Out Here

We're small out here. In the middle of the Arizona big sky, awash in a sea of Juniper trees and red sand, it becomes easy to appreciate the privacy, solitude and the astounding vastness of the stars.

What one is most confronted with here is the self. What were our notions about our own identity, about our likes and dislikes, possible futures and our inevitable passing into history? By nature we are soft and compliant, we change and adapt and at times it's easy to feel lost. But it's just as easy to understand that the very concepts of lost and found are mere constructions of our own thoughts, and that we therefore are not threatened by anything but that which we have ourselves built out of words and feelings. Out here it is quiet. Out here it is plain.

On our walks we step over thousands of rocks and pebbles, fallen wood so old that it has become stone with ice- shattered edges pink as flesh. The earth is the color of rusted iron and country roads stretch out to the horizon. We get to know the ravens by sight. The cottontails, giant jack rabbits and small birds with wings which hum like a cat's purr take stock of us and move on.
Out here it is quiet. Out here it is plain.