Tag Archives: Taos Mountain

Mother Earth, Taos, N.M., and a Talented Local Poet

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A year ago I met a lovely poet, writer and “empath” who, for lack of a better term I would describe as doing “soul work” with animals and humans.  I received a blog post from her yesterday morning which beautifully conveys the passion and wisdom that she brings to the table anywhere she goes.  With her permission, I am sharing a link to her work along with an excerpt from a recent post of hers. Here you will see her love of life, including Mother Earth, and this little corner of this earth, Taos, NM.

A week or so after Earth Day, the days have begun to feel warmer here in Taos, even hot just after midday and into mid-afternoon. So Blue and I ventured to where the shadows of trees would cool and protect us as we walked together. These delicate flowers were thriving in the protection of the Ponderosa pines in the forest we found ourselves in. Whenever I can, I will take a pause to sit or even lay on the Earth, perhaps my favorite kind of meditation. After sitting awhile, then my eyes were drawn to these beauties.

Here in Taos, we still have a month or so before the clouds will gather enough precipitation for rains to begin falling as part of the monsoon season in northern New Mexico. The cloud beings that gather in these parts are favorites of mine. I literally feel the uplift of their presence and feel, oddly, as if they are my very own playmates! (What do they hold within themselves?)Cloud beings seen ‘dancing’ and touching the thermal rise of the mountains, here looking toward Taos Mountain and the Sangre de Christos a few days before Earth Day on April 18th.This time of year, early springtime with things warming up some, we see the apricot trees starting to come out in full bloom. I see this as another kind of precipitation, that of life force and nectar and flower essence. I often pause and thank the trees for their beauty and renewal, once again, calling to the inner reaches of my own essence to hint forward.

Every year with every season, I notice differences and fluctuations, subtle shifts within my own timing that most often are stimulated by that unique elemental dance before and around me. Grasping that I am part of all life, life being life, what a potent way to wake up to what is moving for me within the internal landscape as my own earth and skies! There I can also experience what is budding or coming to fruition literally and creatively.

And, here is a link to her entire blog, including the rest of this post:  

https://lifebeing.life/ 

 

 

Awareness is All

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“Awareness is all” states a bumper sticker on a friend’s car.  I believe this is so true but there is a catch—“awareness” always means to contemplate that our “awareness” is not complete and never will be.  So this “awareness” has a built-in catch-22 so you will always understand that you only see part of the picture. This morning I do think I have some degree of awareness but an important dimension of this “awareness” is that my view of the world is always filtered by biases and preconceptions so that I’m rarely under the illusion that I have complete awareness.  Earlier this morning as my wife and sweet dachshund Elsa sat on the back stoop and watched the dawn unfold, in deep admiration of the experience of the moment, I quipped to them, “Our view always tends to block our view.”  I was aware that as I watched the flycatcher birds cavorting about, scouring for food for their new born, I had witnessed moments like this many times in my life but had never seen the beauty unfolding as I was at that moment.  The process of growing awareness works toward allowing us to grasp our beautiful world in more of its pristine glory.  And I watched the sun beginning to light Taos Mountain for another day, flickering different permutations of shadow and gentle light on these mythical mountains, dressing them for another day of bringing magic to this lovely Northern New Mexico community. As always, Elsa was doing her part to quicken the moment, just setting there on her cushion in all of her exquisite, innocent beauty, licking her ribs and fantasizing about the exciting world she would get to play in another day.

My quip came from the realization that this pristine beauty has been with me from the earliest moments of conscious life.  But like all humans I learned to take it for granted, often seeing not the beauty of the world but my usual image of the beauty, “my view of the view,” not humble enough yet to approach the whiff of “the thing in itself,” less encumbered by the blinders of cognition. These blinders are, albeit, a very necessary part of life but they can become so familiar to us that we never venture beneath the surface and flirt with the aforementioned pristine beauty.

The poet Carl Sandburg understood this truth in his poem, “Precious Moments.”  Bright vocabularies are transient as rainbows./Speech requires blood and air to make it./Before the word comes off the end of the tongue,/While diaphragms of flesh negotiate the word,/In the moment of doom when the word forms/It is born, alive, registering an imprint—Afterward it is a mummy, a dry fact, done and gone.

Sandburg realized that a word is “alive” only one moment, in the “moment of doom” when it is formed after which we will be left only with an imprint.  But this beautiful poem was encouraging us to explore the depths of our heart and discover that flirtation with the pristine beauty of life can be rewarding. This exploration will help us to understand how that our view of life often blocks our view of an intrinsic dimension of life.  This is what Jesus had in mind when he challenged those who live on the surface of life, having “eyes to see but seeing not, ears to hear but hearing not.”