Saturday in Santa Fe. We awaken to the early light making a soft glow outside our windows. Everything looks pale blue. Later, if the sky stays clear, the bright sun will stream through these windows. But not yet.
Today is Farmer's Market Day. Fresh eggs, crusty bread, hand-dyed skeins of wool from some local sheep, hot coffee roasted with pinon nuts, bright green sunflower and radish and mung bean sprouts from the sprout lady....... and John and I are some of the people who will shuffle through the crowded aisles admiring and choosing what we will bring home.
Last winter The Market was in a temporary space but this year, the new building is complete and it is a permanent farmer's market. Buy Local. What is available is what is in season. This season is winter. So there will be bright red chili ristras and wreaths today.
We come to Santa Fe in the winter because it is beautiful and clear. There is no beach and it is not warm. But it is beautiful, startlingly so. And it is open. Words form and grow here where the sky is so big.
Now, it has happened. The soft blue light has turned to broad beams of bright early sun and that mountain that was all blue yesterday, has slopes of trees and patches of snow. It has ridges and valleys and deep crevasses between mounds of rock. If I lived right here in this very spot for 50 years, I believe I would come to know a lot about that mountain. And the birds that live in this spot and when the ravens like to steal things and what kinds of things, and how close the coyotes will come to this house and what the clouds are saying when they look just like they do this morning--a swath of white paint brushed along the farthest curve of the horizon. That's it.
Is this another prayer? To just look and listen? This land is speaking but I must be very quiet if I want to hear what it is saying. So I say, here it is then: Let me learn to quiet my head and heart in order to hear, in order to see, in order to feel this creation.
