I sat on top of the central peak in the landscape’s natural double-gate formation. From here human scratches were slight to the wide spread of cacti, brambles, lines of washes and arroyos. To the left an exquisite shimmer of light marked windshields in a filled up parking lot. Only in the far distance approaching the ringed edge of another range could I see the large cut out patches formed by farmland. Here the “Gate” was also a pass, a threshold to a new zone with its own relation to the horizon, its own markings by which one could figure the cardinal directions. And this was, I suppose, how we got by at one time, half-nomadic peoples all of us within some bioregion. The world was then “gardens” in the sense of the Sanskrit, places contained by some “boundary” to sight. And they all dissolve, implacable, numinous, when they’re approached, turn into passes and show themselves to be only orienting constellations. The high, arid desert breeze moved around. Cars going over the pass below droned along. Presumably, some migrants were struggling within my sightline, invisibly. And the national park signage below, with its long-past, long-thinking description of the land, seemed half-hopeful to me, saying, “70 million years, 35 million years, now.” Within that amount of time a whole lot of shifting around ended up with us here somehow, and its artificial thinking to suppose its not shifting around right “now,” taking us somewhere else. I want to enter our “now,” where people are dying, where urgently human needs keep crying out. But I need the long-view, too, not being able to know whether or not much will change in my day, but knowing nature is at work within and around us, that the volcanic stratums underneath are subterraneanously unsettled, ranging and rearraing, that the cleavages will open.
