Experiments in motion and stillness

By Paul Ross,

White Sands National Monument, NM

October 31, 2017

Adele and I did our best to take care of a leafy friend on this trip. Our various actions/activities revolved around developing some kind of relational strategies between plants and people through a sharing of stillness or movement. I guided a blindfolded Adele over the soft, white dunes with nothing but footsteps while she held our chlorophyllic companion. Later, we buried our standing bodies in sand, and shared in the dousing of water down all three of our bodies.

Along with other experiments, these goofy-silly-splendid acts were aimed at the development of a relationship through shared experience, and the cultivation of shared perspectives through embodied perception. We are trying to put ourselves in positions to better understand plants’ point of view, and simultaneously share pieces of human experience with the hope that the inverse also occurs. Perhaps, after iterations of experiments, a way of being together with living things on this planet can grow from our questions. Dark, stifling, and supporting as dirt; clear, present, and subtle as air; fleeting as water, this way would be.

Sittinglistening

By Paul Ross

Gila Wilderness, NM

October 27, 2017

I sat there all night.

Well, mostly; I had to get up a few times to stay awake.

As I tucked my knees to my chin so to prop up my nodding head, I would gaze around my shrouded knee to see if it was time for another recording. Up all night, my sense of space collapsed with sense of time. Seeing little depth, only motion, but unable to move to give that motion dimensions, my sense of the world crumpled until its folds, usually gentle and expansive, steadily stacked to press me from all sides. And so I curled, sitting, bent to the weight of the nightly world.

I began to hear only that which was different.

Airplanes. Other low notes I could not identify, but still chewed on. They felt like the shifting and stretching of toots, or slow rolling stones, feet beneath the river’s surface, or un-namable unknowable deep things. Pressed by sleep and sound, pressed inward, in-pressed, impressed.

I got tired of exercising patience. I broke no walls, saw nor heard no ethereal perspective of the world. Transcended nada. The world was as it is, always was, will continue to be.

Weaving the Unweaving

By Paul Ross,

Patagonia, AZ

Near the top of a hill strewn with driveways, mesquite, chest-high chain link, and pale amber grasses, sits the former elementary school of Patagonia, Arizona. The stucco walls, a few shades lighter than the surrounding grass, hold up red-brown roofs one story above ground. One building breaks this standard, standing a square forty feet tall with steps to help one ascend to the door. This “ole main,” now houses the Patagonia Museum.

Inside is the most professional middle school science fair project you’ve ever seen, repurposed to tell the stories of living in south-central Arizona. Amongst the lovingly cut foamboard displays, antique tobacco cans, and an old saloon piano nests the words, “the journey of water is the thread that weaves people, plants, and wildlife to place…”

Nothing sums our time here up like those words, perhaps followed by, “and we are here, trying to shore up the seams.” The people working for and with Borderlands Restoration gave us the chance to lend a hand to this purpose. With a melon-sized rock in one hand, and desert seeds spilling from the other, these people are doing their darndest to slow the unraveling of the dusty yellow and green sweater in which they live.

This sweater is woven from a weft of soil and rain, and a warp of scrub, trees, grasses, lizards, coyotes, cattle, hares, and people. The sweater has snagged on the barbs of various borders that have been drawn onto the region, and for various reasons, some of these snags are enough to pull the threads apart from one another. Borderlands restoration is committed to enabling the reweaving of the yanked sections, as well as slowing the further parting of threads. Follow the water, recognize its subtle and ferocious power, and live in a slow and gentle manner, so that the water may do the same.

Big wave

By Paul Ross

Muley Point, Bear Ears National Monument, UT

October 3, 2017

I walked 20 miles that day

(by accident)

A handful of those miles went along

The crest of a thin geologic wave,

Rising from riverbottom to the south,

Leveling beneath my feet,

And soaring one thousand feet to the north.

And breaking.

The whole deal is gliding northward at a rate of about one house sized block per thousand years

If I could walk slowly enough,

You might call me surfer.

I tried to inhabit a moment of that crest by climbing through a crack

One I could not quite fit in.

Exhaling to slide along

Inhaling to press the rock

Exhaling

Inhaling

As the freezing and thawing of water does each year.

