Sat On A Rock This Morning: Bears Ears VI

2024-05-19

This morning and the previous, have tended to train us to wake up with the sun, then emerge into excitement. Eventually, the wonder, sometimes surreal, that surrounds us, begins to teach.

This morning, while DF sits with a journal, I venture out for my latrine building duties. I find only a thin layer of red sand, just inches and the bedrock. I try a small indentation of a wash, hoping to find thicker soil that has built up around the bushes that are surviving there.  

As I stated before, we always play our game of stepping to not disturb the delicate floor and flora. There are signs to caution humans to not trample the precious soil and biology, but here there is evidence of cattle grazing. In the distance, I can see them standing in the Monument. The cattle’s weight and hooves have destroyed way more than the simple paths that we may make. The effect of their prints can be seen. I follow a trail, an indentation paved with loose sand, made by them. They rip out plants that we walk around and admire. This plant life takes many years to root and then grow. The flora do this and flower with only a couple of opportunities each year. Even the lichen wait.

Today, the vegetation is almost all new, displaying a different green and blooming. All of this is rare.

What I know as a Mormon tea plant is different here, because of its stature and structures. Here, it also commonly grows in mass, as a dominate adaptation, unlike at home. A green ground-cover stretches out to the Gods and Goddesses. The iconic Monument Valley can still be seen on the horizon.

The soil is sand on rock. Here it has become particularly fluffy from when it rained and froze. We sink to our ankles where we walk off of the trails. It seems a shame to walk on it. It’s like freshly fallen snow, so beautiful, but you know that your tracks will change it forever. I’m feeling a bit guilty, as the black biology is protective and it will not be back until the moister meets it again, when conditions are just right.

This place is one of those places where morning brings contemplation.

Here, naked on a fallen boulder’s wide surface, I sit. At similar times, the world may seem to pass by. In this valley, it is evident that it is us that pass by this world.

The monument’s terrain has been here tens of thousands of years just like this and I’m living in a brief moment. These grand illusionary beings seem to watch me, unbothered by my insignificant presence.

Thoughts of existence evolve out of this place. We pass one huge form to the next in this surreal landscape. It is all unyielding and constant. In comparison it feels eternal. Change happens over millions of years, a list of small moments.

It would be hard to live here, to eke out a living. This proves that this world is not man’s dominion. Obviously, it follows that this belongs to no one.

Yet, this place does give a sustaining gift. It gives pause. You can’t eat it, but it is something that makes a system re-calibrate and recover and stay healthy. There is a type of nourishment.  

For us humans, there is no noble purpose when you are a cancer to this Earth. We all take too much these days, use and exploit. Here, there is existence without us.

 I watch people pass through here and never leave their cars. They miss the experience, the subtlety. Just as amazing as the obvious out of a car’s window, are the delicate soil structures, the learning to respect the survival of plant species, the true effects of rain and water, heat and time. The mobile visitors don’t smell and touch the dry air, or the fellow beings adapted over the long course of time.

Within the shell of a vehicle and garments, they miss the silence, the vulnerability that is to be human and the living body’s reaction to sun. They are insulated, apart, missing the entire essence and the gift given to be savored.  But maybe…maybe that’s for the best. As this trip unfolds, we shall see that one great value of Bears Ears National Monument is its pristine remoteness and the sense’s that that brings to us.

I am on the forum of FreeRangeNaturism.com often, if you would like to converse.

© The owners of TheFreeRangeNaturist.org as of the year 2015 declare. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to TheFreeRangeNaturist.org with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.