BLOG CARNIVAL: "A Nod to Nature's Grandeur."

Did you all have a good Memorial Day weekend? I certainly did!

Like most of you, my family and I spent the holiday in THE OUTDOORS.

We travelled a couple hours south of Denver to our cabin in Pueblo, Colorado.

Like most of southern Colorado, Pueblo is arid, which brings with it an arid landscape--muted colors like tans and dusty greens, plateaus, open plains, dried-up river-runs, and low-growing foliage like juniper bushes, yucca, and wild flowers (all that can grow in Pueblo's high winds).

In late summer, sunflowers line the dirt roads...

At night, you can hear coyotes howling. At dusk, elk can be seen scattered across the hilltops. Blue birds and hummingbirds dart from brush to brush, their colors like paint-drops on a blank canvas. Black beetles crawl across the shale rock roads, moths flit at every porch light, and the wind whips through every crevice, kicking up the smell of the land--heat, dirt, and juniper.

Frances standing in the middle of a dirt road...

I LOVE PUEBLO. But mostly for another reason than those listed above...
For me, there's something so paradoxical about Pueblo. The landscape is simultaneously interesting and yet blank. There's visual variety to capture one's interest, and yet I can imagine so much more against its austere backdrop.

That right there is what I love most about nature in general--it's bigger and grander and wilder and BEYOND me, yet at the same time it grounds me, too. Sitting on our cabin's porch...

View of the sunset from the back porch...

I'm struck by the realization that I'm far away from civilization. All of a sudden, I feel like I'm the smallest being alive, thinking things like:  I'm incredibly alone; I don't belong here; I'm lost. Yet, in that same moment, I also feel like I'm the center of the Earth--like I'm the one pumping out the heat waves on the dirt roads, like I'm the one spreading the whispy clouds like ink in water, like I, myself, hold all the birds' songs, all the insects' buzzing, and all the trees' rustling inside my very own body. I am alone in this wide open space, and yet I AM the wide open space itself.

There's something so spiritual in that paradox. We are both the tiniest speck in nature's grandeur, and yet we are also the mind-numbing ENTIRETY of nature's grandeur. It makes a person shiver, holding all the Earth's energy inside his/her own small body; like one's trembling with the magnitude of interconnection.

Which reminds me...

In the words of Buddha: "We are the same as plants, as trees, as other people, as the rain that falls. We consist of that which is around us. We are the same as everything."

Now go enjoy some more nature-themed writing from:

The Ontic Blue Stocking

Instinctively Woman

And get outside! Enjoy the outdoors!