Whoops--I forgot where I am

The first month I was in DC, I was attached to the high and dry forests and mesas of New Mexico from whence I had departed.

Now, as I approach my last month in DC, I forget that I haven't moved to my new home yet, the red rock deserts of Utah where forested mountain clusters rise like freckles on the desert landscape. (Do freckles rise? I hate the pimple analogy).

I woke up this morning and red for a few minutes in bed as the sun streamed in my window. When I got up, I even walked over the glass patio doors in the living room to feel the outside temperature. But by the time I walked out of the apartment building, wearing two-layer shortsleeves and a thin jacket, I realized I am not in Utah yet! This Dorothy was hit by a gentle wind and an urban sidewalk shadow that made her realize that when it is sunny on this here East Coast of the USA, it is colder than on the cloudy, warm day prior. Out west, it can be anything on a sunny day, because it is almost always a sunny day. And when the day before was warm, it tends to be warm the next.

Not here though.

However dizzying this constant change of place (pace?) may be, you can rest assured that I will never pull a NIMBY (not in my backyard), because chances are that someday it will be my backyard!

Women Protecting Wilderness

"To me
nature is a salve for the soul.
I am:
humbled by its majesty
awed by its diversity
inspired by its details
soothed by its beauty
awakened by its scents
intrigued by its adaptability
encouraged by its durability.
It connects me with my ancestors
and gives me hope for the future.
May it stay."

-Sarah Grant, Outdoor Enthusiast, Healthcare professional, Lover of Life
Salt Lake City, UT

I love it when other people articulate things for me!

"The different modes of transport that command greater speed point to how the world is experienced when organized on the fast-changing time-space-speed vectors. Space is conquered with the acceleration technology and the distances are measured on the basis of speed and not in spacial terms. In other words, the distance between two given points is measured by how fast one can reach a point rather than by the actual spatial distance. The speed at which we cover the distance--on foot, motor vehicle, train, and airplane--determines how we experience and remember the landscape en route, witness ordinary minute happenings, and interact with the people inhabiting those landscapes."

-ravinda kaur, "the last journey: exploring social class in the 1947 partition migration"
[courtesy Erica W.]

Red Rocks

"Three hundred million years
of the Earth's making
are written here on red rock,
faces smooth or swirled,
streaked, striped, or banded,
creased and creviced, scoured and pocked,
sculpted into figure, frieze, and phallus,
tower and spire, chimney, mesa, bluff and butte,
rust red against Utah's cobalt sky.

Red rock scarred, or stained black
and silvery slate with "desert varnish"
by microbes grasping minerals from the air.

Rocks reddened by traces of iron,
fissured and finned, eroded into shapes
named mushroom, goblin, hoodoo,
evoke a sacred space. This stark,
vast, dry, and fragile place
is slow to change, impossible to repair.

Red rock stretches away to the horizon
or falls sharply to the secret canyon floor,
presses in, blots out patches of azure sky,
slices off light, forces our thoughts inside.

We humans have never been so mall as we are here.

Judith Wolinsky Steinbergh, National Geographic Magazine, March 2005
"84532: Writing on the Land"