031 - barrenness, as a state of mind

and the results of the reader's choice voting

Sadly, I have no woman logging photo. Photo Credit: iStock

Reader’s Choice: words on paper - number 1, 2, 3, or 4

The votes are in. Many thanks to you for offering a Reader’s Choice opinion. Many shared a reason for his/her choice which I also found very informative.

➡️mushroom reads his horoscope

➡️to build or not build community

➡️we need warriors

➡️the institute of water traditions

And the winner is: We Need Warriors. This is, of course, the least structured and complete of any of the essays offered for voting. But I am on it (no timeline promised).

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031 - barrenness as a state of mind

There are times when I read and a sentence inks itself into my brain unwilling to relocate, instead mooring and demanding rumination. It will nudge me. It will knock on my sleep with intention to resolve something that superficially seems to not need that much attention.

I have been working on tying up the loose ends of a larger project. It is one I am ready to conclude, having lingered too long in its completion. Though that isn’t really it. What mocks me with the project is that I know so much more now than when I began. If I had the chance to start over, might I write it differently? My project is a larger conversation about water. How droplets rebirth and sometimes die (please do not put in the comments that water never dies), how it is an essential need for beings to live, including humans.

Inflow to Nambe Lake, Pueblo of Nambe, New Mexico

Writers, they tinker. Stories evolve – their characters, the intention behind the words. I am not one who can work on multiple projects at one time. Having several essays in the pipeline is disquieting, requiring a balance that often necessitates a timer. When I was in grad school, I would tell people who asked about writing that I worked in 20-minute increments soon realizing I was wrong – more like 15. This time restraint has nothing to do with anything other than that is simply how my homestead functions. Big projects require hours … carved out and planned.

Working on this watery map of a moving droplet, I steered away from literature that might taint or sway the words on my pages. I wanted to remain true to my own creativity. There are some exceptions but for 14’sh months reading was disjoined in an environmental dead zone. Crushing, right?

Two months ago [1], I dug back in, setting my heels, my written story on sure footing. I returned to reading environmental authors – new and old – and my heart began thumping too loudly and my nature-based sensitivities wept. A guiding theme pressed itself upon me, though coincidental. Authors straining my compassion and humbling my emotions. A connecting web despite the variation of writers and their topic of discourse for an entire book. Each author strung together a similar narrative presence which is discomforting for someone like me who breathes in the depths of dryness while searching for places where water once ran wild and uncontained.

Barrenness is almost always a state of mind, rarely a state of land.

(Yuvan Aves, 155) [2]

Barren, as in:

~ Desolate

~ Lacking

~ Devoid

I am thinking of the arid southwest’s geographical places. Wild places. Natural places. Even abandoned urban lots, woody stumps divided by skidder tracks, and old ranching fields. Each counts as a place. Yasmin Chopin (What is Place Writing?) writes in her Substack that Place Writing “brings together many aspects of importance and concern in contemporary society … minutiae of living organisms to the effects of climate change, and from natural landscapes to urban-living and our understanding of home.” Further, it is the “intersection of place, time, and memory.”

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Yuvan Aves quote goads me: Have I adequately shared what I intended about a single place that bookends my project?

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I straddle two worlds. The southwest desert is rarely far from my mind. July is a calendar month when thermometers creep upwards, leaves turn into themselves, even sag as soil dries. Water trickles then stops. Words like scorching, searing, and parched are doled from swollen tongues. Humans are irritable. Bodies wrestle with fatigue and chronic dehydration. Outside—the heat, the hot. Inside—air conditioners, ice from the freezer and hours of weather channel predictions that warn of heat waves, power outages, and checklists to follow for self-care.

