LOVE OF PLACE

Where an arroyo meets the dirt road, I stop and look for tracks. A few feet up the stream bed is a nice set of bobcat prints. There’s no mistaking that roundness, the leading toe, and size of the front and back feet. I also see a fox print, or maybe a small coyote. Foxes are on my mind since I saw three earlier in the day, probably a mother and two kits who ran so quickly into the brush I spent a few minutes questioning what I had seen. Foxes are rarer since an outbreak of rabies some years ago. Was that a fox or a wish? 

That’s one good thing about tracks. They stay there. You can admire them for long minutes, imagining the animal who passed by, feeling the tangible presence of a bobcat, a wild cat, short-tailed, ear-tufted, delicately spotted, charismatic.

 It’s another gift, the world showering us with gifts, the tail of a fox, tracks in the sand, and there--growing up the shadowed bank of this arroyo, a mound of jimson weed, also called moon flower, also called thorn apple, also called sacred datura, the large, creamy, lavender-tinted, trumpet-shaped blossoms seeming to glow, exuding power and a rich scent. And next to the flower, here in this streambed, a massive dark rock with white radiating lines, a geometric pattern of dark and light, veins of quartz, cool to the touch.

Is this boulder for me? 

I feel the need to fall in love with the world, to forge that relationship ever more strongly. But maybe I don’t have to work so hard. Maybe the world is already in love, giving me these gifts all the time, calling out all the time. I have thought nature indifferent to one more human, to any human, but maybe the reverse is true. The world calls out: take this. Take this. And this. And this. Don’t turn away.

(Photo by Elroy Limmer)