Month: July 2021

A Day Outside of Time

Tuesday July 21, as I was leaving Las Cruces, one of those big highway signs with electronic lettering said “7/21/21 Time Begins.” It looked ominous. Usually, they say things like “get vaccinated and you could win the lottery,” or “construction at exit such and such.” After that strange announcement, I was happy to get a Day Outside of Time. The opening prompt in my online writers’ group the following Sunday said July 25 is an extra day in the Mayan calendar. There are thirteen moons, so the 365th day is outside of time.

I literally ran with that idea, alone in the beauty of the desert, allowing my mind to be unconstrained by past or future, by any sense of time pressing on me from one side or the other. Nothing impending or demanding. To be free, I didn’t have to run off on some great adventure, because the moment was the adventure.

When I got home, I realized I hadn’t walked down to the Rio Grande lately. The river looked like a long, fast-flowing mud puddle after recent monsoons. I stood at the edge. Strands and wreaths of desert willow branches floated past, green and flexible, torn off by wind and water. Time and thought are the branches. The present moment is the river. Beyond that, the mountain. Steady. Tadasana.

I walked home past the “cat house,” a trailer that houses a cat colony—at least in the yard. (I don’t know if they have indoor access.) Someone feeds them. Among them are two unusual and beautiful cats I plan to use as feline characters in a future book. They were snuggling and sunbathing with their friends. Animals always have all days outside of time.

 

Rain Runner

Sensation and perception reach my deepest inner places, massaging out creativity and awareness where I didn’t even know they’d been knotted up.  The first day of rain delivered a short thunderstorm. It cooled the air so much I opened my door and turned the air conditioner off, bringing in the special smell of desert rain. The burst of natural light through the screen door changed the look of the room, and the silence created space in which the familiar felt new.

In the prior weeks, the temperature was over 100 day after day. My body is acclimated to exercise in high heat, and I’ve come to enjoy the intensity of it. However, the sand on the trail got so hot my toes were blistering in my five-toed, flexible barefoot shoes. A pair of new, semi-minimalist shoes let me keep running, but instead of responding to subtle differences in the terrain that normally would make me vary my stride and speed, dancing around rocks and thorns, I just kept padding along. My feet felt nothing but shoe.

On the second day of rain, soft and steady, I ran in it, letting it bathe me in its blessings. The sand had cooled and firmed, the perfect running surface. Wearing my barefoot shoes again, I could feel the textures of thick sand, of thin sand over underlying rock, of the rounded bumps of a pebbly stretch of trail—getting reflexology from the ground. My feet were happy. Sole to soul.

Rain beaded on the tips of green needles and leaves, on desert plants that seldom wear such jewelry. The greens grew brighter and deeper under the diffuse gray-sky light.

To honor the rain gods, I cleaned the trail as best I could. With the reopening of tourism comes plastic litter. The discarded containers I carried to a trash can had no texture, no responsiveness to the weather, just impermeable smoothness. The dirt that stuck to them was alive, holding moisture, darkening with wetness. It struck me that my mind after too much time indoors is like plastic, while time in nature makes it more like dirt. Stuff can grow in it.