Cactus National Park and the ponder of the wander
Do you know the National Park Service has a rule? You can’t post pictures taken in any National Park, Historic Site, or National Etcetera if you commercialize, monetize or otherwise use for the purposes of making money aforementioned web site? Strictly forbidden. Even more so than buffalo-tipping. Of course for a licensing fee… You can use them in accordance with said agreement.
Lucky for me, I hate both capitalism and consumerism and none of my rambles with mis-spelling, poor grammar, misplaced modifiers and an extravagant over-use of metaphor contain advertising, affiliate marketing, any one’s product line or any of that. I have no desire to sell you anything. Or for you to buy anything from anyone else. You ever think that maybe, just maybe, all this buying and selling is what got us to this place? This place where we have a whole era named after us… The Anthropocene. So named I suppose by a group of scientist’s standing around a a timeline chart of eras and epochs, one saying. “Yep. Yep Right here. This is where we really started fucking stuff up. Let’s name it something. Anyone?” Buying and selling? Should get it’s own era. I’m going with the “dumbfuckocene” but that’s just me.
Will we make it out of the age of scorched-earth capitalism, nuclear weapons, dwindling resources, changing biosphere (not in a good way), and political insanity intact? Eh.
In short I don’t want to sell you anything. I want you to get rid of all that shit and go wander around the desert and think awhile.
No, not this space right here where I am. That space way way over there. over that ridge. Yeah. There. That’s your spot. Breath. The air is fresh. It’s silent in the way that only the desert can be.
Departures and Returns
My last few posts seem to me anyway like a dreadful attempt at a travelogue rather than the meanders of mind and soul during the journey. We are going to go back there now.
It was a National Park and these are amazing. More so that they are preserved and protected from the relentless greed of the consumer mob. Hey, every billionaire dollar starts with an end purchaser buying a thing.
There was Cactii, thousands of Cactii
Cacti Waving to the Sound of Silence
And so here we are rolling through the second time I saw saguaros. They saw me. I waved. They waved back. I feel bad for people who can’t see the cacti wave. They all do. Wave that is. Not just the ones with arms.
The prickly pear with its bright red apple, the cholla that looks like a tree, The barrel so stumpy and and some of them lumpy and all of them waving at me.
They wave because they don’t sing. Not like the trees do in a forest, God’s original woodwind instrument is silent here, in the desert amidst the waving cactus. When you walk far enough, the sounds of man and their machines, the noise that murders silence is gone to, and only the desert remains maybe, maybe you can hear the guardians whisper and maybe there is a desert song to be heard..
Recalling the Moment months down the road
We drove through mostly, as is our norm because of time. M and I Hiked a little together. I did some alone. It wasn’t far. I’d love to come here with a pack, water and miles of trail ahead. Given my visual acuity and field, that might be problematic in a place with five species of rattlesnake. But that’s why they make these swell things called snake gaiters that go all the way up to anywhere I am going to get struck at. I am too smart in the ways of the wild to put my hands where I can’t see and haven’t poked at with a long stick.
Also can do that in March, when the crawlies are still thinking about getting out and they aren’t pissed AF because it as hot AF.
Winter and Spring time is for watching the cacti wave. Summer? Definitely time for treesong in the rolling hills of New England. I’m a weenie that way. My philosophic brain works best in an outside temperature of 75 degrees .
As we roll and walk I’m generally lost in my own world of thought. I can’t capture details with the lenses God gave, so I focus on the emotion invoked by the passing array of color and form. I take a few shots to zoom upon later and share with you/ But mostly I think and absorb.
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It was a desert full of waving cacti. Awesome.
