TRAVEL: Day 5, Monument Valley

Earth's dynamic processes use time to its own ends, creating innocent forms unpossessed by the admiring gaze. 

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"…nothing is fair or good alone…" (Emerson)

"…cast a pale eye…pass by" (Yeats)

To humans is left the act of naming that will endow Gaia's spires, pinnacles, and mountains with memorial purpose.

When the trail fades, build a rock cairn to guide the next hiker passing by, silently assure his steps into wilderness. 

With a mighty surge, raise an obelisk to your country's heroic victory.

Place a headstone for your beloved one and then inevitably, turn and walk away, back to your future.  

Endow a museum, for that will hold the strange and beautiful work of many human journeys.

I consider these and other fundamental rituals of humans,humbled as we are by grief and the insult of death.

Monument Valley and its haunting sandstone bluffs, towers, spires, and ship rock formations has such singular poignancy to me.

I can make of it a memorial ground, a place of spirits gathering in the dust and wind, calling each other to witness.

"More than this, there's nothing
 More than this, tell me one thing…" (Roxy)

"The ill-concealed deity…" (Emerson)

But I see its beauty, standing separate, in need of nothing.  Even poignancy and formal feeling fall away.  The wind removes the wispy shrouds wrapping emptiness. 
  

Now I have the will to climb, to stop, to become empty.

model Navajo hogan

People live in this place, their lodges earthen, low and humble.  There is space between them. The village was unneeded in the old days, a modern and necessary inconvenience.

Juniper logs are stacked without nails,  ingenious, sinew-like, raise a shelter.  Unjoined, merely balanced, but so sturdy, they can be moved and raised in another place, some other time, for reasons or not.

Emerson's Nature gave him a center, it seems, a Deity.  Perhaps a male soma becoming archetypal.  I find no holding center, nor have I concern.  I see a open door to maya,  endless, direction-free, transparency and deepest space. 

Ford's Point, modern day Navajo model

I, too, watch, then alas, I leave.