Never Tame Your Inner Wlldness

6/29/14

I used the “I” touch as an alarm clock. It used the sound of a harp to wake us up at 5:00am. Our sleepy shadows milling about in the flashlight beam, lazily bumping into each other as the coffee machine gurgled. We were going to see the sun rise over Bryce Canyon.  6:09 am, is what my GPS said the sunrise was at this exact location. We had 40 minutes to drive up to Bryce Point.  By way the crow flies its not too far, but it looms over our campsite to the West; a white cliff with no evidence of its mad capped hoodoos at this distance.  I pour a second cup of coffee into my thermos & started the car. The first tones of twilight showing the silhouettes of the ridges.  The Park gate is open 24 hours. They let anyone in at this hour.  

Its a cold wind on Bryce point.  We bundle up in coats & scarves. Hats are impossible. Cuddling a cup of warm coffee we sit on the extreme edge of the cliff cosy & waited.  

We didn’t come here to see the sunrise. We came here to see our souls rise. Our souls that scientific stew of poems we perpetually stir.  We came to feel our souls rise and perhaps be visited by ancestors; the memories of our grandparents or Mom & Dad. 

    The sun shyly shuffled around behind the Aquarius plateau, the highest plateau in North America.  Then one pink finger tip at a time it crawled into the line of caves along the rim of Bryce Canyon shooting its fingernail Polished eyes into their inner most recesses.  You know how flamboyant the sun can be when it first gets out of bed. It’s all Freudian & spry.  Then like melting ice cream it drizzles its rays down the white eroded slops onto the hats of the red hoodoos.  All tied together like a child's pull toy; an insane child's pull toy. Is that a window or an eye?  The sky was monochromatic; morgue-Elvis-blue except for one tiny cloud running north as fast as it could with a red butt. The light doubles all the formations with crisp shadows slowly moving beside each stone figure, and then there were sections where the light was changed and thrown back onto walls that have seen no sun and this caused an effect where the rocks glowed from the inside, like a bed of charcoal just right to flop a steak onto, bedsprings glowing from love making, but the mountain rolls over the wind rises, and all the woman squirrels line up and do that woman thing dance just as the last bit of the bottom of the sun pulls its bare-feet up over the horizon and traipses over the land with all its heat and brightness. All of us on the overlook oooed and awed, and giggled a little bit at the nakedness of it all. The light got all over our faces and cloths.  People from around the world were up there on that overlook, they got all splattered, and are going to be forced by there deep psyches to write post cards home about the experience. I love the wildness the National Parks have retained in its system.  There is no such thing as a wild system.  Nothing is systematically wild. Never develop or tame your inner wildness; Wildness is always self-defined, and changing; topless dancers at truck stops in the middle of the desert, girl scouts earning their first badge, a fingertip of sun light on a chipmunks nose.