Saturday, February 9, 2013

A Novice Desert Mystic

Mystical Light - Lynda Lehmann c 2013


I dance in a translucent dream -- a dream of light and verdure.  Drenched in crystalline sunshine, under high fair-weather clouds that cast their shadows like afterthoughts on distant peaks, I feel the land rolling away from me while it percolates with waves of new life: blossoming and blooming and pouring forth all manner of feathery green after a three-day rain.

I have wandered some Northeast forests and always felt I'd seen plenty of what Beauty there is to behold. But the desert's blazing shades of emerald, amber and gold against distant hills flushed red and glistening in the morning sun, make me ecstatic. Rocky flanks rise under luminescent violet puffs that float above -- coasting, those magnificent clouds that look like great arcs sailing the deep skies -- and I know that I'm in a place that changes me.  The epic fullness of stretching, yawning magnificence in diamond-faceted splendor that unwinds within my view, seems impossible. 

Pointed skeletons of trees and ancient pocked Saguaro Queens, scroungy tufts of yellowed brush and telltale signs of nocturnal burrowing creatures: all cast their net of Intrigue to make me feel spellbound.  I am a novice desert Mystic: I have no need to brush aside the Inklings that make me feel buoyant as those sailing clouds.  I am buoyant with joy at the grandeur of Being.

How can I be so fortunate as to feel I've seen Eden?  The scent, the verdure, the great flowing open space unspoiled by the clatter of urban sprawl, wash my soul.  I stand mesmerized.  And I am content and far more whole than I was yesterday.

All the while, the desert whispers its sacred covenant:  Thou shalt not gain dominion, nor command me. 

And the Garden still grows.




Sea of Beauty - Lynda Lehmann c 2013

Golden Light at Evening-Lynda Lehmann c 2013

Desert Covenant - Lynda Lehmann c 2013

That One Lone Tree - Lynda Lehmann c 2013


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