Once upon a time, now and long ago a sleeping giant awakens.  In the river.  J’entre dans la salle de classe.  Je regarde autour de moi.  Je vois . . . .  How can I tell you?  How do I find right words to say?  It is nothing, really, and everything.  Some moments are forever.  What comes in that moment, forever struck, changes what comes after.  Each of us has known such a moment.  It has surprised us.

Here now in my cottage at edge of the cosmos, bread baking, woodsmoke like oak incense from fire in stove, snows melting dripdripdrip overflowing ice laden gutter, green of daffodil shoots secretly emerging, and almost unbearable beauty of music surrounding me, entering my self.  These are the words I have been meaning to tell.

I drove most of the day both Tuesday and Wednesday.  I got back to the house in Indian Hills shortly before dark on Wednesday.  The journey back was immense beyond time and distance.  I cannot tell all of that.  I can tell you of the physical road map, you who were there, who shared and witnessed our departure.  Like so many endings, that was only a beginning.  How can we know in the instant of our perceptions?

Tuesday morning.  Meditation.  Closing of sacred circle–in greeting and farewell.  Breakfast, deep breakfast.  Luggage packed and loaded.  Intermittent departures.  Music from the Aerie still hangs in the air as it has since our group work beginning before dawn.  Amidst this, there are three dogs dancing.  Brief conversations.  It is dissolution of community, opening of the sacred circle.  There is in my heart a feeling of a lifetime of words unspoken.

Into the car.  Onto the road.  That journey, the first step . . . you know.  I stopped at Post Office in Paulden, mailed the one card I had completed to friends in Norris.  The remaining cards I have not yet completed (even now these years later).  I noticed at Post Office a feeling, what I perceive as a distance or insubstantiality which I attribute to the people I meet.  Then, there is Marshall, returning already from the airport, shuttle van now empty.  Then, onto road north to Interstate 40.  Cars and trucks began accumulating behind my vehicle; that is not at all like me.  I do not now have a sense of the speed at which I move so I set cruise control and manage to integrate with flow.

Interstate 40, east to Flagstaff.  How long since I last climbed this mountain?  Was that even who I am now?  Snow still on ground.  Is this the same snow that was here last week?  (Last week?  was it only last week?  It seems I have moved through lifetimes.)  Or has there been another snow?  I do not know.  I move upward into a vortex of snow white, sky blue, highway gray, and forest green.  Suddenly, Flagstaff.  I stop to refuel before I go into the desert.  This journey I carry a small fuel reserve as precaution.  I do not intend to have to use it.  I also carry sleeping bag, heavy quilts and a large feather bolster sewed by my grandmother, insulated winter clothing. Water.  I do not intend to have to use any of this.  I stop for coffee.  Look for newspaper.  Weather.  Forecast.  hat’s what I look for.  No snow, no major fronts approaching.  Temperatures moderate to warmer than usual.  So I will return across the high mountains where snow blocked my passage on this journey to Wildflower Lodge long ago.  US 89 north to US 160 to Durango; then north to Montrose; eastward again, and northward.

White, blue, gray, and green shift to shades of red and brown as I move out of the San Francisco Mountains and into the painted desert.  I drove all day before I noticed that my shadow had moved to the other side.  I moved all day; it seemed only a few minutes.  Red desert, painted desert in infinite shades of colors, mesa, butte, erect pillars, crumbling mountains, windswept vastness.  Through the reservations of Navajo, Hopi, and Ute–how fortunate am I that there is passage granted to this intruder, even though now an intruder not truly understanding the destruction that has gone before.  Burros wandering freely, goats, sheep; and herds of sheep with dark, strong women with raven hair and watchful dogs.  Quiet men in pickup trucks.  Through this eternity, I notice my car moving faster and faster.  Until I set cruise control.  Not too fast.  I do not wish to go out a meteor amongst the sheep; let me not bring silence to the lambs.  Through the Four Corners, past Ute Mountain, past Ute Mountain Casino, into Cortez, then eastward.

