Seen/Heard today in Taos:

Thorny tumbleweeds blown up against my door while isolated snowflakes whipped by, and the mountains stood snowy and blue-black against a chaotic sky of purples, grays and blues.

4 horses trotting north on the sidewalk along Paseo del Pueblo Norte, a chestnut, a white stallion, and two coal colored mares, eyes wide, scared, determined, heavy-headed, passing a line of traffic near Cid's, along the Valverde meadow.

People in the cafe talking about the downfall of capitalism (doesn't register), problems with unregistered cars in accidents (don't really know), asking me about bankruptcy and credit card debt (I wipe it out for people who file bankruptcy), asking me about military issue ammunition at Walmart (no idea), asking about the breadth of a US Passport (no idea). Others talked of yoga, releasing the hamstrings and so releasing the hips and so releasing the shoulders and so releasing the heart (inspiring, want to do it, need to hang and stretch my trunk today).

A long line of people at the electric coop paying their electric bills near shutoff time at the end of the month.

An elder man from the Pueblo, dressed in turqoise slacks, with rich, dark skin, smiled at me in line at the bank, and we talked about the cold and his new blossoms that may die tonight. When he was done with the teller, he turned to me, smiled again and told me to "be well."

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest

I stopped in the cave on the north side of the Bonzai forest. He was there, near the entrance, squinting in the sunlight. Crows circled overhead, a murder and a half at least, maybe more. A brown knit ski hat, pulled down to his eyebrows, and bending backward in the breeze, comically, where there was extra material, space for a cone should he grow one. His face was vertical, a long nose, but also sturdy up around the muddy green eyes, muscular cheeks, all lines leading downward, a mouth covered by brindle beard, sandy, red undertones, gray creeping in and scraggling down over a sharp chin. His eyes were set wide, propped up by the points of his cheeks, and it was hard to focus on both at once. I could see him riding with King Arthur, or Ghengis Khan. He said his name was Harris, which didn't seem likely, but he was genial, and unfaltering, and, although slightly hunched in the shoulders, there was a strength to him, a sinew of having lived outside and climbed for thousands of days.

The first time I came upon Harris, I had dropped off the trail to pray to the four directions in a place where the Tinkantananda could see me. Her eyes were made by the outlines of two circular stands of spruce just below the final antler velvet hump of talis leading to the peak. He watched in silence, leaning against a tree. I didn't notice him until I had bowed the last time, to the north, and saw his feet in sandals, hardbitten toes with long nails, the little toe on each foot pried away from the rest at 45 degrees.

I rose and looked at him. He was wearing a black hoodie and shadow covered his face.

"I like your ceremony," he said.

"Thanks. What are you doing here?"

"I'm spending some time up here. There's a cave over there. I think bears lived in it a long time ago. It has some good ghost energy."

He pointed down the slope and to the north. I was annoyed, maybe a little spooked. It wasn't that he was menacing, or even out of place, it was more that I liked to be alone in the bonzai forest, with my thoughts, the crows, the rabbits and the groaning trees. And he spoke slowly with a smile that you'd have to call wizened. But Taos has a lot of people like this. They find their way here through the cracks and pipe through the streets and up into the hills, sometimes out in the sage on the desert. At times they speak brilliantly, other times in tongues, but there is a rosy-cheeked rogue quality to most of them. Things are bad, but they could be worse, and here they generally leave you alone to skip along the creeks, and hide out in the brambles. If you want to die out here, you can.

"How long have you been up here?"

"Can't say, but probably a month."

"I've been up here 20 times in the past month and haven't seen you."

"I know. I've seen you a few times. Really like this ceremony you do, especially the part when you circle your hands for abundance."

"You've watched me do this?"

"A couple of times. When you go to that rock at the top of that ridge," he said, pointing up to where I often do my ceremony. It's a place where a lot of people stop.

"That's messed up, man."

"Nah, I don't pay much attention, and nobody sees me. Your the first person I've talked to since I've been here. It's no different than those ravens up there. They're watching you, too. You don't have a problem with them, do you?

"No, but they're not checking me out."

"I don't know about that. I'm not checking you out, just observing nature."

I wanted to get going. Dusk was dropping down and I really didn't want to talk.

"Well, good chatting with you, man, I gotta get going."

"Harris."

"What?"

"My name is Harris."

"Got it. Good to meet you, Harris. Hope it works out for you up here."

"Did you see those two ravens the other day, the one with the wing missing a swath of feathers, and the other large one with the loud caw?"

I had and they'd made an impression on me. The bird with the proverbial broken wing, but it was still flying ,and it looked like the other one was playing with it, helping it.

