It is an astonishingly beautiful day today in northern New Mexico,especially right here in Llano Quemado, on the south side of Taos.

Fall has arrived: the cottonwoods are starting to turn yellow, and the chamisa is blooming. There’s a stiff wind out of the east, creating strong updrafts along the edge of the mesa, where flocks of ravens and magpies wheel around and around, drifting up and down the ridgeline. It’s like they’re competing to show who can glide better, though I have to say the ravens do a better job, playing follow-the-leader between the tops of the tallest trees. The magpies are distracted by pine nuts and juniper berries, frequently dropping out of the air to have another bite. Later there will be aromatic bird poop on the hood of my truck…

The stuff is everywhere

That’s chamisa, above, also known as “rabbit brush.” The flowers rise chest-high from tough bushes in amongst the sagebrush, heavy with nectar and pollen. The other day I saw a honeybee struggling to lift off, legs loaded with yellow dust. It slowly rose straight up and out of sight. I could see the pollen it was carrying from 15 feet away. I can also feel it in my sinuses, but this will pass.

Outrageous beauty all around. Golden yellow swaths of turning aspens decorate the mountain slopes. Jesus, I HAVE to get up off my ass and hike before the snow closes off the high country trails. None has fallen yet, but it’s just a matter of time. I can look out my window and see Mt. Wheeler (13,151 feet), rocky and bare in the sunshine. In another couple of weeks, it could be white up there, but for now we’re enjoying temperatures about 10 degrees above normal.

I feel ready for work, but first, my 12-string or the bouzouki. It’s just that kind of Saturday.

Okey dokey, three new images posted in the Tusas Mountains Series. Not the one below, but check it out, anyway: this belongs to our expedition guide. It’s a .44, and the reason he was packing it was in case of bears hiding in the mine shafts. No kidding!

Yes, that got my attention

Am I in the right place or not?! I love this stuff… If you visit today’s page, however, you’ll think the juxtaposition rather humorous.

The rest of the country really has no idea.

I wouldn’t have had, either, if not for being naturally reckless on occasion. This last weekend, however, I had guides and 4WDs to smooth (?) the way. What I did was hook up with an informal geology field trip, and we went back where hardly anyone ever goes. Total, absolute heaven, on some of the worst roads I’ve ever been on in my life. How we got through without a smashed crankcase or a blowout is beyond me. But where that gets you is astonishing.

Powerful deep energy

It really is wild. It goes for miles and miles, until the distance doesn’t count, because everywhere I go, I’m Here. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. It’s a huge spiritual kick. When I get far enough away from “civilization” that I feel that deep, serious fear, it opens up the circuits, concentrates the attention. Then I pass through to some enormous, unspoken relevance that’s like cool water to a thirsting soul. Inexpressible awe and gratitude. Comfort. All is One, indivisible and alive.

Coming home from something like that is always jarring, no matter how loving the domestic scene. Until I see the wildness again, that is, right in front of me, in the flashing of her moods and in her eyes.

My friend was driving when we came around a curve in the mountains west of Tres Piedras.

“That’s where I got my first elk,” he said, motioning with his chin. The way he said it, I knew it was a long time ago, and that he’d done it many times since then.

He told me he’d been out working nearby, when his companion shouted that there was a “cow” down in the creek. He wasn’t thinking elk, but that’s what he found after going to investigate: a badly-wounded elk cow. Someone had shot off a hind hoof, and the animal was terrified and could no longer run. He approached her cautiously. As he got up close, he could sense or hear her heart beating loudly: ka-BOOM-pah, ka-BOOM-pah! “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’ve come to release you.” Immediately, her heartbeat quieted [ka-boom-pa, ka-boom-pah] and slowed.

She let him come right up to her. He pulled out his .44 and shot her in the head.

It was a couple of Sundays ago, and it still reverberates…

I was at a custom car show in the park. I’d just gotten a hot dog and a Dr. Pepper and needed somewhere to sit. On the edge of the car show, under some trees, was an unoccupied stretch of grass, so I sat down to have my lunch. I was really happy, looking at all the amazing cars, and the hot dog wasn’t bad, either. When I finished, I stood up to brush myself off. For some reason I happened to turn around, and this is what I saw:

The bones of the man himself are in there somewhere

I recognized Kit Carson’s grave at once, but this was still a shock. I’d only seen it before from the other direction, on the other side of the fence. I’d also only recently finished reading Hampton Side’s Blood and Thunder (“The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West”), which I unreservedly recommend to the entire world. You don’t know what really happened unless you read this book, and if you do, you’ll both be glad and wish you’d never had a clue. Suffice it to say that in this context, turning around and getting smacked in the eyeballs by the familiar grave was one of “those moments.”

Hot rods and Kit Carson: blood and thunder, indeed.

Every bathtub needs a window.

