LOVE OF PLACE

Where an arroyo meets the dirt road, I stop and look for tracks. A few feet up the stream bed are 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 one earlier in the day, a blur of movement that ran so quickly into the brush I spent a few minutes questioning what I had seen. 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, short-tailed, tufted-ear, delicately-spotted, charismatic, playful, predatory.

It’s another gift, the world showering us with gifts, the tail of a fox, tracks in the sand, and there--a massive dark rock with white radiating lines, a geometric pattern of dark and light, veins of quartz, cool to the touch.

Is this rock 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. I have thought nature indifferent to humans, to one more human, but maybe the reverse is true. Maybe the world is already in love, giving me these gifts all the time, calling out all the time: take this. And this. And this. Don’t turn away.

(Photo by Elroy Limmer)