"Yea, I saw them. I was amazed the hurt one could fly with that chunk of feathers missing."

"I saw you that day up on the rocks rotating your head to watch the birds."

"Dude, that's strange, you watching me like that."

"I was watching the birds, too, and you happened to be up there. The things is, I've been watching those two ravens since I saw the hurt one drop on the rocks above the cave. It's a young one, and the big one is its brother. I thought it would die, but when it couldn't fly several birds came by each day and brought it food, and one day the big one picked it up and brought it somewhere else. But then they came back a few days later and I watched as the big one put the hurt one on its back, spread its wings and like a plane towing a hang glider, it took it up high into the thermals and let it drift in the wind until it started faltering and then it would swoop under and catch it. It was amazing. But the most amazing part of it was the laughter. These guys were having fun. Ravens are magic and they heal with laughter. I know there are all these dark, horror stories with ravens, but really, they're goofballs, and they like to play all day. And I could tell you noticed the same thing."

"You could?"

"Yea, and I wanted to talk to you about it."

"Alright, man, I really gotta go."

"Good to meet you, ah...?"

"Alex."

"Alex."

We nodded and I started back up to the trail. I wasn't sure what had happened or if Harris was really living in the cave. Part of me hoped not because I wanted to be alone up there, but part of me hoped I'd see him again. There was something in his eyes. And the weirdest part was that I'd watched those ravens for a while and the thought had come to me, "two ravens healing each other with laughter." I wanted to write that down, but I didn't have my pad and I didn't want to put it in my phone, so I forgot. This time I wouldn't forget.

Dancing on the Point of a Needle

It is Sunday and I'm in a new office in town. Nobody is here. There is a kitchen, a fridge, 4 bathrooms, freshly laid wood floors, supplies neatly stacked in cabinets, a copier/printer/fax/scanner that spits out 40 pages a minute. I just put up my giant pad of post-its so I can suss through where I'm at, my goals, my leavings, my bubbles, my awareness, small things floating on the ocean. Also, I hung a little painting by Michael Wojczuk, who was just in town with his wife, Niko, from Boulder. It is called "The Rabbi's Garden" and was painted in Girona, Catalunya, Spain (north of Barcelona). The walls are a little softer than they were when I arrived. I have rice pasta with pesto in the fridge, and a new container of Antonio's hot salsa for nosh. My right leg is pumping in its customary way, up on the toes, 120 beats a minute, maybe more. My forearms sit comfortably on my new desk, dark grained wood, smooth finish. I'm breathing well, in a way that makes me want to stretch my trunk, hang on a beam and let the ribcage expand. It's been a strange 9 days, some splurges after a six month cleanse, a reintroduction of comfort foods, a reorientation to disorientation, a celebration of spring, my exuberance, my excesses, my capacity to dance on the point of a needle in unbridled joy, not feeling the prick, face oblivious to feet, destruction in every direction, and yet the warm puppy tongue of life force licking me with devotion. I saw it all in 9 days, and I know what to choose, how to play, the changing rhythms, the song variations, the bodily systems that pump, feed, clean, sense, warn, throb, hurt, prickle, and power down with a sip of mate laced with Ume and honey, so that I again sense the earth under my feet. There is work on the table, more coming in, trips, writing to pour through, pour out, like the black mud after a spring snow. There was a red-cheeked joy on Thursday night, at 2am, in a blizzard of a crazed snow, directionless, spinning, spumes of it rising and darting off, Sahara sands of blown texture, a bicycle buried up to the seat, a car lost in the sea of it, and me with my green herringbone sportjacket on, an old yardstick in my hand, no hat, no gloves, searching for spots where I could accurately measure the snowfall and report my rapture to the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque. And I reported 13.5" at 2:12am. It was the best I could do. The drifts around my house were over the yardstick, and the sage was like an island chain of sandbars and trenches, at times thigh deep, at others swept off leaving starfish crystals on coffee clay. I was in and out, but I couldn't get enough. I watched the snow invade the light over the door, a swarm of it in sufi revue, and I had to feel it. So, I'd mount the wall and roll into the powder in the sage, crawl around on hands and knees so that the flakes filled my nostrils. Ahhhhhh, I said, many times repeated, ahhhhhhhhhhh, the kind of ahhhhhh that comes from the center below the bellybutton above the balls, and leaves you breathless, but not in need. And I came back in, finally, and wrote. I was still buzzed from the whiskey and my fingers were wet and numbed on the keys, but I road a flexible flyer of delight that I wish upon every sentient being. My love was full upon me, overflowing, out to you and it, this and that, a soft focus for it inclusive of everybody, and I wrote that it is "the moment I live for." And I wrote, "I love you." And yet I erased that the next day, embarrassed, hung over, my possibilities downsized, my love pocketed, my fears reawakened, my headmaster summoned. But I come to you today pockmarked and preached to, stretched out and bled, hieroglyphics etched on my forehead, an itch in my toes to hike up high, and I feel a pinch of affection for the bars I don't need, Chancy and Gil, and Blake, Joanne and Donna, people I don't see anymore, same old same old, but in that there's some light shining through; underneath the habits is the desire for connection, resurrection, reflection, endlessness, espirit de corps, fathomless, a return home fresh and bountiful (but something you need to put back in the fridge after you shake well and sip plenty), Rip Van Winkle-eyed, win-the-lottery grins, and shy smiled yuks with even the darkest hipsters in the room. It can't last, and it eats everything else in its wake, unsustainable, beat-your-brain-able, your Zen turned neon beer sign, your boat dry-docked until the next tide, your last tickets punched. Nope, can't do it, but you can't blame a man for seeking the headless, heedless joy of dancing on the point of a needle.