When I think of my best self, I think of arid lands. In Vermont, the landscape is mostly lush and green. Sightlines limited by trees rising on round knobs that hide ponds and creeks. Hay fern, hobblebush, club moss fill gaps that only a ray of sun can penetrate. A place of fairies and talking woods. Here, rain falls (mostly) with a sense of regularity and greenery flourishes. Before returning to the east coast, I pushed granules of dirt with my boot toe in southwest Colorado and northern New Mexico. My playground of high peaks and shifting sand. Forests unclosed and shift to high alpine meadows with a kaleidoscope of colors. Places that hold snow until midsummer, float icy blue bergs that are gnawed by water that laps at her edges until the last drop fills the watery pool. Go a few miles the other direction and ponderosa pine blends with gamble oak then pinion pine edged with sagebrush and cacti of many varieties. The desert may be hot, but it is not barren.

The desert doesn’t sparkle but strains as lukewarm shades of tan—beige, sandy, almond, maize, brandy, teak, caramel, mocha, sorrel. Tan is a neutral hue between brown and yellow. Pale changed into new combinations that darken or lighten simply by mixing the base pigments of brown, yellow, and red. Add a little white and the color changes again.

Does color invoke an opinion? One that construes as a barren landscape. One that might be as a recommendation that the land is:

~ Lifeless

~ Wasted

~ Useless

Are these words an interpretation that conflicts with unrestrained, inspirational, and affecting? When is the landscape sentimental, not from its point of view but from the human perspective? Tan is the color of the earth and the cast of ground. On the color wheel, tan is place of sanctuary—stability, warmth, honesty, and home. Tan traits dip into history, calm, and connection.

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There are many who believe the desert is unwelcoming, like extra knowledge is necessary to live within her wide spaces flanked by mountain ranges that might be a distance away and don’t seem to exist. To understand the desert is to know that the mirages are not of water but the heat rising from a surface that inflames the soles of feet and blisters noses while cracking lips. The desert chokes with life. With small movements. Motion blended into the warmth of the land. The beings in her midst that, too, are shades of tan. To know the desert is to appreciate the rainy season, avoid the arroyos, and carry plenty of water. To value the desert of the southwest is to know her history, one that drains of resource extraction, one of isolation, and extinguished promises. The desert is a place where I fear nature’s power and respect human vulnerability.

Returning to the quote by Aves, I re-read again the nearly 7,000 concluding words that have me wondering: Do I offer an observation that transcends what might be imagined as a barren land. Does my sharing a personal perspective show off the state of the land?

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge

🟢 what follows is a short excerpt from the project I write about above

At the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, I am alone. The interstate is never far enough and whines beyond the square measures of fields and the scabby wall of shrubbery trees that border the Rio Grande’s waterway at any level of passing water, or even when mostly rife with sand. Marshy riparian areas are a vegetation competition between black willow shrubs, salt grass, and bull rush with the more flamboyant and invasive salt cedar and Russian olive. In the flats, small whirls of dust are generated from movement I cannot see—maybe a coyote on the prowl, a javelina rooting for lizards, an ancient tractor tilling land, or the push of wind on the downslope of mountain rides. The dust climbs and spreads, suspended in the air before tiring and dropping, returning to the desertic surface. In contrast, my feet are tempered on the ground, and I feel a connection. The land, with all its churned grit, survives.

Blinds celebrate the birds which fly into and depart from this space fixed as a part of their annual migrations. Arriving flocks know where to fly to as a part of their communal memory. I walk trails waggling and wandering. I finger the thick, uneven cottonwood bark with her seams of depressions old and weathered confident these trees are protected enough to live for decades longer, as long as some water continues to pass at their roots. I consider how we tear down mountains and unwittingly build hills. How the Mayan civilization collapsed in one hundred years. How earth holds ghosts. How we humans have pushed water beyond her tolerance. I think of these things as I meander to the edges of marshes seemingly out of place. I kneel beside cement-lined ditches with gate valves that control water in the desired direction of fields with corn, milo, alfalfa, or millet that feed the migrating masses. Fields leveled with laser-beam lights to assure the water is spread evenly and covers its planted grains. I consider how this is meaningful management because we have removed the naturalness of the land these flocks once found on their own. I marvel in disbelief that, of all the geometric shapes available for humanity to emulate, we choose to live in right angles and straight lines.

