Yosemite sunrise

"and after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in it's glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the RANGE OF LIGHT."

-John Muir in The Yosemite

North rim sunset.

Paul, I'm broadcasting my life on the Internet for you. Enjoy your prostate exam training.

the nature of vividness

I-40 west under a starstruck Arizona sky. Eric and I are trying to make flagstaff tonight, after leaving from sherman this morning. Grand canyon tomorrow--north and south rims--with time-lapsing at both. Then to Zion for Angel's Landing and through Death Valley at Sunrise. Yosemite Valley in three days. Then my month in the high sierras, which John Muir apparently called the "Range of Light." I'll be hiking the 240 miles of the John Muir Trail through Yosemite, Muir Wilderness, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia. The Range of Light.

My dark soul needs serrated mountain knives of light to cut through the shades I've drawn across windows that I used to insist never to be closed.

"crack the shutters open wide I want to see you in the light of day, watch the rays play all across your face and body."

Left Sewanee and its gently curved ridgelines and deep, dark blue coves for red rocks and serrated mountains and cliffs of the west. What is it that draws people westward?

We're both wanting to get lost. Why? Because in the losing, we're hoping to find, and sure that's old, cliché, and breathless rhetoric, but that's the only way I know to explain it. Hoping to find something we once knew, once felt, and once believed that all of life onward would always feel that vivid. Only in the subsequent numbness, I think, did we realize the vividness of the prior time in it's absence, a time in which I didn't think life could be anything but.

And the numbness feels a certain sad nostalgia juxtaposed with it's comfort-- a comfort derived out of protectionism, because the vivid is hard, and painful. The remembrance of vivid moments, or chills during that song, or those songs, or the way you felt naked in the rain (as if it were washing something out of you, or washing you out of something), or the way we swam in Cheston in the thunderstorm, or the way we felt wind for the first time at Byoona Amagara in Bunyonyi, or the way that first firetower sunrise blasted white hot light through a heart that had been gathering dust. Those moments paradoxically opposed to the painful, but no less important moments like the changed relationship status, or that damn letter, or that boy beaten in the streets, or that morning where they told us their stories, or that plane ride to LA after she broke up with me. Or the email I got tonight. All those things like colors in a painting, tied up within and around one another like a Pollock tonight.

Eric was sleeping after dinner, and I was driving, listening to "Happiness" by the Fray, and there was this surreal moment where he sang, "happiness was just outside my window, and could it crash going 80 miles an hour" and I looked down and saw the speedometer reach 80 and the reds and oranges ahead on the road blurred simultaneously with the voice that said that gone for now feels a lot like gone for good. Light blurs with hot tears like in the AVA song where he sings about closed eyes and tears flowing out beneath eyelids. So much music tied to so many vivid moments but now it falls flat when the shutters are closed and the tears are blinked away. Do souls die?

But they told me resurrection happens.

"I go home to the coast it starts to rain and I paddle out on the water. Taste the salt taste the rain I'm not thinking of her again, and I've never felt so alone but I've never felt so alive."

And Eric talked about love and hardness and the earning of love all tied in with the vivid times and we wondered if the love we've found that's comfortable and healthy that just doesn't seem as vivid is what we want... It's not that one is better than the other, but my eyes reflect the hope and fire deep beneath the shutters and the shades somewhere within me, and that hope and that fire wants it to be hard and vivid and beautiful.

We wondered if vivid and hard is better than numb and comfortable, or vice versa, and which is best for the world. Our brothers and sisters walk around asleep and yet alive. Come awake from sleep-ARISE. Do you not want to be awake? But maybe vivid is irrational.

It's my turn to drive, up out of flagstaff in coconino, but our closing thought was that we want to ask these questions, and live free and on fire again and let that fire burn away shutters and shades. And yet, what's more important to us in this range of light is to listen to the landscape, because although the landscape may possess answers to question we bring, it may possess answers altogether different and more important. Answers that have been lost in time.

We'll be time lapsing. And that will be reflected. Light reflecting on our faces and through us.

this morning i got up for the sunrise at the firetower and went and it wasn't one of those sunrises where there was this prick of light... this pinpoint of white hot light. it was like the clouds guarded against that and there was this explosion of fire right on the horizon line and all the clouds lit up so bright with the daylight that you couldn't discern the single point. it was lost in the orange fire.

hold fast to the break of daylight.

back again tomorrow for my last sunrise before leaving sewanee for who knows how long.

heart's breaking a little bit.

glenn beck from the weekend: "Obama is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don't know what that is, other than it's not Muslim, it's not Christian. It's a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it."

FoxNews on it: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/29/beck-amends-obama-racist-comment-questions-belief-collective-salvation/

FP: http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/30/all_god_s_children_got_intolerance

And media matters:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201008310014