Water Will Find You (because you belong here)
Road to Everywhere photo by Renee Podunovich
Water Will Find You (because you belong here)
at Cannonball Mesa
I. Junctures
all roads end. especially an unmaintained, 2-track county road increasingly indistinguishable from landscape, an obstacle course of boulders and ruts that will knock the bottom out of the vehicle unless you stop, park, put on your daypack
and begin to trek.
here, my footprints begin, stirring fine flushed dust rising in spirals with each step, airborne and errant on Spring Equinox winds that whoosh a primordial oomph, carrying the smell of minerals and ancient silt, the touch of saltwater on swaying waves, hues of cerulean ice melt, songs of elk bugling under moonlight;
all of these drafts in on invisible vapors from snow-covered crests,
from as far west as the Pacific Ocean and its volatile fault lines holding visions dreamed by sunsets.
II. Anonymous
on some spring days in the high desert, the wind is intolerable, but today, it feels like being shaken awake, purified, cleansed, my hair and lungs full of disorderly elemental intersections. I am in a new current; I accept this baptism by whirlwind, this walk into expanses so endless it is like stargazing. snow from distant mountain ranges travels beside me though its path is elusive in this bone-dry vastness, and that moisture is never easy to discover. through Sage, Juniper and Yucca tangled into a weaving of peculiar geological mishaps—I travel so far that I am suddenly small and unknown but somehow at home;
how awe is simply the sudden recognition of place,
a sense of belonging to the vastness you had forgotten.
III. Desert Emeralds
hidden by boundlessness— sudden chasms. at the edge of one of hundreds of crisscrossing canyons, I can see a pool of water lingering in the bottom, evidence of a recent snowstorm. sparkling a promise of well-being, it beckons me down a narrow path where suddenly cold, damp air rises from a sandstone overhang, greets my dusty face, shivers my mammalian body, invites me into a shallow cave with walls covered by vibrant, verdant moss, green like a supernova, feeding on snowmelt seeped through underground stone shelves. droplets hit small pools of transparent water—rippling, rippling, rippling.
IV. Here You Are
there is no other sound than water meeting water. of my breath caught in eternity. no other moment, no other reason needed to open my heart again. despite impending endings, some jewels emerge in unlikely places; create a motivation to keep traveling bumpy side roads, to keep going no matter how and despite obstructions. There will be moments like this—
don't despair any longer,
water will find you.