Like with the adobe cottage we rented for a while in San Cristobal, the bathroom in this old adobe has a smallish window high up on the wall beside the tub. When I stand up to take a shower, I can look out to see sunshine and mountains, or feel the breeze on my face. This evening as I lay back and settled in for a long soak, I heard them through the screen: crickets, thank God!

Something had made me want to turn in early. My wife was away in Colorado, and I had pretty much run out of enthusiasm for much of anything by around 9:00 p.m. That’s usually when I start to come awake, but it had been a strange day all around. I felt as if I had a lot of inner sorting-out to do, not the kind you work at consciously, though. This was more a case of feeling that I simply had to stop. Just stop, and let the anxiety settle down. I also had a sense of needing to be reprogrammed from on high, as it were, an intuited directive to await further instructions. Very unusual for one so previously guilt-driven as myself, to just lie down and trust the universe. I live for long hot baths that transition into bedtime, so that was what I did.

These crickets were loud. Probably right outside in the lilac bush, I figured.

As I lay there in the dark — my favorite way to take a bath — I remembered how the crickets back home in Maryland, three million light-years away, helped set me on my current path way back in ‘98. I was standing in the backyard in the twilight, probably after having closed the garage, when I noticed that the crickets had suddenly disappeared, or had they? Turning toward the house, I was startled to hear the sounds returning. I stopped in my tracks and slowly turned my head, first one way and then the other: oh Jesus, it was me! High-frequency hearing loss in one ear or the other made the crickets’ music fall or rise, depending on the orientation of my head. As the first undeniable proof of irreversible physical decline, this hit me like a two-by-four. I felt so sorry for myself, I even cried.

Considering that I was already 53 years old, you’d think I’d have had a more enlightened outlook, but that “immortality” thing dies hard. Later on, when I was wrestling with the unbearable fear associated with breaking up our old life to move to New Mexico, I’d recall “the crickets,” or rather the absence of them in my ears, to bolster my resolve: if not now, when? I had to do this NOW, because my body was shutting down. I had to take the risk.

That was 10 long years ago. I don’t know who that person was who did such crazy things, can’t get inside his head for love or money. I remember that my wife was burning out professionally and that our lives were falling apart. I didn’t want to cut the grass any more. I didn’t want to clean the basement. I didn’t even want to drive to town, I just wanted to flee.

So there I was last night, 10 years later, lying in the bathtub. One cricket singing through the open window was especially loud, and I found this oddly soothing in a way I’d never quite experienced before. I felt that all I was meant to do, at that moment and maybe for the rest of my life, was lie there and listen. It was like the good part of being in a church. Just listen and be saved. BECOME the sound of the cricket, dissolve into the ocean of life.

I went to bed soon afterwards. Alone, of course, and way before the normal hour. There was nothing on my mind. Six hours later I woke up and sat down to write this post at 4:00 a.m. I knew I’d been dreaming, dense unremembered dreams, the kind that make you wake up tired, as if you’d been walking all night long instead of sleeping.

It’s almost quarter to six now, and I’m crawling back between the cool clean sheets. I need to go a little farther, and maybe when I wake up, I’ll remember where I’ve been.

UPDATE: There’s a book that fills in a lot of what happened after I found my hearing was shot. How we came to be here, etc. Buffalo Lights: Maryland to New Mexico. Buy a copy and feel better right away.

Today’s blessed relief comes from Hecate, whose “Discussing the Undiscussible” post goes directly to my own concerns of late:

Mystical experience, the experience of the mystic, what it is that mystics experience — that stuff is, almost by definition, idiomatic. It cannot be translated into any standard language, although it is possible that the language of exceptional music, exceptional art, exceptional poetry (over prose), may come close.

My deepest mystical experience — and this is odd for a mammal, living in the flesh — is observing bright, late-afternoon sunshine on leaves, grocking photosynthesis and the symphony inherent therein, being in a forest or a garden. Yesterday, I walked through the Brookside Gardens and sucked, as a hungry child suckles a breast, upon the amazing sight of sunlight filtered though deep forest shade. I see Fairies there, but I mean the word “fairie” in a scary and Earth-centered sense. I reminded myself that I can go on living.

When I wrote,

Because I DO have a mother, and I finally know I have a soul.

After growing slowly in my awareness all along, it’s here now in the nick of time. I’m talking about the Big Momma, chilluns, the all-enfolding love of all Creation. MOTHER NATURE, Mother Earth, the stuff my body’s made of, the thing we can’t define or do without, the ultimate redemption: Goddess loves me, this I know, for my tears, they tell me so. (Put it any way you want.)

what Hecate writes is what I meant. Late afternoon sunlight on leaves is something I understand, too. But I’m 200 pounds of do-the-dishes-when-the-spoons-are-gone, I can’t write about breasts and sucking. Er, suckling. That’s it, though: nourishment from “our Mother,” as a commenter expressed. And note how the author is replenished by the experience. (“I can go on living,” etc.) The line about the fairies is important, too, for conveying a sense of the quality of the energy involved. This is precisely what I’ve found to be true in really wild places, where I’ve felt it. A lot of you must know what I’m talking about.