Mesa Verde.  It is late afternoon; the sunlight is red gold.  Some overcast; sky to eastward intensifies in color to deep blue gray over not so distant mountains.  Again, into the snow covered.  Snow plows have pushed great hills of snow along the twenty or so miles of twisting road from US 160 to the Anasazi ruins.  Clifftop pit houses, excavated, now sheltered by sheds of concrete and steel, the sides draped with tarpaulins against the winter.  Now, along the road through centuries to next pullout, the next viewing of structures left by those long gone.  I choose not to descend into the canyon thru this snow.  In cliff wall, across the canyon, suspended beneath overhang, supported on great stone shelves there are ancient homes, shelter for lives long since lived out.  What fingers carved steps in these sheer walls?  What hands so placed stone into the walls of these temples small and mighty?  I am mute, deafened by the thunder of this silence.  What is this uneasy solitude I feel before the centuries long procession?  Whose is the hand that holds before my eyes a single card:  The Lovers . . . .

Night is upon me quickly.  I descend from the mesa to US 160 and make my way as far as Mancos.  Stop for gasoline.  The main street is cleared of snow.  Sidestreets are slush and ice.  Enchanted Mesa Motel.  Not exactly contemporary.  Small.  Very neat, very clean.  The proprietors are most welcoming to this stranger travelling through.  I check in and unload my suitcase with intention of going out for a bowl of soup.  Then I am paralyzed by the scream that wants to come from my throat, a scream of agony, and ecstasy, and wild desires.  Rivers of tears are flowing through my eyes.  I am happy, sad, lonely, filled, empty.  All at one time.  About now will be dinner at Wildflower Lodge in the shadow of the sacred mountain in a land far south and west of this icy splendor; far, far south and west.

I collapse into sleep and dream dreams:  Night at Wildflower Lodge.  Fire moves on logs, shadows flicker and dance.  The room is firelit warm and yellow gold in surreal light.  Blinds on the window are open, the window filled with a sea of lights in the valley, and the silent turning of stars.  I am flowing, molten in my lover’s embrace.  Midnight, no sound save the silent turning stars, the rush of the river within pushed by the drumming of my heart, and the storm of passion’s breath.   I am filled to overflowing.  The now small fire whispers on falling logs, red coals.  We lay in embryonic ecstasy.  we slip through eternities as the room pulsates in this afterglow.  Midnight, the silent turning of stars, breath rising and falling, rising and falling like ocean.  I awaken the room is empty.  Only a dream?  Sometimes the intensity of communion accentuates the separation, changes the shape of solitude.  There was a question, that stain is it wine, or blood . . . and whichever, is it mine?   Poet of the Big Sur coast, yes?

Morning.  Eastward to Durango.  From car radio comes Four Corners NPR broadcast of morning program of Native American music.  I ascend from Durango to Silverton with songs and chants and drums of the ancients.  Each curve, each new peak, each canyon, each frozen river on this soaring to each summit brings a primitive roar to my throat.  I open to life; open to song; open to words unspoken; open to touch; to consuming desire; to coming together and flying apart; I open to the Mystery of self and other.  Suddenly the convoluted, highly tortuous twisting of the highway becomes a sun-glistened serpent slithering into the crevice of the canyon.  Into the canyon.  An eternal dance.  Silverton.  Ouray.  I share this journey.

Molas Divide:  open.  Red Mountain Pass:  open.  The serpent slithers.  I feel as if on fire.  My voice rises from my throat, no longer my voice.  Rivers flow beneath the ice.  To summit.  Then freefalling as serpent slithers.  I become the road I am travelling.  Something within me knows when there will be ice–just in time.   From Ouray, north by northwest to Montrose, then eastward to Cimarron.  Infinite expanses of snow, rivers and lakes suspended in ice, like these white waterfalls down black canyon walls among green firs.  Black highway.  White expanse soaring into infinity of blue sky.  Stillness of the frozen river, waiting.

Beside the road, a scarlet splash on the snow.  A dome of magpies–black bodies, white wings rising, falling–on protruding red-black ribs of an elk fallen onto the spilled crimson flood of what was so soon a river of life.  Who would ever believe that small cage of ribs could have contained the throbbing heart of god?  Black Mesa:  summit open.

Monarch Pass:  9 miles, summit open.  The serpent rises.  We are singers, you and I, of this unsingable song of god, the nameless and unnameable, the incomprehensible beauty and terror of love and being, of quiet firelight and quivering volcanoes spewing rivers of molten rock.  I am living and dying in the avalanche, this journey with you from Wildflower Lodge.

Gunnison.  Parlin.  Sargentis.  Garfield.  The serpent has plunged into the canyon.  Now stretches along the Arkansas River, to Poncha Springs.  Now US 285 through Nathrop, Johnson Village, Buena Vista, Antero Junction, Fairplay.  Red Hill Pass.  Kenosha Pass.  Turkey Creek.  Parmalee Gulch Road.