Before Work

The desert is still and cold this dawn. A quarter moon, tattered at the southern edge, drifts alone in a soft blue sky. All the stars have retired into the light and there are no clouds to anchor with. Frost on my car windshield and my bicycle seat, but it will soon melt off; it is not the cold of deep winter, of early January, but a simple morning cold, settled down into the canyons, and walking slowly among the sage roots and grass stalks now fully free of snow. Winter still resides up high, to the north and east in the peaks, the blue gray snowfields above treeline spilling in tongues through the spruce forests. There is more up there than before, it snowed several feet in the past two weeks, and you can see it in the thickness of the white, a settled depth, something to last until late spring, something to give to the river and the streams. It snowed down here, too, but it did not last, the ground is warming, the days are longer, the sun higher, nowhere for frozen things to hide in the desert day.

I am busy with work, busier than my swirling energy likes; "I" burn off myself like fog, in wisps, off and out, into the air, not back in where I am left empty, making slack faces, not knowing, not sure, lost in an unattended space.

Last night I dreamed three dreams and my sinuses went dry, filling up behind my eyes to moisten the walls. My mom flew me over the coast in an open contraption, an ulta-light, over east shore road, toward bayville, a late season snow on the beach and the lawns of the coastal houses. My brother was down there somewhere, and I knew there was more snow on this coast than in the desert, and that bothered me, but my mom had to show me. She was instructive, maybe telling me that the teardrop shaped bay I grew up by is beautiful, as beautiful as anything else I've known. We flew over twice, one time during summer. I did not know the driveways and the people, the cul de sacs, and the seaweed colored water. Or maybe I did, but have forgotten.

I walked to high school along the streets of a city. My pace was fast and I had a bundle of hot dogs in my hand. I did not know where to put the hot dogs as I approached the school with its brick facade. It felt new, a place where I might run into somebody unexpected. I felt disheveled, too much stuff, the hot dogs cold and thick in my hands. In one version, I remembered I had a backpack and stuffed the meat in there. In another version, I walked the hallways with long, buffalo hot dogs in my right hand, protruding out like fat, bendy pencils.

In the last, I was walking with friends, a woman with a small child. We kept approaching a plaza, like the one in Santa Fe, springtime, buds on trees, pigeons warbling and strutting. I felt close to an understanding, not feeling bad, but still a tightness in my solar plexus, something not quite landed, not quite sure of itself, something still tied in a knot. She seemed to know and asked me how I was doing. I told her I was doing well, doing well, and I meant it, but the tightness remained and the moon was in my window. The clock said 4:47, but I was still in the dream. My friend, who knows me, said, "You look tired." And I knew this, knew the tightness had been interrupting my sleep. I nodded hoping we'd approach the plaza again and I would be less tired.

On Saturday, I hiked Devisadero and went to my brother tree on the way down. A raven played with me, riding the wind just above the canopy, crowing when it got out over the cliff. At the tree I put my forehead against the sharp, thin branch that juts out and put my hands around the bough. It was calm, no wind. And yet this tree swayed at its core and I felt its heartbeat, vibrations into my hands. I looked up to confirm that there was no wind. There wasn't. This tree moved for me. It waved its trunk and I could feel its life.

