I had always wanted to drive
cross-country. Maybe it was Chris who forty years ago first put desire in my
eyes to see this land as she discussed her trips back and forth from San Diego.
Instead I studied all about its history and literature looking for the sights
as others saw them.
Six years ago, my daughter was
about to move to California, and being recently unemployed, I decided I should
drive her there, and then I’d slowly circle myself home, visiting the natural
wonders of America. And so it happened.
I wrote a poem while sitting on a
great sequoia; took so many pictures in Yosemite they left me black and white;
looked out upon Lake Tahoe’s mountain dark reflections; drove the lonesome road
straight through the desert of Nevada; walked through sandstone Arches after
crying at the marriage of the ground and sky in Canyonlands; looked out from
Anasazi windows in the sacred vaults of Mesa Verde; never took a photo of an
inexplicable white buffalo in Zuni; worshipped with the silent Acoma
apparitions in Sky City; just missed a slow coyote on I-40 in New Mexico;
touched the surface of the largest mass of turquoise ever while exploring Santa
Fe; listened to the blessed myths of Taos Pueblo; found my way to Cripple Creek
and finally the summit of Pike’s Peak from where I scouted over cornfields of
Nebraska crossing Mississippi waters towards the east back home.
It was experience I cherish to this
day. But still, it was the mere experience of a superficial world, infinite in
its variety and wondrous in its manifest appearances, but nothing without the
consciousness in which it’s seen.
This wordless Being is the only
wonder of the universe. More to the point, it is the god in which that universe
appears. It’s here and now, and everywhere I go, it is. Even nowhere.
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus qui abundantia. This land is your land.
