Moab (2009)

I meant to touch on the camping trip and realized, a month later… that I didn’t.

Moab is…. How to draw Moab?

We arrived in the evening and we started our visit then and there by scrambling around the top of Dead Horse Point. My best sweetheart told me the story of how the place acquired its name and it left me with a tightened throat. Sunset fell completely and the night wind swept up the sheer cliffs, blowing my clothes against me and my hair into snarls. My hands hurt which was interesting. My hands always ache when I am high up. Heights do something to my heart rate too. So although I couldn’t see perfectly, my body knew where I was.

For a woman raised on the east coast for most of her formative years…. Beauty, to me, is the wet grass, the fireflies, the smell of the sea, rain in the afternoon, green everywhere. This was a different world completely.

Moab is a swirling dance of red, orange, and dusty purple during the day. It is fire and brilliant shards of light at dusk. It is a calm grey blue at night.

Silence beats against your ears. Regardless of whether is it a trail with very few companion hikers or if it is where tourism and crowds abound, the silence streams around the shrill echoes of laughter and brushes against your legs, eyes and heart. Silence is alive there.

Towering rocks are temples, they are forbidding and watchful as you pass under them. The ground exhales under your feet and for all the stones, dust, and solid ancient landscape, somehow Moab is vibrantly Alive and Self-Aware. It is an Eerie, and almost Holy place.

There the wind woman is even more wild and dangerous and beautiful. Although I have always loved and distrusted her, I have never felt fear. There, I was so sensitive to my fragile body and her fierce freedom that I was actually afraid.

It was exhilarating.

(2009 07)