounding me, the brilliance of the light illuminating me.
