Tag Archives: hiking in New Mexcio

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

The Unnoticed

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About seven thousand years ago, a culture that the invaders of five hundred years ago called the Bajada were making tools out of basalt.

Basalt. Were they crazy? Gluttons for punishment? Basalt is hard, grainy, homely, and close to impossible to knap. But by god it’s tough. It takes a lot to break it. Maybe that was the attraction?

We have to assume that the so-called Bajada–we have no idea what they called themselves, though they were all over the Southwest–were tough. And that hunters found a reason for their choice of that difficult material.

Where you find those basalt flakes you may also find the metate where gatherers ground wild grain:

Their camp is eroding into the arroyo. But if you’re alert you can spot what’s left of the place where folks sat around knapping basalt, sharing chapatis made of wild grains, and telling stories about the next seven thousand years.

On Creativity, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Corvid. Yes, you read that right.

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A local group, “Art as Antibodies” asked for pieces about how we’re coping with the Covid lockdown. I sent a  painting of the wide and windy desert, which is how—and where—I cope. Not covidy enough, they said. So I sent a corvid.

Slot canyons are spooky, mysterious, intimate. Ravens nest along the rim. When you emerge from the dark strictures of a slot canyon you feel reborn.

On Creativity, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Time and Bushtits

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On a ridge in the low hills near the highway, a micaceous mano rested like an Easter egg in a nest of cobbles nearly the same size and shape. It was Archaic, a rounded lozenge with one smooth and one pecked side. There in its stone nest it will stay, with the hill slowly eroding out from under it.

A good dozen bushtits fussed and tsp-ed and fidgeted in the juniper. I sat very still. They seemed not to notice me, coming and going in a cloud like midges.

One red pebble.