There’s an irritating sameness to a desert landscape. At least to the untrained eye, like mine was.
The vegetation at first glance is bleak and rather scruffy, suitable maybe only for scorpions and rattlesnakes.
It’s dry…
It’s parched…
It’s prickly…
And what little green there is if it hopes to survive has to suck water from stone.
But traveling to unfamiliar places, like looking at good art, can teach the blind to see. Even a desert landscape – when you’re patient, when you allow it to – can take on a personality all its own.
Stop, sit, wait. Be very still. Empty your mind & sink into the moment. If your heart is pure, creatures great and small will bless you with their presence.
Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.
– Native American Wisdom
🙂 🙂 🙂
Thanks, John. i don’t know how you got such great shots of the creatures. What an incredible delight, a journey from my chair into the especial thrill of this even beyond the beautiful creatures, that emptiness. That desolate, quiet, the only human in it emptiness. Miles and miles of it.
LikeLike
Yes, the emptiness. “So quiet in there,” as the song by Van Morrison says. One treads softly in the presence of the sacred.
Thanks, Barbara.
LikeLike
Wow, oops … The patience shown for the critters … I assume there was no traffic on the road when you took the photo of the rattler. Did they literally all approach you, or were you the hunter and at times the hunted? Thanks for sharing these scenes. Kinda makes me “proud tuh be Ah-mer-cun.” I love it when there’s proof that we, in fact, did not “tame the wild West.”
LikeLike
The mountain lion and the Mexican wolf are actually in a controlled situation near Tucson, not wild. The snake, as I was looking at it with one eye through the camera, I thought was just a python. So I followed him into the underbrush, but fortunately (for me) he got away. Later, on the computer, I saw the rattlers 🙂
Thanks, as always, for your comments, Richard.
LikeLike