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Oh, you’ll find it. This is a telephoto shot, but I could hear him (?) squawking all the way across the road. It was all of a piece: a welcome end to Thursday night’s rain, the light about to break through low-hanging clouds, the raven calling the sun.

Just a couple hundred feet above us, light snow. Here a steady drip and drizzle until after midnight. The tall elm trees that shade the house collect the water into giant drops that plonk against the skylight. It’s a fine one, too, that skylight, custom-built fifty years ago with a great big slab of heavy plate glass. I’ve been here for more than ten years and it’s never leaked. Lord, it’s nice when something just works.

Calling the sun seems to, at least if you’re a raven in the morning.

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A lot of things are coming into clearer focus these days. What’s important, you might say. A healthy dose of universal truth, accepting that I’m part of something greater than myself and finally relaxing a little bit. I certainly didn’t get this far on my own power, did I? We always think we do, as if we sit around and tell our hearts to beat.

Family melodramas recede into the past. My own are more current but still sideshows. No one knows how to drive this thing, yet the wind is in my face, even while I sleep.

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“MOOugnnnn! MOOugnnn! MooUGNNN!” just now at nine o’clock at night, over and over for a dozen cycles, then fades. It happens any time of day or night these days. There are farms of some sort in the valley at the bottom of the hill, down there where the Rio Grande del Rancho flows. (That’s what they call it, but there are places they’d call it a creek.) I don’t really understand it, these little operations. You never see more than a handful of cows at one time. What are they actually doing down there besides growing a little alfalfa and raising dogs? Going to day jobs, I’ll bet. Meanwhile morning, noon, and night, the squalling beast I imagine is stuck in a hole. Maybe it’s too big for coyotes to bring down. Or maybe they are! Were it only the mighty puma, we’d have some peace real quick.

This is a funny neighborhood we’re in. It’s like driving through an old farmyard. The damnedest things go on behind ramshackle fences on muddy lanes. I peeked between the boards around the corner once one frigid winter day and found myself eyeball-to-eyeball with a steer: his breath was steaming, just like mine, and he had frost around his nose. Farther up the road is a place that’s hard to describe. It looks like an acre’s worth of rusty sheet metal, old tires, and caved-in little buildings fell out of the sky. The owner has a herd of maybe fifty sheep and goats, and every now and then he takes them out to graze along the acequia. It’s quite a sight to see him on his horse with his sheep dogs and herd. Sometimes we have to stop in the road to let them go by.

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I took this picture today standing deep inside the canyon of the Rio Grande near Pilar. The river is running high right now. There’s so much water moving so fast. Such a deep greenish-blue. It’s an amazing thing to see here in the terrible high desert. That’s not what you’re looking at, of course. This is a different river altogether, a river of stars and planets and moons. We’re all connected here. It looks like you could just swim across that gap.

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