It’s so important.

It was a beautiful day today, so I made a short video with my MacBook. It’s called “Adobe Shadows,” and you can also find it at Taos Video Circus (my YouTube channel).

It happens fast at 7,000 feet.

This morning the clouds are hanging low over the mountains. There’s actually an overcast. It rained last night, and the temperature outside is barely 60 degrees. There’s fire-building in my future, though it seems we’ve hardly had a summer. I see a flurry of activity as migrating hummingbirds crowd the feeders. The chamisa is blooming, bright sweet yellow flowers everywhere, with lots of bees. Roadside vendors have sweet peas for sale.

Tomorrow I’ll look up and see the aspen on the mountains turning yellow too. Noooo, not yet! I’ve hardly even sweated, only one day I remember when I had to change my shirt. “At least” it’s beautiful. Stunning, really, as always.

I’m free and healthy and 63. Stand by, as always, for new developments. The Taos Podcast is coming soon.

I forgot to get this posted a couple of weeks ago — gee, I wonder why? — but here it is.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize elements of previous blog posts assembled into a new whole. Not quite like building Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, although related, and with much better results. This was just published in the August edition of Horse Fly. What’s more, the publisher thought it was so good, he paid me extra, a thing possibly unprecedented in the history of writing. At any rate, you can read it now without coming here to buy a paper:

JOHNNY & THE HORNED TOADS

Years ago in Texas (sorry), we called them “horny toads.”

I’d just turned 13 and didn’t know what “horny” meant, outside of the context of the critters — adolescent urges notwithstanding — but you could find the lizards everywhere, even in town. Back in junior high school in Abilene, in those glorious pre-air-conditioned days when just surviving until the final bell was an accomplishment, the reptiles were a God-given source of distraction from the heat of study hall.

We sat at actual wooden desks with inkwells and lids that opened up. Nobody used fountain pens or had any ink, so dipping pigtails wasn’t an option. But you could grab a “horny toad” at recess, lightly scratch its scaly belly to put it to sleep, and set it gently on its back inside the desk where Peggy Sue would sit. After everyone had taken their seats and study hall had settled into a sodden stupor broken only occasionally by yawns and sounds of shuffling papers, the animal would wake up and start skittering around. The victim usually opened her desk to see what was the matter, and you can guess the rest. This trick only worked with girls, of course, because they screamed so well. The perpetrator generally came to the rescue while his comrades smirked, scooping the lizard up and dropping it out the window. (Why this reminds me now of Homeland Security, I’m not sure, but see what you can do with it.)

Three years ago in Llano Quemado, I missed the photo of a lifetime. I’d taken a walk without my camera — guaranteeing at least a miracle — and sure enough there was one. About halfway up the dirt track on the mesa, something wriggled in the road 20 feet ahead and then sat still. As I approached, I saw it move again: a horned toad trying to get traction in the fine brown sand. But what was that on its right hind leg? Good Lord, a baby horned toad riding on its mother’s back! I honestly couldn’t believe it. The lizards froze when I squatted down beside them, and then I saw a second baby in the dust a couple of inches to the rear. The baby on its mothers back was spotted just like she was, while this one matched the color and texture of the ground it sat on. The mimicry was perfect. The late afternoon sun illuminated the camouflaged tableau with golden yellow light. My camera, if I’d had it, would have been 18 inches from the horned toad family, who held their position until I stood.

* * *

This summer, for whatever reasons, I see horned toad hatchlings all the time, and I’m amazed. There’s just a twitch, a thing that might be real or not, like a floater in your eye, and there they are, fully formed and no bigger than a thumbnail! Yesterday I took my camera on a hike and finally got a close-up shot: the piñon needles on the ground are longer than the tiny beast… They must be like Fritos for the magpies. How ever do they make it?

Try to find out anything about horned toads, and you’ll encounter contradictions. They’re disappearing, or they’re not, for one thing. The young receive no parental care, supposedly, although I saw differently here in Llano. New Mexico writer S. Omar Baker, who died at the age of 90 in 1953, once wrote,

“The horny toad, ill-graced but harmless
Is thought by some to be quite charmless
At least he helps eat garden ants up
And does not try to crawl your pants up.”

The easy familiarity with something few see or take notice of today disturbs me, even as I smile. A couple of weeks ago, I was driving down a twisty, rocky lane. The air was sharply cool and damp from the previous night’s rain, the warm sunlight welcome by comparison. Halfway down the hill I stopped, incredulous: sitting in the road looking up at me below the open driver’s window was a HUGE GREEN BULLFROG the size of a cantaloupe! We stared at each other for a long moment, and then I drove off, checking in my rearview mirror that I hadn’t seen a mirage.

Sometimes I feel I’ve won the lotto on another planet, and then I wake up, remembering I’ve always been right here. What happens in the in-between, though, and where did everybody go?