Walkaway

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world. ~ Walt Whitman

Sometimes people speak of how people are destroying the planet, and while that may be true in a limited sense, I tend to think that the planet will simply shrug and issue some stern correctives if it becomes absolutely necessary.

Indeed, it seems already to be trending this way. I take some hope from my understanding of people as a blip in the deep-time soup of the planet, and scaling the dunes under impossible skies at the White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico, imagining the sea floor it once was, perhaps with manta rays and ruder forms in flight, I was struck humble and filled with a sense of grandeur and awe for a pattern so very much larger than the one we’re consigned to in our finite lifetimes.

A vast expanse of gypsum "sand," speckled with soaptree yucca plants.© Brian Awehali, 2009.

All of my life, mostly in nature, but sometimes in peak moments of human engagement, I have had glimmers of this larger, perhaps eternal order, and in nothing like a theistic or moral sense. We are incapable, as creatures, of fully experiencing this larger order: we are like motion picture cameras, flicking across 24 frames a second and telling ourselves it is movement rather than a peculiar persistence of vision.

My petty day-to-day concerns melted away in White Sands, and I was content to simply let the mystery be and enjoy the bleeding edge of my creature self.

This week’s image ~ above right ~ Dawn, White Sands National Monument. Photographer: Brian Awehali, © 2009.

Thumbnail image ~ White Sands’ Silhouette. Photographer: Brian Awehali, © 2009.

Brian Awehali is the Editor of Loud Canary, a diverse and pithy weblog exploring interconnectivity, sustainability, and nature from within the bowels of modern mass society. To read about Brian’s travels and musings, visit his blog.

Tagged as: Brian Awehali, Nature, New Mexico, Walt Whitman, White Sands National Monument