First a pre-amble to the day: Mid morning I had been standing still for too long posing for a fastidious photographer friend. I was thinking about the idea of living every day as though it was your last. I was changing that around in my head. Living every day as though you had a thousand years left as if you had all the time in the world. So I stood and moved an inch sideways to keep aligned with the sun and shadows and stayed with the moments of the standing, like the trees.
Here is the rest of the day. I drove early into Moab to meet with a friend. He is in the midst of creating a series of portraits with camera of people in Moab. An old river guide, a climber woman, me (what am I?). We were looking for more faces. There is a wonderful dilapidated rock and artifact and dinosaur bones shop at the far end of town. We were looking for the owner, Lin, a man in his eighties. His Son, Sonny, gray bearded Santa-like, was behind the counter selling chunks of quartz and petrified wood to tourists. He said his father was out hunting rocks and called his cell phone. (I asked what kind of ammunition he uses to hunt rocks.) He told us his father would be back at the warehouse at noon. Then he went back to his customers without telling us where that was. We waited. Sonny waited. He  waited for us to breath in the slow lumbering pace from the dust of the fossils. Then he gave us some directions.  I went to my storage place to pick up my bikes and unicycle. I loaded them in the truck and we went to find the warehouse. Sonny was there back-dropped by his father's fleet of VW buses. They were lined up on a loft shelf like a set of encyclopedias. He had used them in the sixties to give tours of Canyonlands. That biggest flesh eating dinosaur the T-Rex from filming Jurassic Park was there too and a thousand other things grouped. We waited and the waiting was easy. Outside was a garden of old metal mixed with wildflowers and wire. Sonny called his father. He was having lunch. A geologist arrived the kind who know about gold veins. He collected tracks, fossil-ed tracks. He said bones were bones but tracks told stories. Sonny brought out on a fork lift some great slabs of sandstone criss-crossed with prehistoric footprints and Lin ambled in. The three men settled into a long conversation about moving the rocks. We waited. Lin was a reluctant portrait model. He was more interested in the old 4X5 camera. He had shelves of old cameras dust obscured somewhere around. He eventually sat. After some photos were taken he squirmed and said he had to get back to work.  He began telling stories. He knew Edward Abbey. They drank beer together. He claimed Ed had gotten the name "The Monkey-wrench Gang" from his own collection of monkey-wrenches. The geologist had seen them, hanging on a wall in a dark secret room. Gnomi and Sticky were all this time waiting hot in the truck. I went to leave and Sonny saw my unicycle. He said he knew how to ride. The tire was flat. They had an air compressor and filled it. Sonny said he's learned on a ship when he was in the Navy. He'd unicycled in Manila. He hopped on in the warehouse, wobbled a bit and pedalled away. His father and the geologist watched as he unicycled past the  slabs of ancient tracks.
The day had filled to overflowing like a bucket left under a slow drip overnight.

I feel as though I have interiored what might have been an imaginary friend from childhood now inseperable from who I am.  I think that this friendship is the one I base all other ones on.

I found Sticky a year ago. Last night when the set sun still pinked up the sky a family of coyotes yipped and howled across the canyon from my cabin. Sticky trotted out to the canyon edge and howled a response. The coyotes howled a group chorus about hunting and the pack. Sticky's sounded love-sick and mornful, but he turned away from the canyon, came home,  jumped into bed and curled up.

There is a  listening and being listened to that is bigger than the human ear. I think it is a way of listening to learn from, a way of being listened to that encourages deep solace and uncluttered thought.
I am wrapped in a blanket and the hills above me are covered in a fresh layer of snow. I lined up a row of buckets off the front porch to catch some water from the sky. They filled fast to overflowing. The water  feels close to ice, almost thick.  Between squalls I took a slow walk through the canyon. The ground seems to survive on being frugal. When rainwater is absorbed, stones rise displaced to lie on the surface. I picked up a broken arrowhead at the door of the tipi. It is blue flecked dark red. There is a certain patina of worked stone similar to the jewel-like gloss of rain worked land.
The rains turn Gnomi's and Sticky's fur into fierce tribal coats.  The rains turn the road into an impassable red-ochre gumbo a kind of moat without drawbridge that keep even friends away.  (An afternoon of dry wind  sears it adobe hard again.) I love how it comes in so unpredictable to turn my ear even if I wanted sun.
Later the hot blue desert sky pushed the storm tight against the mountains, a burst of thick pigmented paine's gray before it left altogether.

Every day my shadow crosses parts of the world where there are millions of things seen and unseen and every one a thing like a jewel to my mind.

When i stay in the desert long I begin to grow into the land so it feels as part of me as my bones, as though I need this wind to hold me up. I love the thin skin between domesticity and wildness where I feel the weight of the water I use. I carry my water bucket by bucket and watch it seep later into the ground to swell seeds or nourish the sage and juniper roots. I love the climate extremes that repel an ability to insulate or regulate into some dull medium. My pores breathe in response to the shrinking cold in the morning, to the swelling heat of the midday.  There is a pure efficiency of sun rain and wind left unharnessed even when it comes to our human needs, like the ability to squat that turns a chair into something awkward.  When I leave it feels like ripping off a freshly formed scab. I want to stay here until I turn into a piece of the skin. Anything else is beginning to feel like a denial of life, of death, of everything there is.