As the sun passes higher into the sky, I ponder how remarkable it is that water can cast various physical states in a matter of seconds—forms of a liquid, a solid, or a gas. The water cycle is a stunning performance of circulation—movement between vast oceans, the ground of forests, deserts, mountains, ridges, and valleys—and the atmosphere, the sky above our heads and out of reach, no matter how far on our tiptoes we stretch.

…

Water flows on paths of least resistance. Many routes morbidly unchanged over generations yet always in a minute shift; a tad left or a tad right in its downhill redress to a place beyond where it began. Water likes to flow on the same course—a route scoured over time—but willingly creates bends and oxbow curves, only to return again. Water chooses to move slow and with a purposeful objective to fill cracks and holes, sink into deep, echoing catacombs of porous rock aquifers, recharge springs, and load lake-sized bowls. With time, nature’s wilding fills a path with debris, and in a rejuvenating moment, nature flushes with a seismic torrented burst that overfills banks, adds nutrient sediment in lowlands, debrides crevices to confirm, once again, a slow, shallow pathway. At summer’s end, creeks are a mere trickle of her spring overflow and once-exceedingly-passionate self.

Maybe for change there needs to be the development of a new relationship with the land, a cultural shift of action. Maybe the top of the bell curve should turn so that the downward trend is the end of the term resource [3] and the beginning of a new term.

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take a moment to consider

What is the most recent phrase/sentence you have read that sticks/stuck with you in a way that was hard to shake off?

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notes

[1] Is A River Alive (Robert Macfarlane), The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light (Craig Childs, Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest (Charles F. Wilkinson), There Are Rivers in the Sky (Elif Shafak), Underland (Robert Macfarlane), An Owl on Every Post (Senora Babb)

[2] This quote is contributed to Yuvan Aves in “Part II: Ghosts, Monsters and Angels.” This second story is set in India. Macfarlane, Robert. Is A River Alive? W.W. Horton & Company, 2025.

[3] Pages 249-250 of Water Does Not Acquiesce. Resource, from its Latin to French etymology, was to rise again, recover. A word of flatline use traceable to 1596. That would change in the years of war and particularly in the 1950s following World War II when the country needed economic stimulus. Rapid growth came from harnessing the power of water. Public sentiment supported the intellectual and technical industrial complex that was capable of building anything. We had conquered the bomb, we could command rivers and water.

In this escalation, in the underpinning of a need for navigation, flood control, irrigation, and the growing urban water supply needs, the definition of resource refashioned itself to become one of the 1,000 most common words in modern written English. Used most often in its plural form, resources is now better understood as: “Stocks or reserves of money, materials, people, or some other asset, which can be drawn on when necessary.” I have Oxford English Dictionary to thank for this bit of knowledge, but how might this relate to water?

Visualize a X and Y graph. When the term resource reemerges in use during the 1950s, it does so employing an image of extraction—minerals, coal or gas, logging timber or siphoning water. Resource quickly climbs the hill of the diagram, which I visualize as climbing to the top of the mountain that holds snow. Still unseen in the graph is the downslope where water flows. For many, water is considered limitless yet its exploitation can be broken into two mindsets. One is that the resource is truly limitless and there exists no concern that it might become unavailable. Two, is that it is not limitless, and someone should guard the source. Who guards the source? One that reflects the value of water as a defining requirement for all living beings. Instead of controlling and poisoning her, we should find ways to support her droplet rebirths, support a climate and landscape that multiplies her numbers away from pollution and supports a landscape that is able to return what is to what was with pockets of water in seeps. Where development is moved back. Where concrete is minimized. Where overflow can stretch across the land to replenish. Maybe we need to think of water as not a resource but as vital sustenance, revered and protected. Not protected in the way a banker’s pocketbook is protected but protected as a public good. Because here is the thing, and maybe why the past sits so heavily on my shoulders: what will people do when water is no longer affordable? Who gets to decide who is permitted the water that remains?

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