On raindrop-pecked sand, the subtle lunar crescent of an Archaic metate broken and abandoned a few thousand years ago.
Old Moon
All posts by Betsy James
SEAS
About 130 million years between tides.
Witch’s Cave
A little rock shelter in the sandstone where—maybe in the early 1900s judging from the state of the juniper—a Navajo sheepherder, a woodcutter, or an outlaw had augmented a natural cave with cut branches.
Still Waiting
An Archaic mano, or hand grinding stone, begins its next few thousand years in the sand of a hearth. Time and weather have reduced the charcoal of ancient campfires to a shadow in the soil.
Alas, Poor Ferdinand!
Under a juniper instead of a cork tree. Picked clean by coyotes and bleached by the desert sun.
Yes, they were cold
…but the coyote was barefoot. Fair’s fair.
Where Dinosaurs walked
…and now, 150 million years later, so can we.
The Morrison Formation, deposited by rivers, deltas, and shallow seas. In rain or snow it reconstitutes to dinosaur poo—you will never get the mud off your boots.
The Skin of the Earth
Where we put our feet can change within a yard or two.
Also true for others’ feet.
Art Show
One of the liabilities of an oversized right brain is less room for the left brain. In my busy multiverse of painting, writing, teaching, and hiking, that’s a real issue at times.
I have four paintings in the Albuquerque Museum’s annual ArtsThrive show and sale—this is my seventh year—and I should have sent you the links a couple of weeks ago:
https://albuquerquemuseumfoundation.org/artsthrive/
Enter my name in the top right of the second link. And if you live in ‘Burque, the show’s up until November 8.
There! Whew.
Awe
From hike journal, 10.8.95:
The day began and ended with a moon so big and orange it looked unreal, beyond natural, godlike: something to worship, for how could something so strange not be holy?
In the morning, as I drove down to meet the others at 7 a.m., the setting moon was about to touch the western horizon, oval as a big squashed orange. I stopped the pickup and said, “Oh!”
In the evening, as we drove wearily home at dusk, there she was again, rising: weird, enormous, still infinitesimally touching the purple mountains. We came over a rise in the road and all together said, “Oh!“
Later they switched moons on us and there was only that little cold dime, high in the sky.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 