Everybody Haiku Tonight

Still raven on sage
black on green waiting for snow
alone, muscled, wings ready

Canyon wall at dusk
echoing in my belly
boulders holding sound

An early darkness
turns the house to memory
of people not there

Of Tugboats and Crybabies

Holy shit. Holeeeeee shit! I didn't think I had it in me, man. I didn't. But I had to get to the river. Down and up the dirt hills, snow squalls circling the desert, ringing the peaks. A lone light across the gorge, up on the Hondo Mesa like a tugboat calling me, an icebreaker in the caliche. Wind taking off from the west, down the cerros, up the broken hills. A sky of india ink spilled to the northwest, dark blue, then darker still, verging on purple, wanting to drip. I got there, not so bad for the front side of the ride. Alone in the ruts until the edge where an old red truck with a rust stained camper top sat in the depression at the outlet of the Manby trail to the springs. I didn't go there. I didn't look in the window. The bike dropped itself on the lava rocks and I clambered down a few to stare at the river. The water was a camouflage green, the jade overrun by mud, no sun to pick up a sheen. Wind rubberized my ears and I floated off myself with some vertigo, out over the junipers for a time. When I came back I looked to the east and the moon was full riding above the dark clouds. I was confused because last I saw la luna, she was little more than a slushy half. Where was I? On the gorge rim I thought of flying across to the Hondo side and searching for that tugboat, but my knees wobbled and I didn't have a superlight in my backpack. It was darkening and time to get going. I knew those first few hills going back are harder than those two long hills coming in. Steep and windy. I had some energy elixir in the cambelbak and that helped with the piston action on the first rise, but, man, that second one starting kicking my ass before I pushed a quarter way up. And this is the thing. I went from nose breathing to mouth sucking, chest heaving, but the legs were filling up with can-do muscle twitching. Halfway up that long and gnarly second rise I felt the crybaby singing to me. Head bowed, ass off the seat, biceps pulling, hands gripping, wrists twisting, tongue going side-to-side, I swallowed heaps of that solar-plexus drain swirl of lament, the no-no-no-no got....to....fucking....stop...legs not gonna do it...falling, falling, falling, fainting...want to give in, give up, let myself down, drop soft and pliable into the defeat of it...And yet I'm still moving, pumping, swaying shoulders, gaining the second half of that hill, seeing the top, and then...the...tipping...point, and I know I've passed the max torque requirement, it's getting easier, I'm going to top it and get to drift in the flats until those last long curved swales that are easier, much easier than these two fucking roller coasters. I'm sweating under my layers now, and at the same time the westerly blow is cutting through me and snow pellets slap my right cheek. It's almost full dark and the clouds have swallowed the moon. A car a few rises ahead, hovering in the near dark vastness, shows its break lights, two fresh lit cigarettes burning red in the snow. I'm on the decel, knowing that I've slayed the hills and it's all easy into dock from here; and also knowing and still tasting the crybaby who wants to give up, his wail, his willingness to submit, to be dropped off, to crumble knock-kneed to the ground and be picked over by strays because he deserves that fate. But the crybaby didn't have it so easy tonight because there is more, much more inside, and I know it, and I cannot reconcile the crumble, not now. And I've been through it, and I know that once past those hills it's easy, and that energy used on those rises is recycled, sloshing in the tank for a long journey, longer than I ever expected.

March Voices

Like a lion March has swept in with winds so loud you become part of the roar if you stay out long enough. But with that wind has, thankfully, come some moisture, pebbles of snow and hail, lashes of rain against the pocked pumice walls. We're in a constant gale, windows rattling, sometimes curving in parabolas, the tips of the sage plants shuddering, closing their eyes against it. And that sage has, in the span of days, gone from olive and sepia to dusty blue-green and has kicked into the world the swirling aroma of late season grapes and a tenacious cleansing spearmint. I am drawn out from this desk into the unraveling cold, the serape-slapping southerly rip, into the crumbly, scarred yellow clay, where the whistle blows through my chest, and presses my temples. I am barefoot on the gray gravel, claw-toeing my way to the sirens, again to lay low among these plants that rise only a few feet off the pliable earth; snuggle in with the zephyrs diving, rising, puncturing, dancing back, hovering, fainting, and then pouring in on the back of a gray whale. It is snowing in the mountains, open bowled Wheeler Peak - which cannot be its real name, Tankwantanda to me - baptized at the highest reaches in a winter white thunderhead, spilling its riches onto the back ridges, opening a mouth toward the sacred mountain, Pueblo Peak, Tinkantookoto, to coat the still ice covered Blue Lake. Tall aspens shiver and sway in the narrow, winding canyon trail up toward the lake, rising over the folds of the mountain that show from below in shadowy triangles. An inner sanctum tucked deep in the kingdom of this mountain, a source, a birthing canal, a place where the ancients of this land can tell you where you are. I cannot go, friends tell me, although they sometimes tease, but in the not going, I am there. The bark of those aspens is familiar, the funneled wetness seeping off the high ground has reached me from El Salto, riding an easterly in the summer, and, today, in a tempest of this world-reflecting teacup, a battle of seasons at work in the sky just over me in the sage. I lay down on my back and close my eyes facing west and listen. It is late afternoon, March 7, 2009, a whole world of talking going on beyond my border, but here all I can hear is the wind and my toes are being tickled, they are not cold, and my right hand feels the sting of a cactus hidden in the clumped straw, and my ass feels nothing but easy ground giving up some moisture, but not much. There are people in the wind, voices and information, headlines and backstories, histories. Dust to dust is what I think, people in black huddled around a grave. Here it is, I'm sitting in that dust that has turned to clay and I also see little animal bones and ash, pollen drifts along the dark roots. It is late afternoon on March 7 and nobody is here, no cars, no dogs barking, no rabbits sniffing, just the blue rises and volcanic chimneys, clouds masking the sun, and the tilt of the earth toward the south.

