water, wind, and time

Update on Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 5:47PM by Mark S. Burrows

Landscape, like everything else in life, is always evolving, shifting, shaped by the subtle and slow pressures of wind and water on a scale that we can only guess at--geologists round off "ages" to speak of mountains shaped millions of years ago, not worrying about precision in some narrow sense.  After all, such estimates give us a range, a feeling for the immensity of time and the patience of change.

We come to our lives without such a sense.  Ours is a culture of hurry.  Imagining change, allowing time for things to shift, is not a strength we have much practice with.  And our anxiety comes in just at this point, anxious as we are to see things happen in a positive sense, worried that they might go in other directions.

The landscape of the Southwest offers innumerable parables of "the slow."  In fact, this is the case in every landscape.  Our environment, wherever we find ourselves, is changing, and we with it:  day by day, we make our way from the receding horizon of our birth to the unknowable but always approaching horizon of our passing.  We live between these immensities, which pale in terms of geological time but rise in urgency when we face them with a measure of the acceptance and grace possible to us as human creatures.

What will the howling winds, the raging waters, do in shifting what we thought were the settled configurations of our lives?  What patience will we find to be vigilant in the midst of such storms, allowing ourselves simply to be present to the changes and open to the coming "future"?  What lessons will we learn, with the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, as we give ourselves to this change in the only real moment we have--the present?