The Citadel

After the desert musings

After many weeks traveling in the desert, returning to the normal world
isn't easy. Its hard for my mind to fit back into the way of things.
You see, I have been awhile in the deserts of the American South West.
Now these deserts are not new to me, I have traveled them many times,
and I'll travel them again, but familiarity does not cease my
wonder. I am still enthralled.

   I am a prisoner of their colours and their endless open skies. I cannot
drive through them enough, there is no horizon that hints of an ending.
There, I am a finite being mesmerized by the infinite space of the desert.
There is no black ribbon of road, stretching in a unswerving line, over countless
rises and falls that does not make me crave to go further. Inwardly I get
absorbed into the emptiness. The return to the daily world of relationships,
work and media from the pristine world of the desert is always jarring.
This time it was mayhem.

   To climb to the top of the mountain is a metaphor often used in
meditation. It denotes our ability to find detachment and to view our
consciousness from a distance. The desert is similar. Its the uninterrupted
view of the vast landscape, it frees the mind and imprints it with
stillness, a stillness so soothing.    
   
   I returned home, to find my thoughts of a month residing in a hour
of my companions, such was their busy-ness. Their constant focus on
fleeting turmoils seemed to have imprisoned their awareness into a space
as tiny as matchbox - so it seemed to me - my focus still on the endless
horizon. They looked at me uncomprehending, I felt like an alien just
landed. How could they know my inner gaze was still with the billowing
clouds across that sky, and deep shadows crossing the sage and ochre
hues? These folks forgotten to look into the sky!       

   A few days have passed and I find myself more at home, and
a new awareness occupies my being. Its a sense that inside I have
changed forever, the old me cannot return, because a new me is here.
I am not entirely of my old homeland, I have let a new land transform me.
I feel like I have "grown up", but to what? The river of acceptance is
flowing inside me, carrying me where I'm not sure, except it feels
so right. 

Time for thoughts on the road

The Citadel is traveling through the USA at the moment, or should I say the part of the US I love best, that is out of large cities. Outside the cities is the America that everyone should visit sometime, to really know the place. Beyond the rush of the traffic, the countryside of this continent is glorious, and larger than life. If this is the New World, then as an Australian traveling, thinking back on the landscape of my homeland, things there seem so geographically worn down.

I'm in the Rocky mountains today, soon to travel deeper into these amazing peaks. Its revealing how I expected to find these mountains forbidding in size and energy, yet I find them warm, cosy and safe. The deep green meadows, the herds of lazy Elk, wildflowers and the everpresent aroma of butterscotch from the Ponderosa pines.

I am struggling at times with the lack of air. But that is well made up by the air around the pristine streams and waterfalls. It seems as if two landscapes exist. The real one, and another that belongs to a mythic world, where nature can only express perfection. It exists in my head, and I am seeing it all around, breathing it in, and making it part of me. I am wondering which storybooks of my childhood told me these places, this wildness really exists. Yet I can't think of one book, painting or even film that mirrors those duel images.

But today a whole mountainside covered with golden Aspen, shimmered in the mist. It was glorious.

Blessings, Wendy xx