Alkali
Sunrise. Newborn Sun is iron fresh from the forge, searing a convolution of foothills slung along the playa’s eastern edge. From inside this sun-struck vault, anxiety clings like lint beneath my sternum. Using a long exhalation, I send it out on a gentling breeze. Dry air accepts my donation, offers no receipt. My worries drift across the alkali, become dust that scatters and settles and waits on whirlwinds that will spiral it away into an uncaring sky. A fledgling flies with a Yellow Warbler half its size into the light-scatter of a leafy branch above me. The fledgling flutters, begging for food. Warbler flits in and uses the black needle of its bill to drop an invisible insect into the stout and gaping beak. For a moment I am stunned by this cooperation between species, a morning counterweight to human divisiveness. Then I'm told the warbler was feeding a brown-headed cowbird, a nest parasite. Cooperation is crushed into an illusion.
Midday. Sun sizzles effervescent onto the desert floor. Alkali shimmers and shatters space in the way a soul would look in physical form. Snakes and lizards huddle in kangaroo rat burrows or beneath basalt boulders, waiting for the glower of heat to soften. Clouds are hiding, too. They gather in some unseen place, biding their time, relinquishing the entirety of the cobalt sky to piercing light. Tails of palomino dust gallop across the playa, exulting in the afternoon wind. I drink the last tepid water. Adjust the portable shadow of a broad-brimmed hat. Weigh the benefits of hot solitude against a cold beer and air conditioning. I begin to swallow the bare-souled and brooding loneliness. My phone rings.
Evening. Winter Rim reaches upward to shield the tired Sun. A sharp-edged shadow casts eastward across the playa. The darkening margin creeps over blonde alkali, a time-lapse of orange lichen swallowing a boulder, of petroglyphs dissolving from rock, of Sun engulfing Earth in a future beyond the reach of human consciousness. The sunlit skyline is an undulation of hills lying low and stark as rattlesnake flanks, awaiting the evening dissipation of heat and light in that patient way of beings who don’t know Time. I celebrate unsubdued beauty. Ache with the passing of another day.
[NOTE: Thank you to Playa at Summer Lake for the opportunity to teach and write in this soulful place.]