You Gotta Get Out More

When people vacation they usually head to some airport somewhere or drive toward a specific destination in search of some specific feature of the landscape, urbanscape, seascape, etc.  There is usually a plan - head toward Aunt Edith's house, stop along the way at the largest ball of twine in the world, take pictures as we cross into each new state.  Next time you head off on vacation, try abandoning all sense of direction.  Head out and get lost in some set of mountains.  Drive off the freeway into some beautifully desolate landscape.  Listen to....well, listen to the silence.  Turn the kids out to run and relieve themselves in the world and listen to the nothingness.

I renewed my relationship with the solitude of the landscape last week.  I drove into the Book Cliffs and watched the falcons fly off the red slabs of the Castlegate Sandstone.  I marveled at the quite studio presented to the ancients who painted images of "ghost men" on the rock walls.  I drove into the gray, yellow and white landscape of the Mancos Shale and marveled at the "quiet desolation" to coin a phrase.  I headed up to the top of the San Juan Mountains and listened to the wind blow through the aspen leaves as they shed themselves in a golden carpet on the ground.

Aspen on a gravel road.

Next time you plan where you want to go...don't.  Try losing yourself in the alleys of nature.  Take some pictures, sit beside a stream, let the wind blow through the trees and be reminded of all the things you can find when you don't go looking for anything in particular.  As Thoreau said "Simplify, simplify."

Just tell her to sit down and take a number.....

The concept people and governments have that they can somehow control nature always gives me pause.  I think it is the whole thing about how man is destroying earth.  Let me say this about that.  The concept that man can destroy earth means that man is somehow more powerful than the earth itself.  The audacity of that opinion is caused  by not just a little self inflation by man likely driven by a false sense of importance bouyed most likely by our religion.  Man's dominion over the earth and all its creatures and all that bunk.   The reality is the earth is an amazingly resilient and powerful force.  You will be born, live and die in what, to the earth is the blink of an eye, and the earth and its creatures will still be here.  Man will go extinct.  It is the way of nature.  Species go extinct and they go extinct for so many reasons.  The Earth will always be here.   If you pollute the earth, your water, your air you are poking yourself in the eye.  The Earth could care less.  In the blink of an eye, man will be gone and the Earth will sweep up and go on.  So all this crying for Mother Earth is a bit overdone in my opinion.  Cry for yourselves.  Now that is time much better spent.

I sit tonight about 40 km east of the eye of hurricane Hermine.  Awesome.  Gusting winds.  Sheets of rain.  Thunder.  The power of nature is amazing.  Sounds to me like the Earth can take care of itself tonight.