The San Francisco Peaks practically whisper through the bedroom window of my upstairs apartment near downtown. Along with the tribes that consider the mountain sacred, I believe the rest of us should more frequently name how that mountain touches our lives. I know I count on the peaceful presence of the highest peak in Arizona. Many times a week I look at its shape and consider the clouds there or imagine the creatures walking through aspen, pine and fir. Lately I’ve been up there almost every other day to pray with my feet.
I’ve spent weeks in Phoenix, recently, joining my strengths with my siblings’ strengths to meet the needs of my aging mother. When I get back to Flagstaff, it helps me to steer myself an hour up the trail that leads to the top of Mt. Humphries. This puts me into skin-kissing chilly woods quickly. With no aspirations to walk to the top, I just walk. It’s the simplest remedy from my heart’s files.
This morning I walked only five minutes into the woods. I paused when I heard birds. I’m not a naturalist able to tell which clump of feathers made what sound. I didn’t even look closely, really. I just stop to listen to gurgles from one direction, chatters from another. I savor the matrix of sharp twitters and mellow chuckles all around me.
Trails go places. But I don’t go on. What if you come to the most precious place of beauty, ever? Would you miss it just because there wasn’t an interpretive sign? Would you keep going just because it wasn’t yet the end of the trail? I wouldn’t. I know often the day’s best moment is right in the middle of things, right there along the way to wherever THERE is supposed to be.
A flicker of pale blue the size of a dropped gum wrapper causes me to squat down. A small moth flutters. Now I see how bright the new grass looks: those lemon yellow green slivers might be only days old. Above me the aspen leaves also hold that first-weeks-of-spring green that looks like color was just invented. Sounds come into focus one by one: the sluicing stream-like rustle of the aspen leaves, the metallic whine of a fly lifting, zooming, and disappearing. Woven into a fly’s path, I see now a yellow and black thumb size bumblebee so laden with pollen that it looks like a tiny lump of shag carpet moving from flower to flower. And what are those dark floating wings? Dozens of them catch light as they hover three to five feet off the ground. One lands on the pocket of my faded pink snap button cowboy shirt. It’s a three part beetle with six legs. We eye each other.
“It’s a bespectacled grown up short woman,” it tells the others as it floats back into the hovering mix of winged creatures.
Noticing that beetle’s three-part body steers my eyes to other shapes: the triangular lace attached to slim stems that is a bank of ferns. The crusty blotches of light green lichens on rocks: rocks that emerge out of grass like frozen humpback whales. And look at that tall grass: the blades droop like casual lines from an ink-loaded paintbrush.
“How can a mountain be sacred?” a student scoffed in class last winter as his colleagues debated the pros and cons of using reclaimed water to make snow.
How can it NOT be, I think today when I return home refueled, refreshed, and replenished by a pause on the Peaks. Light and shadow. Sound and silence. It’s a mountain as holy as the next moment of rapt attention in your life. I realize the sacred might be found in watering the color of your favorite flowers thriving in pots. The sacred might arrive as you finger the just-right book you’ll read next in your favorite easy chair. For me, it arrives in a glimpse from an upstairs window at the veils of rain sweeping across slopes where beetles hover and birds chortle: that simple visual prayer reminds me of the divinity of giving complete attention to where one lives.
