Let It In

By Adele Ardent

White Sands National Monument, NM

October 31, 2017

The light was fading on the last day. I was cutting it close, but unexpected wind the day before had made my hasty field reconstruction go slowly. The sun had already dropped below the rim of mountains by the time I put my outfit on.

Photos by Jeanette Hart-Mann

I had created the Let You In body extension for class last year, to explore connection and control as a continuum. It was a simple robe that concealed my posture, and a face-cone that both focused attention on the most emotionally revelatory part of my body and allowed me to restrict contact as I chose. This process of revealing and concealing seemed to me to have a sympathetic resonance to White Sands, not just to the slowly shifting dunes, but to the bizarre dual role it’s expected to play: as a playground where children can sled year-round on snowdrifts that never melt, and as a military asset, a buffer zone, from which we were forced to retreat one night as a missile flared to impossible heights and was lost among the stars above Alamogordo.

In this iteration, rather than simply making eye-contact, I asked those willing to actually reach into my space to remove the make-up that added up another layer of concealment/revealment to my face.

Even though my friends and classmates were (quite tenderly) invading my space, I still felt impossibly far away, as if I were looking at their faces and at the pastel wash of the sunset from within fixed and unchangeable memories. One persistent thought that I couldn’t fully push away―although, keep in mind, this was Halloween―was that this is what it would feel like to be a ghost, to be at a permanent remove from full engagement with the surrounding world. Yet, at the same time, even as the failing light was slowly covering up each face and feature of the landscape, everything seemed beautifully amplified, brought physically closer by intense focus.

The landscape at White Sands, so unlike anything else, forces the mind to deal with it directly, rather than through the veils of previous experience, assumption, and approximation that we so often wrap around ourselves. In opening up, in allowing for connection, whether to people or to place―it seems to me that joy and loss are inextricably linked, that to be fully, and open-heartedly awake to the sense of closeness, also means one must be fully awake to the sense of distance, as they are felt by the same metric.

If we opt for control over connection, we’re not choosing safety or comfort, we’re choosing isolation.