Patience

I didn't have any today. It was a ball rolling across my floors, rock on cement, moving north, wobbling, picking up speed, heading for the wood stove. Nostrils flared. 75 push-ups. Eyes sucked into the monitor, phones poised to ring, already ringing along my pelvis, permanently in those bones, even at the top of a mountain those bones ring, and they talk to my ears, and I reach for a phone that has been left in the car. But I know somebody is calling. I know somebody wants me. I know the other side of town is blinking with red lights and someone in a truck, stuck, window down, smoking, has a phone on her ear and is waiting for me. I'm up there looking for the fiddler, trudging, lurching, gulping air, looking for the dance step, the shuffle and spin; but not yet, it's not there, forward I go leaning into the mountain, heading into a need, a filling mouth, a call to arms, a siren for the wealth left behind and the fires ahead, a stumble on the rocks. And she is not there, or maybe she's up on top, looking down at my galumphing figure moving side-to-side in the trees, splashing mud puddles, and maybe she thinks I'm wounded and need healing, but that's not something she does. She keeps moving and I follow, but I know that following will not get me there. And the phone keeps ringing.

A Live Quiver in Solitude

I'm in buzzes and swirls, heartbeats in my calves, congas in my ears. Stepping off the bicycle under a Uzilevsky sky of candied lines leaning red, rose, jolly rancher watermelon, and finishing west with a cotton-dipped Close Encounters mars-tinged saffron. Bending layers of velvety, rolling clouds spread east to west and lowering over the puckered camel hump of Two Peaks. Toward the gorge from which I came, there is a an eye-shaped sky hole of marine blue looking at my house. La luna, a thickening crescent with the hint of a nose sits high among shredded night clouds, leaving Venus well below in the building cloud wash. And I stand outside, listening to nothing, no sound, the houses settled, no cars, no planes, no wind, the gears not turning, the underneath at rest, the sky drifting, my feet pulling up a vibration, but not from the ground, from themselves, the soles summoning me, standing still, arms loose, a human liveliness in my skin, sore muscles figure-eighting from the exertion of the ride. I am alive in the midst of the immense quiet, energy running out through my fingertips, my teeth in pin-prick ripples, through my eyes that drop with the light toward the sage sitting without fanfare in a calm sea all around me. The ride is over, that last juniper tree on the west rim, a perfect spade, in silhouette, sits behind my eyes and reminds me of a similar tree on a hill in Boulder that always brought me back to early childhood, some knowing of loneliness, a wanting of it, to be a point on a horizon, a live quiver in solitude, something to sit under and gaze out from, nothing more. At the rim, the air rapidly cooling, I hopped among the lichens covered lava rocks until I found a wide one on the precipice, sitting above the still snow pocketed slope, above an over sized pinon where eagles sometimes perch. I looked down on the river, flowing thick in milky jade, early snowmelt swelling it up onto the matted west bank. Its roar from 700 feet below vibrating my shins and stilling my ears. I could sleep standing on that rock, on the edge of a long drop, hoping for mist to reach me. On the way to this point, riding the rutted road up and down hills, looking into the draws for snow patches, and lost horses, hidden tree thickets and bobcats, I waited for words to come, ideas, something from the parts of the New York Times I'd read earlier, from the NPR story on Hasidic rabbis molesting young students, from the week at Mabel's sitting in silence, listening to people lives, but nothing came, nothing but a sense of things bigger than myself, things that encompass all of the streams, things that leave the world quiet, the gears seized, the lone tree on the rim to suck in the last light.