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Lizards flit about, and hummingbirds, and even an eagle soars. The ants lug to their nest every scarce crumb they find. A scorpion rests under a rock, but lift that cover and she scuttles away. When
wind ceases, insects are everywhere. Timeless it is, but movement still through time. I am embedded in Life’s relationship . . . if I can just be slow enough to see.
Heading back to camp, I spotted a pile of human trash, old pots and rusty cans, stashed under a rock. I loaded my arms, and booty made my unfit body even more ungainly as I clambered up a few hundred feet of boulder-size debris. It somehow mattered enormously to me that I carry out at least a portion of that anonymous debris, make an act of reparation toward slow processes of desert.
Back in my perch, I turned again writing:
Radical Love . . . guides me in knowing that child starving in Sahara, woman celebrating a birth in Melanesia, man tortured in Brazil, all are part of me. I feel deep kinship with little lizard that stopped to exchange stares and tree that snapped when I pulled too tightly on rope anchoring my tarp.
Radical Love makes work for justice inevitable, for God is present in this lizard, this tree, as surely as in eyes of a stranger, or heart of a friend.
The desert taught me that we are all connected – not just with our neighbors, not just with our own species, but we are one with ocean sand and desert cryptogam, great whales and Asian elephants, mockingbirds and, yes, bugs and bacteria too. We are one with mountains, and rivers and trees, and great mystery of beyond.
Time passed, and I survived. Saying final thanks to tree that anchored my tarp, I said aloud, “I owe you more than I have words to say.” Perhaps I moved, but perhaps not. What I experienced was tree reaching down, tweaking my hat from my head. As though spoken aloud, I heard a voice: Your species always uses so many words. To listen, to love, that is enough.
I went to desert to learn to listen. I did not expect to hear voice of a tree.
(c) M. Killoran, Hendersonville NC 2003
Maureen Killoran is a certified Authentic Happiness Life Coach and Unitarian Universalist minister. Her passion is helping mid-life women and couples use their personal strengths to achive lives of meaning and creativity. Check out Maureen's website, www.spiritquest.ws, for more info about her coaching, workshops, publications, rites of passage, e-courses and her free monthly e-zine, SEEDS OF CHANGE.