Right this moment and yesterday and even more tomorrow it grows every day feeling more free. I'm back in Colorado a hard leaving turning into the ease of being here. I worked a busy full quick-moving day and a half. In the  afternoon I drove to Aspen with the unicycle to lend to Jim the photographer man. I stopped at the grocery store to get some lunch and there he was by the strawberries.  I had strawberries for lunch.  It began to snow lightly. I picked up some wool socks at the Thrift Shop and drove up Independence Pass into last winter's snow to Lost Man Trail. The trail flowed between areas of deep sun-pocked snow and open land still flattened from the rememberance of the snow's weight.. I passed a wide avalanche run-out strewn with broken pine boughs. The wind was sharp on my face and Gnomi and Sticky were blurs of wet fur. Back at the car I pulled off wet socks and drove to town to meet Dawn at Zele's where her photo's and my journal entries were hung. Dawn met me after work, then Sarah and Kiley and Sarah's brother and Dawn's Adam.When I cleaned out my storage place in Utah I found a bag of dresses, little black ones and way too many. I brought them along to give to Dawn. There were enough for Sarah and Kiley too but they all needed to be tried on which we did right there around the table. There were two women speaking Russian at the next table. Gnomi and Sticky and Kiley's dog Tuk-tuk sat in the chairs. Adam sat in a chair and watched it all. Sparrows picked up crumbs. Then we walked for miles though the North Star Preserve and the sun set. I stopped before going home at  Davey's to pick up my map of Moab. He had a fire going so I stayed until there were only ashes left and the stop lights on the highway were blinking amber.

My hands are like another set of eyes I touch everything I see. I think my hands are lucky to belong to such a willing body.

I love being alone. I love Dawn's response. I love being with my friends and meeting new people and it seems as though the alone loving is connected to the people loving.  There are two places I love being alone the most: The expansive wilderness and my tiny home. Yesterday was one of those perfect mixed days. I wanted to go back to the Lost Man Trail without any time needs and light lasting until almost 9 p.m. I forgot my ski poles so I stopped in Aspen and found Retta at the farmer's market and Dawn on her lunch break and Davey between jobs and missed Kiley who tried to chase me down like a hungry wolf after a gazelle. (she told me that later) and Hillary  who will have an art opening soon and was giving out wine samples. The thrift shop had no ski poles, they usually do but I found a still shrink wrapped audio copy of Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd" on CD for $2. Davey lent me his poles. I spent the rest of the day high up in the snow. There was never not snow I climbed in a slow heaven to a ridge at 13,000 feet and felt full and whole in a way that couldn't comprehend lonely. Coming down was all gleeful, glissading the steeper parts and leaping down the rest sometimes a leg would break through the snow pack sucking it up to my thigh and I'd fly into the slope face first having lost my shoe. I'd have to hop back up and dig it out arm buried to my shoulder. The snow played with me.

I think there are as many ways of being a father as there are ways of being a daughter or son. Sometime people become who they are with more struggle and some seem to ease along. I like to remind about the trees in the biosphere that couldn't grow straight and tall because they missed the wind that trees need to push against to find their strength. Sometimes fathers nurture that resistance and sometimes other people or circumstances. The important thing, like the wind is being a presence.

I think there is a mystery to everything especially the things I know most of all.

I had planned on skiing high up with Katalin today. She decided to stay home with a cold and a book so I went alone under swooping clouds. The snow is deep melting fast half turned splashing into a stream. I was thinking about relationship and being alone. I looked down at the snow, at the ground and there was, right there, the relationship I have with the ground. Always supporting my body, there under every step and wonderfully full of surprises. So stable, so changeable, so full of mystery and beauty, and with that down looking and acknowledgement there was such peace.
It has been summer hot for several days. I found a jade green bevel-backed beetle with pale pink wing tails cold bodied slow on the snow surface. Then I passed another and soon too many to count. There were some ladybugs too. Gnomi and Sticky flushed out a pair of ptarmigans mixed half winter-white half summer-brown. It was my last ski until next year. The snow was too engaged in it's transformation and urging me into summer.

Summer has bounded into this valley. I have roller skis such a silly thing but my body loves the motion of skiing so some days I ski up long paved mountain roads and hitch hike back down.  The rides are always interesting. I skied on Friday. All around the snow melt water was crashing down the valleys flooding roads and making much noise. I had tickets to see Joshua Bell in the evening gifted from the local radio station and in the front row. The performance was like the first day of Summer like the new water. We ate late. I had blueberry ginger goat cheese salad it tasted like it was  re-telling my mouth a story about the day. We walked the dogs along the edge of town in the dark.
 Saturday was a nanny work day. I took the girls on a bike ride along the river. We filled my pack with drift wood picked out of an eddy full of flotsam and foam. We spit cherry pits from our lunch. Julia had dribbled some cherry juice on her leg and convinced me the ever gullible that she was truly injured. Fiona spit most of her pits into my hair by mistake. We collected stones and watched a wild green watered creek enter the brown silt of the bigger Colorado River. The day was hot and child slow. We ate dinner on the porch. I found some wrinkled blueberries in the back of their fridge and some crumbly old Gouda cheese and made a homemade sort of the salad like the fancy one from the night before. The girls drowsed off quickly after baths and books.
Sunday in the afternoon Katalin and I found each-other and hiked a fast sweat making trail I had never done before. It is called the Difficult Trail. It goes nowhere just ends.  Dawn and I had tickets to see Salman Rushdie talk in the evening at the Aspen Institute for the Aspen Writer's Foundation. He was brilliant formidable funny and we laughed that deep whole body unstoppable kind of laughter and sat spell-bound silent too.
And here is where the mystery comes in. Later that night a friend asked me about my father. It was a week end of being, of living like my father lived. I was thinking how he showed me how to question everything, not from a place of defiance, but of curiosity, and to find in that questioning not answers, not a wealth of knowledge, but mystery, bucketfuls of mystery.

I like the pattern of the water slipping thin over this concrete. I caught one moment in the changing flow.