To people unfamiliar with this land, the desert can seem a harsh and uninviting place. I’ve heard it described, by those more accustomed to homes with carpets of thick lush grass and curtains of broad and leafy trees grown close together, as dull and drab and desolate, lacking in color and vibrancy.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
There is truth to the old saw about not being able to see the forest for the trees, the notion that the so-called “big picture” gets lost in the persistent focus on the details. There’s equal truth in its obverse: that too great a focus on the big picture leaves its constituent elements unnoticed and unappreciated, in all the ways that last word implies.
Life in this place gives its inhabitants the great gift of both views, for those with the vision to see and the spirit to comprehend.
In this place, the world itself is replicated over and over, in elemental form: in cloud-blanketed turquoise skies that lend their image and hue to the waters; in the deep and fragile greens that dot a landscape of warm browns and grays and golden shades; in the fire of the dawn and dusk as the dust of each day is carried aloft on the winds to create a light show like no other.
It’s one of the things that makes turquoise, the Skystone indigenous to this land, so emblematic of this place and its beauty: the entire world writ in miniature, inscribed upon, embodied within, pieces of the very earth itself.
Wings highlights this phenomenon regularly, in either medium: in silver, by merging and melding the earth’s palette with the suns silvery light; in photographic form, by capturing the interplay of organic light and shadow, color and form, stillness and motion, rendering single moments immortal.
The latter is on exhibit in today’s photo meditation, a series from a larger collection of images he memorialized nearly a decade ago now, images from the Quartzite River that wends its way through the long, deep canyon just south of here.
It’s a tributary of the Rio Grande, a small artery by comparison, yet one capable of producing dangerous rapids that boil of miniature falls. It’s a permanent home to numerous species of wildlife, and a vacation home to many more who make it a regular stop along their migratory paths each year.
Near the river’s end, where its serpentine journey carries it inexorably toward the dam installed decades ago by human hands, the water tends to level out in speed and depth alike. In its lower reaches, it appears almost sedate, a model of modesty and demure tranquility.
Appearances are deceiving.
Its deep blue-green color only hints at its hidden depths, the shimmery moiré of ripples and waves exposing the power that rests just beneath the surface.
It’s a welcoming environment to those able to hold their balance on its surface, beings much more agile and at home there than we humans will ever be. Ducks and scaups, gadwalls and goldeneyes, all find purchase on its slippery shimmer . . . and sustenance, too. In the warmer months, it’s a liquid landing strip, bringing sky to surface in yet another way; in winter, parts of it form a fragile skating rink, one thick enough to hold the wingéd ones, but little else.
Occasionally, if one is lucky enough to be present at just the right time, a bald eagle will swoop down from the cottonwoods in search of a meal, or a sandhill crane will skim along the surface, landing for a layover.
Further upstream, the waters are less docile. In the calmest of times, they still flow with force and power. At the thaw that marks the line between end of winter and dawn of spring, and in this monsoonal summer season when the clouds burst open like watery flowers and the rains descend in a silvery sheet, the river becomes a torrent, a boiling, churning blue-white torrent amid the gold and green of the chamisa and sage.
It’s a dichotomous wedding, of elemental forces that alternate between a gentle ebb and flow and a fiery dance, whipping and driving each other into a spiraling whole, a new union of contrapuntal harmony and oppositional healing.
It’s medicine, sustenance, life . . . painted in hues of earth and water and sky from the palette of this place.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
