The Cracks

 Thank you Mother Earth; for your powerful vegetal tenaciousness; Thou Hast Not Forsaken Me! The adventure for this Mother's Day; seemed tame enough; go up the back road to Aspen Meadows and eventually Hyde Park, park in the usual pull off area off this remote gravel road, step over the two low strands of rusty barbed wire, find the ancient road, go northwest across the extremely diverse natural display of many stones of wide disparity in color, shape, texture, this setting the stage for a truly fractured scree. It was Mother's Day and seemed like an adventure was appropriate. We crossed a few more rusted barbed wire, trapsed down a calm ancient trail to the valley floor below that was very narrow and graced with a small burbling, gurgling, susurrus creek with a trail heading up river.  We were hoping to venture to the top of the valley, which turned into a gorge, then some cascading waterfalls that  fell many feet and down to the base of the this crack of a place. After ducking limbs, brushing past stray chokecherry bushes in bloom; finally at the base of the falls.  Two drops were defined in the slit of this gorge, each drop being roughly 13 feet and looked like a pretty scary rock climb up the second step next to the top fall; the creek navigating a magnificent slit in the canyon hundreds of feet tall on both sides. It looked doable yet scary. I opted against it. Too much smooth rock scaling. Instead, we headed back, bushwacking through again. I saw a break in the cliff faces above and concieved that we could perhaps go up that way as an easy way out without backtracking through the valley.  We headed up through larger stones and boulders and, visually, to me, it seemed pretty doable.  The avalanche-ish area was strewn with loose stones, scree and various hazards. We progressed fairly well, noting loose and unstable stones and avoiding them. The way became increasingly more difficult and treacherous and yet we persevered,  me warning of hazards to Sunny a distance below.  Then the seemingly not too hard slope began to show signs of being scary and handholds more risky.  I worried about Sunny; being below me and in the line of anything I might dislodge as well as her skill level, which had not been tested by me.  I said I thought maybe we should quit and go down and she seemed to think not, perhaps correctly as descending is more dangerous than ascending, for a number of reasons, so we persisted. I had, amazingly and coincidentally, noticed when I  found a backpack in the car earlier; that it had a good length of strong but lightweight rope in one of the pockets and decided to leave it in there; first thinking it unnecessary and then just thought it somehow useful, maybe and, ‘why not’, so it stayed in.  As it turned out, i was so frightened of a slippage up there, I remembered the rope and took it out, figured a way to make a loop big enough to slip over Sunny's shoulders and around her waist so we did that and i just looped it randomly around my shoulder and held it with my hand, loosely.  We proceeded with me getting increasingly nervous and then, eventually fearful.  Sunny seemed composed and not as fearful as me, yet clearly alerted to the hazards.  We continued inching up until it looked more and more grim and scary. I had to stop just to rest my heart and find a place in my being that had more clarity and less fear.  It was quite the meditation. I was mostly afraid I would inadvertantly dislodge a stone that would crash down and injure Sunny. We continued slowly.  Very frightening.  I found a tenacious bush in the scree, the only one right there and wound the rope for an anchor and proceeded looking for safe stone outcrop handholds that were not like ‘loose teeth’.  Each step was carefully considered as if life and death. Sunny made it to the bush and painstakingly unwound it and we found a way to pull the slack up. I was very concerned.  The handholds became more uncertain and the scree was now more loose sand and gravel, loose stones.  I clawed and removed stones to create little hand and kneeholds and crept forward.  Saw three more smaller bushes, half dead, traumatized by the fickle years of drought, yet still clinging, as I was, them in slow slow almost geological time.  I scrutinized their strengths, testing each in turn and returned to each several times and decided which to try to trust and wrapped the rope again and Sunny followed using the rope again, never slipping, never faltering, never complaining. I was groaning and swearing some, yet continued up somehow, finally using another anchor shrub and then another, finally a strong, but thinish piñon tree root and we belayed her all the way to that point and then grabbed a solid juniper branch and … was up near the top and safe at last,  then Sunny the same. We were elated and amazed and talked about it on the trail, in the car,  at her house; mulling over the many facets, no pun intended. What I want to notice in the larger, poetic and very real details; in a way that brings the frightening details to face the immense realities we live with; is this: mother earth has many details and physical features that we have, as organs and aspects of nature ourselves; being an integral part if not continuous wholeness reality -  of life or ‘existence’ too; that we have certain features that bear witness to the powers involved and one of them is cracks and crevases. It comes to my mind powerfully that the iconic image of a person, having slipped or fallen off of a cliff and is clinging to a tree for dear life; the last thread of hope for survival is very very real; that the cracks and crevices created by the shifting of mother earth's skin as she tosses and turns in her bedding and clothing, each tiny defect being extremely unique in properties and that becomes the milieu of the planet itself as it soars through space at tremendous speeds; each attribute becomes a handhold for existence in this body, so the decomposing, fractured granite cracks along its certain matrix lines,  and the rains and snows seep into the cracks, also dissolving the stone into sands, then soil, like the ‘soul’ of the ‘earth’; the frozen nights and days expand as water does as it becomes ice and fractures the stone more, allowing soil to build and a seed to fall or some fugitive root to find refuge, as it tries to escape the dry air, germinates and/or survives to do what evolution dictates; to grow and cling in this crackiness, corroborating with the elements and, over time, becoming well anchored to support the ravages of time and the fickleness of weather and anchor itself, becoming, in turn an anchor for more than just it, harboring bacteria, creating shade and holding places for nests and the insects and butterflies and birds that  sip the nectar of its flowers, most all plants being ‘flowering’ and so it is with this ecosystem and system and organism and creature we are all a piece of; mother nature. So it is this shrub tenaciously anchored in a crack on a scree that becomes the cleat we clung to; for dear life, all happening, coincidentally on Mother's  Day 2024 and there it was, a sort of umbilical cord, poetically, too. And a powerful 68 year old mother clinging in love onto her 72 year old lover; both bewildered and in awe, observing all this. It has been suggested by some advanced thinking moderns, like Bayo Akomolafe, who also feed from the indigenous and their ancestors; that, perhaps, we find refuge in ‘the cracks’ and such as we find ways to survive our cultural follies and find some other places to be fugitives together, grasping for alternatives to activisms that may need other forms to cling to - to survive and plant some seeds in that new soil, heeding, always; the specific and stunningly unique natures of the materials we all are part of and need to understand, as ourselves, in fact; belonging here, sprung from the earth itself,  just as much as each other, as we are, in fact; integrated and fugitives in and from; the cracks and crookednesses, a refuge from the rectilinear paradigms. We cling on  the scary slopes, not always onto a bronze rod but living shrubs that are our saviors today, now and forever. Lovetangles.