While the world burns, I retreat to the mountains.
a poet goes out west to feel human again
The news is doing what it does best — playing humanity’s trauma in neverending cycles, letting it rest and rot right in our pockets. I watch men kill in the name of a faceless god and threaten to obliterate those who just want their families fed and safe. I watch earth buck against our disrespect, how it screams and lets its tears drown out cities.
I am frozen, and even my pen, my outlet, is no longer calling to me. I don’t know how to write about my little daily life when people I love are in war zones. I don’t know how to write about the small moments when co-workers lose their homes in an apocalypse-esque flood.
Then work cracks the whip, reminding us we aren’t entitled to the incentives they dangled before us. A man calls my work an embarrassment while it was built on his team’s sloppy data. I’m questioned, dragged into phone calls.
Their overreactions make it seem like it’s life or death, when we all know it’s not. On top of it all, they don’t know that my granda just died, that my grandma is dying, that people I know are hiding from falling missiles right now. Their energy is the last thing I need. Any paperwork error is the most minute thing.
I am not unique; we are all going through it. So maybe (crazy idea) we should approach one another with grace.
When I see these men in person, they cannot meet my eyes. They puff out their suited chests and walk on, talking about numbers and their vacation homes. Money is their faceless god. One we all need, but should caution revering.
I shut down and head for the mountains.
Quiet. Stillness.
The muscles in my body relax as if I’m Odysseus and I’ve finally found Circe’s island. Is this what stumbling across home after a never ending journey feels like? Is that what I’m looking for?
I lock eyes with a bighorn sheep, who watches me from his shady, red perch. I envy him. He, in his nakedness, can survive the Valley of Fire while I, clothed and sunscreened, already feel my body calling me back to the coolness of my waiting car.
Who is the superior being, really?
I pray he can feel the apology in my eyes. What have we done? To his home, our home?
I climb the steps of Atlatl Rock and study the petroglyphs of those who understood this sentiment at their core. I see handprints and a little footprint, as if the indigenous are reaching through time’s hazy portal to reach me. My soul aches against my body, as if it wants to be released, to hold their hands. I want to live like you did, I want us to honor earth like you did, help me, help me, help me.
There is some shame. I feel no right to ask this of them. I thank them for allowing me to visit, to witness their art. I promise to honor them and earth in a way they did not receive when this modern country was violently conceived.
The next morning, I cleanse in the Narrows’ cold waters. I’m taught patience as I carefully lock my feet around slippery rocks, entrust the wood in my hands to guide me, one step at a time.
Zion’s towering cliffs fold around me, a hug carved by centuries, watching me closely as I make my way down the riverbank. Apart from my fellow hikers, and the tittering of birds, I’m once again enveloped in nature’s silence.
They warn us of flash floods, of mother nature suddenly wiping her face clean of us. But today Zion is still and cradling me, and I feel my own ancestors walking with me through the cold water. I thank her, for my body, for the water that both nurtures and destroys.
We head for tribal land, and I center myself before entering. My sensitive soul aches as a native woman bestows us with the croon of her music.
We walk across red rock, embedded with the ancient footprints of giant beasts that once roamed. She takes us down, beneath the surface, to a sacred place.
I count the rock rings, think of how long it took this water to carve the canyons this deep. Wonder what standing in this exact spot 500 million years ago actually looked like, but my mind can’t comprehend that level of time.
I think of today, of the sea levels rising. How desperate this region is for water. How when water comes, she comes ferociously, unforgettably. What will this canyon look like 500 million years from now?
I am thousands of miles from war and yet I feel death all around me. Death of what the land once was, of the imbalance we have caused. Standing deep in the canyon, I touch the red rock that is degrees cooler than the rock above my head.
I thank it for its protection from the sun. I tell it I love it as much as I’d love any person. More, maybe. Probably.
I thank it for allowing my presence.
We work as a unit, climbing the steps back up to fresh air, and find hours have gone by while we were underground. The sun is setting behind black and red rock mountains, the whole sky illuminated in one long rainbow.
If I could live in this moment forever, I would.
I’ve moved through three different time zones in two days, so my body relies on the sun and moon. My internal clock clicks into place, leaning into the now.
We drive by day, burrowing into temporary homes before the endless road melts into night’s pitch-black shadows. Evenings are spent by fire and starlight.
Miles away, men load warheads, politicians debate who owns my body, and a hurricane churns in the gulf. Nerves clutter my head, my body clings to its mother, earth, and anticipation churns in my gut.
I bear witness. Rise with the sun who has seen it all, rest under the stars who have blanketed the night since the first rings emerged on those red rocks.
I am a dot of sand, a droplet of water, the lick of fire, a scratch of time in rock, a star dangling midair.
While the world burns, I retreat to the mountains. I find stillness, feel so very humbled in our smallness. I know I must leave and return to my daily life. And I still don’t know where to go from here.
I have no answers, other than I found my humanness in the mountains.
And I cling to it.
May we treat earth better. May we treat one another better. May we be the droplets of water and dots of sand that come together to make oceans and megaliths of change.
May nature’s stillness both humble and empower us, guiding us back home.
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with love, amy elizabeth
Beautiful piece. Sounds like you had an amazing trip. ❤️