There's something very satisfying about climbing a hill that you see every day. At the top of the basalt hills south of us--we named them the Scrat Hills, after our beloved artist cat who disappeared in 2010--I felt that I was part of these slopes. I often have a sense of loss or frustration with the distance between myself and the features of this landscape. I've always talked about climbing the Scrat Hills. On the afternoon we climbed this slope, I finally felt close enough.

This is "The Dome," an outcropping of what appears to be igneous rock. The rocks are covered with bright green lichen, which makes The Dome even more conspicuous in the dun landscape. The Dome is the Blanca Flats equivalent of
Ayers Rock in Australia; there's something sacred about it. Even the dogs are drawn to The Dome.

The land stretching out to the mesas looks like the floor of an empty sea.

Jake and Shelby climbed the hill with us . . .

Looking out towards la Culebra, you can see nearly all the way to San Luis. I loved being surrounded by the soft basalt slopes. Despite living at the foot of one of the highest mountain peaks in Colorado I'm not much of a mountain climber; old hills are more my speed.
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Today I was reading some of my earliest entries in this blog. I started the blog in 2007, around the time I launched my now defunct author's website. I was frustrated and confused (still am, to some extent) about how hard I had worked to steer myself off the course that felt the most natural to me. Why do I deliberately turn away from the projects, the visions, the work that feel the most important?
Maybe the photographs I've been taking and the short poems I've been writing don't mean much in the scheme of things, but I love the fact that they just exist, like the dry grasses and the stones here. They grow or they don't grow, live or don't live, but they're present. They exist. Nothing else I've done has given me such a sense of release from the wounded monster of my ego.
I built the house that I huddle in now, my legs cramped from crouching, my back sore from staying curled up in such a small space. I poured a hasty foundation over dream-sand, threw together walls that rattle around my ears. I worked hard—maybe not honestly, but hard—to get to this place and build that house. I must have had faith, at some point, in that journey.
Would I be any more willing to take an entirely different direction, one that leads more directly into my heart? That path is hard, and I might be too soft for it now. There’s no guarantee of shelter. On this trail, you risk an exposure that’s both beautiful and brutal. The food you gather on the way is sparse and mysterious--stones and shadows, leaves and light, the occasional peace that comes when you’ve accepted that there isn’t anything but this.
That journey begins when I refuse to say ‘yes’ to anything I can’t completely, utterly believe in.
The heart, in solitude, has to learn to recognize its own voice again.