Life, Unity, Transcendence

The Vastness of Now

Getting “lost” in the last embers of a high desert sunset

“Live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find eternity in each moment.” — Henry David Thoreau

Driving east across the Northern desert towards the Grand Canyon, my husband and I recently “lost ourselves” in the last embers of a flaming sunset, the kind that lights up the spines of the cacti and melts the squat juniper trees from dusty green to dusky blue.

All around us, serpents of light twined their way up the faces of the buttes, and fingers of shadows clawed at the remnants of daylight from behind craggy outcroppings.

Slopes of lichen, dotted with darkening, rounded, tenacious shrubs of desert sage began to slip into the shadows of dusk. I could imagine a rabbit feeling brave enough to dart from cover — or a coyote wily enough to wait for the rabbit’s lapse of caution. The circle of life in the desert is brutal. It is hard to conceive how the ancient ones eked out an existence here.

Ahead of us, a sea of sunlight lingered in a bowl of rock. Pink sherbet coated the tops of the crumbling buttes, whose children, errant chunks of volcanic boulders, lay scattered across the desert floor, unmoving from where they had been thrown by the forces of the earth countless eons ago.

As far as I could see into the distance, threads of mountain ranges, dipped in purpled indigo, grew inkier and inkier as they wove their way towards the horizon.

We passed a solitary mesquite, its trunk twisted and gnarled and whorled into a swirl of peeling blood-red bark and wizened gray. Surely this was a gift of a glimpse of one of those grandfather trees who looked as if it had been a guardian of the earth for ages upon end.

Behind us, the sunset flared over the distant Pacific Ocean. But ahead of us, Nature played a different show.

A rim of purple at the base of the sky, like a wispy fog, appeared before our very eyes.

I looked away for just a moment, then back again, and the light had shifted, morphed, spreading into the palest of pinks, like the air on a summer solstice night in the Arctic, when the sun never quite sets, but lingers on, inviting you to inhale it, to breathe it into your soul.

And now, there was movement in the sea of pink, a swirling, a dissolving into cerulean blue.

I did not dare to look away again, for fear of missing the metamorphosis. So subtle were the shifts that I wondered if you would even know that anything had altered, if you would remember the “pinkening,” if you didn’t know that it was there before.

There was then a settling, like a lava lamp turned upside down or a piece of sand art when it had been flipped, and the particles mingled into a semblance of uniformity.

And soon, the whole vault of the sky shimmered into emerging stars, like diamonds scattered across velvet shifting from the deepest of blues to ebony black.

Their brilliance had been there all along, just obscured by the day.

But, they, and we, freed from the illusion, transcended into night, spinning off into the vastness of “now.”

I snapped the iPhone photo (at the top of the story) through the window of a car moving 70 miles per hour across the desert just to remind me of the moment. The photo above, taken by my husband at the Grand Canyon last week, shows the same “pinkening” effect.

As always, nature, is the best reminder to me to be fully present in each moment. It is just too easy to get caught up in the yesterdays and tomorrows. But, truly, the only moment we ever really have is the one we are in right now.

I hope that you enjoyed getting “lost” for a few moments with me. You might also enjoy:

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

Poem and photos ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.