The dam is beautiful, and …

By Paul Ross

Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell, AZ

September 28, 2017

the dam is beautiful,

      and nearly complete in imponderability.

who could know what five million kilowatts (or however much it was) feels like?

the kodak shot is composed of an arch of parabolic grace,

       made slender by the enormity of those hewn canyon walls

the dam is beautiful,

       occupying a tenuous membrane between

clean power

and

power for power's sake. between

water still

and

its will to move. between

temporality

and

perpetuity. between

harmony with

and

middle-fingered defiance of

nature

the river

the world

that one day it may be gone makes both all too much, and absolutely no sense.

On the methane flares on northern New Mexico

By Paul Ross

Angel Peak, Four Corners, NM

September 22, 2017

They say that when it rains, it rains around it.

An inverse to the pet thunderclouds that follow the glum and unlucky in the world of cartoons.

A howling field, which pushes all good things away, such as the rain.

What a preposterous sin, to banish this connection between earth and sky

They cannot touch each other.

Rifted by and angled iron arrow,

Loosing the daemons safe beneath earth’s skin

As odorless, insatiable flame.

Two kinds of pumps

I wanderwalk along the badland valley floor, amongst dwarf cottonwoods and natural gas pump stations.

I think of the ‘bad’ in ‘badlands’ as less of a negative term and more in the way that skater kids in high school say ‘bad.’ Impressive. Sort of scrappy, and capable.

Sounds of my heart and the stations comingle…

Two kinds of pumps

Untitled

By Paul Ross

Wild Rivers, NM

September 11, 2017

7 September – The more I look at rivers, the more I am convinced that they are exquisite portraits of life-in-world.

11 September – And after time, our bodies came to find ways through the stones more easily. Our joints and limbs separated and collided, our bipedal tendencies swinging like ersatz pendulums to find paths of least resistance.

It is not difficult to imagine a body like mine becoming more and more used to this way of moving. Less and less attached with any one orientation or rhythm. Given enough time, it is not difficult to imagine a state of dynamic grace emerging from the repeated motions. I would venture to call that way of being-moving-thinking-doing, water.

Everything alive comes from the sea or a river or a stream. Or from rain, or snow, or cloud. That’s where We all come from, and where We all return to.

Untitled

By Paul Ross

La Villita, NM

September 4, 2017

4 September – As suggested, we kept the word “altar” in mind, tending on hand and knee to Ron’s crop of beans. It sure was fitting, and I wonder whether I would have thought of that word without the suggestion.

I should have taken pictures of my hands.

Or handprints… or something.

If you didn’t see them, they were caked in dirt and bug juices.

Water and sweats and probably some hummus.

But there was something about how it was on there that worked excellently as a reminder of where those hands had just been, and the maneuvers they had just pulled, and the prints they had just left.

There was to sit amongst the long and careful folds of a masterful paper airplane. Water folded unto soil folded unto hands folded unto time. Each piece is both paper and crease-maker.

And there was something in the nonchalance of it all that brought the feeling of wellbeing I had walking home from school in the sixth grade

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By Paul Ross

Rio Grande Headwaters, CO

September 3, 2017

28 August – Here we are! It’s a long valley.

29 August – Follows the water. I crest a ridge, and sound wraps around like a quilt. A patch of rapidly clicking grasshoppers, a patch of bubble stream keeping time like one, long heartbeat you can hear in your ears, a patch of flies with the buzz, a patch of finches chasing.

The hills, too, wrap softly here. Tufts of grass rolled up as a sleeve from dad’s old fleece jacket. Also like the goosebumps that jacket guards against.

Following the stream farther up, I come to snowbanks. Deciding to add some of my blood to that of the mountain, I open a small piece of my left hand and give a small scarlet smear to run downhill with the water that enlivens the West.

31 August – Followed a stream from its source. Here is a piece of the story.

3 September – “In the less explicit, perhaps more inferred sense, the map appears as a contrivance for designing a world, a machine for fashioning its energies – as something that stands for the scene for all representation.” – Rita Donaugh

“Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact.” - Bachelard