Winter Solstice 2011

Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice, 2011. It is time to look back on a year which, for us and our family, at least, has been good. We’ve stayed healthy, been blessed with more than enough, and have been able to spend time with many beloved friends and with our family.

In March, we took our grandsons to visit Bandelier National Monument in the nearby Jemez Mountains. We hiked through magnificent ponderosas, cottonwoods, and elders along tiny Rito de los Frijoles. They climbed wooden ladders to explore caves carved from the volcanic tufa, ceilings blackened by ancient hearth fires and walls populated by petroglyphs and pictographs. The boys took careful notes, and we watched as they proudly received their Junior Ranger badges in the newly refurbished visitor center.

By May there had been no rain since December. The dusty brown spring produced almost no wildflowers, but plenty of strong wind, and our skies were filled with acrid smoke from the burning forests in southern Arizona, over 250 miles away.

In early June we escaped the smoke to the Colorado high country, where ample snowpack had resulted in heavy runoff. The drift next to the cabin provided us with ice for the cooler, and we were glad for the crackling aspen fire in the old blue woodstove. This time, fire was good, under control.

But two days after we returned home, a giant plume of smoke suddenly blew up over the Jemez: thus began the worst forest fire in recorded New Mexico history. In the first 24 hours 44,000 acres were torched, and we watched in horror from our house in Placitas as flames blazed along Cochiti Mesa and up the canyons into the ponderosa forest. At night we watched as the fire crowned across the ridges; during day we wiped a heavy layer of ash from the outdoor studio tables.

The Las Conchas fire burned for over a month, eventually incinerating over 156,000 acres. Then, when the August monsoons came, floods scoured the denuded canyons and the Rio Grande ran black with ash.

Now, in December, we are blessed with moisture in a more gentle form… “snow on snow on snow.” This mid-winter may seem bleak as memories of the wildfires cast a pall, but the snows promise some sort of recovery for the burned mountains.

Looking over to the Jemez today, I see that their snow patterns have changed. They will never look the same during my lifetime, probably never ever.

Tonight we celebrate the longest night of the year by listening as poets read by the light of a single candle. Their theme: Fire, Ashes, Snow.

Fire can be destructive, cleansing, warming, nourishing, and/or illuminating.

Friday, the daylight will be imperceptibly longer, and Saturday evening, Christmas Eve luminarias will mark the birth of Jesus, God’s Light for us.

May our holidays be warmed by the joy of sharing with family, friends, and especially with some we may not know. And may the next year bring promise and light to each of us and to all of creation.

Faith

Yesterday I spent an hour or so creating a spiral meditation path on a vacant lot across the road. Though it is late spring, there are no wildflowers or native grasses. The native junipers have been trimmed up so that they can no longer shelter their roots from the sun and wind, and the rocky ground is dusty after months without rain.

From a high point I look across the Rio Grande Valley, sixty miles west to Mount Taylor and back five miles east to the Sandias, thinking that surely there is no place around here where someone has not walked, hunted, cut firewood, or grazed sheep… all impacting the land over the past ten thousand years. But right here, for the past three decades, this spot has endured its most intense human occupation.

Our neighbors spent thirty-seven years in this place. With their own hands they built a house, kennels, and several out-buildings, poured a foundation for an unfinished addition, buried half-burned trash, old car parts, broken sports equipment, beloved pets, and other stuff as yet undiscovered. When it was time for them to move on, we bought their land.

Since the house was unlivable, we began the cleanup by stripping the wiring and recycling or giving away anything usable before demolition. Parts of the kennel went to a local animal shelter, a shed to a neighbor, metal roofing to a Pueblo farm family. Weathered wood board and batten went to a local builder to become a ceiling in a new adobe home.

The entire two acres was littered with nails, barbed wire, shards of glass, broken toys, and the miscellany of modern life. We did a lot of digging, filled a dumpster, and hauled home anything we thought might be of some value to us.

Now, three years later, it is time to acknowledge the past and look toward the future.

Starting at the center I rake a widdershin path out in a dynamic spiral, gathering bits of wire, screws, glass, plastic, and native rocks. An intact concrete patio block emerges to become the center post. Every piece of trash caught by the tines of the rake is tossed to the center, testament to the way in which our transitory existence can have lasting impact on this earth.

Finally the spiral has grown to fill its space, so that now, entering from the left, one may proceed clockwise to the center.

As I head back home, I spot some pale purple and gold iris blooming in an old flower bed. Not being desert natives, they won’t long survive unless someone waters them. But for this moment they are beautiful. And now I know that something wonderful can exist here again.

Crooked fish and Straight Thinking

“I have some guppies that have deformed spines… why don’t you try to figure out if that could be hereditary? I’ll give them to you if you want.”

Soon I was sharing my bedroom with a dozen or so one-gallon pickle jars full of generations of guppies, keeping meticulous records of their procreation and health. (I still have nightmares about scrubbing algae from the jars and counting tiny fish.)

Taking my friend’s suggestion turned out to be a defining moment in my life. Two years later I was walking up to the podium at the Western Virginia Regional Science Fair. Turned out the first place award in biology came with an all-expense-paid trip to the International Science Fair in Albuquerque NM. (I thought, “Where?”)

That was in May 1963. I fell in love with New Mexico—from the new Western Skies motel on east Central one could look up to the east mesa at sunset, where tall grass reflected the golden skies to the west. We rented horses and rode down the arroyo below Four Hills. We toured Old Town, and munched sopaipillas dripping with honey. There was a tour to Los Alamos, where we lunched at Philomena’s (the old guard station), and a day trip to Acoma Pueblo, the Sky City.

But mostly it was the light, the ultramarine fading to azure green at twilight peppered with stars, that caused me to affirm to my teacher, “I’m coming back here to live.” “Yes dear,” she humored me.

That was nearly fifty years ago. What if I hadn’t taken my friend up on his offer? For sure, I wouldn’t be sitting out here in the desert, listening to coyotes celebrate as the full moon rises over the Sandias.