The speed of time

When the calendar ticked over another page to August, suddenly I was aware of fleeting time. The signs have been there, ever since the monsoons started and the weather changed dramatically. Gone were the relentlessly sunny skies, replaced by overcast depressingly similar to Pacific Northwest gloom. The low humidity in the neighborhood of 7% (my hair dried on its own in minutes, bread became toast simply by leaving it uncovered for 5 minutes, and mildew is unknown) increased seemingly overnight to high in the double digits where absolutely nothing dries on its own. The brutally hot temperatures have dropped to comfortable 80s but the air conditioner is still running because of the humidity.

The light has also changed. I went for a walk after work today and noticed a discernible softening, a lower slant, a cooler tint in the afternoon light washing over the Painted Desert. It's lovely but it's a bittersweet lovely. Fall is coming. Time goes by.

The five months that were a wide-open landscape in May have narrowed to fewer than two and it seems the remaining time here is disappearing much more quickly the closer it comes to being gone altogether. I also became alarmingly aware that all the places I'd circled on the map, places I thought I had all the time in the world to see, had not yet been checked off, so the last two weekends have been a flurry of going here and there, wherever I could go on a day trip. 

I made another trip to Canyon de Chelly to hike into the canyon to White House. I drove to Flagstaff to see the Museum of Northern Arizona, devoted to the culture of the Colorado Plateau. I made trips to Wupatki National Monument, north of Flagstaff, home to beautiful pueblo ruins, and to Homol'ovi State Park, near Winslow, to see more ruins. These have turned out to be my favorite. There is nothing spectacular about them; they're just a couple of sites with minimal ruins:

But this is the thing: they truly rely on the honor system. There are no roving rangers, no cameras, no policing of any kind. This is the extent of the law enforcement I saw:

All other ruins I've visited have been sanitized; every pottery shard, every arrowhead, every artifact has been removed, but that's not happened here, and it's astonishing what's been left. Every shard I saw, lovingly placed in a collection by someone in what seemed to me to be in a sacred manner, was picked up by that someone, looked at closely, maybe meditated on a bit, and then put back down.

Little altars were everywhere. If there was a flat surface it had been adorned with these jewels. Some celebrants added petrified wood or pretty stones, but it was all part of the offering. I stopped several times myself to search around the ground and easily found a dozen shards within minutes. It's a powerful thing to touch something that had been made by a woman a thousand years ago, someone not so different from me, and then leave it behind. A powerful, powerful connection.


The sky put on a distant show for me that day. I've heard that the great walls of water dumping out of a dark cloud are called dragons' bellies. I was treated to a double. Awesome, huh?

=======
Thought of the day:

There's just some magic in truth and honesty and openness. (Frank Ocean)