You don’t go to Eastern Oregon simply to visit a remote place. You go to be infused with incongruity. The crushed sage leaves in your hand will flare your nostrils to take in more and more of the scent of sun, sand and sky.
Looking over the Malheur Wild Life Refuge
And then, at the edge of the silvery slope the smell will turn immediately to mud and the spreading marshes will wash through your recepticle self with a mixture of grass and water, a kimchi of the past, fermenting its way to the future.
Mesmerizing Marshes
You will inhale the dust and the lushness side by side. Then feeling like a small speck in the universe, and similtaneously seeing yourself expand to fill a larger space, you will confront any part of your life that is filled with sameness; that has narrowed, limp and dank, without the contrast of opposing sounds or smells. Walt Whitman, the poet said “I am large,” claiming his spacious identity. He held the contrasts of time’s turning. Who you are changes to fit the environment. You will rise up to take in the desert proprioceptively, forsaking your over-dependence on thought. You will confess amid the sparkling song traffic around your cabin that despite a professed love of nature and pride of literacy in its abundance you can’t return the bird calls by name.
The trills that tickle the ears are annonymous. Once they make their way through the cerebral labyrinth, a longing sadness emerges that you can’t greet them either by name or by note. The same with the fragrances. They rise from the desert, indecipherable and defying all metaphors.
When you look up at the striated Pillars of Rome, golden columns that speak of the endless cyce of deposition and erosian, let your breath fall to the flowers at your feet and rise to the clouds with the same cycle of filling and emptying. You will be large too.
Pillars of Rome
