The Desert

I never tire of the desert, its spaciousness, its vistas, and the mystery of life that survives in it.  This evening, a solitary quail sat in a mesquite tree calling out in a plaintive voice, a sharp, touching cry.  You seldom see a lone quail—they are usually in little flocks scurrying across the desert floor.  I don’t know if this bird had become separated from its flock and was calling out for it, or if something unfortunate had happened to its covey and it was crying out in distress.  As I walked away, it continued its insistent call.  Perhaps it was simply looking for a mate.

Every day there are new things to discover.  Eagle’s claw (Turk’s head) cacti are usually solitary

but today I found this little cluster.

The Texas rainbow cacti have finished blooming and are now making fruit that is slowly being eaten by birds, and perhaps small rodents as well.

Ox Mountain

The woods on Ox Mountain were once beautiful!  On account of its being on the edge of a large country, it was attacked with axes and hatchets.  How could it remain beautiful? The refreshing breezes of the night spirit and the dawn's breath, and the moisture provided by rain and fog, did not fail to give rise to sprouts of vegetation from the stumps of the trees.  But cows and sheep were repeatedly pastured there, and for that reason it has remained desolate.  People observe its denuded state and assume that it never had any woods at all.  But how could this state be the true nature of this mountain?
                                                                                                        — Mencius

Meditating today on the Ox Mountain story of Mencius.  There is so much in it that speaks to our relationship with nature, to faith (of all kinds), to our understanding of truth.  It is especially pertinent in the era of the Trump Administration--of people who believe that the only way to relate to others and nature is to possess and to violate, to consume and destroy; people who loathe and deny the truth at every corner ("there never were any woods at all").  Thomas Merton says this about Mencius' parable in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

Without the night spirit, the dawn breath, silence, passivity, rest, man's nature cannot be itself.  In its barrenness it is no longer natura: nothing grows from it, nothing is born of it any more.