Nature is more than the sum of its parts -- it possesses a magic unifying principle, spark of life, existence beyond and apart and aloof from the simplifying, pattern-making mind of man.
This was a landscape alive: humming, buzzing, chirping, ...What Mexico looked like before fast food, trash, and grazing: undisturbed, incredibly luscious and beautiful.
Lava flows jumbled like bulk food; angular irregular boulders of roungly similar size tumble down toward Big Rock Wash, where a curious all-green tree called Palo Verde grows alongside the Elephant Tree (green under crinkling off gold paper) and the Ironwood Tree --...an alive, verdanmt buzzing blooming profusion: "a vibratory place". WIthout illusion or pretense - yet still hard to see -- perhaps things are the wrong size, strange shapes in complicated, yet ordered landscapes. Only a few species of grass. WIldflowers everywhere - if you look. (I had to crunch a patch to lie down and write this).
At the (dry) stream banks (marked by whitened rocks) grow bush-nightshade and desert lavender, not holding back rock erosion, intermixed. At intervals crazy flowers bloom: hibiscus... High scree slope of creosote, burro bush , brittlebrush, jr. elephant trees, ocotillo. The rocks are dry, brittle: some pummice. B.O. Flower. Mallow. Stickleaf Mentzelia. Dahlia.
Soil (between jammed gravel jammed between boulders) is tan and almost entirely clay plus a few sub-sandgrain particles. THe parent rock is basalt w/ quartz crystals scattered in. Black rock remains hot to the touch after the shadow has replaced sun. Probably dehydrated, discombobulated, waiting in the shadows, feeling the ever-moving air breeze cool my skin. A vulture circled me, left, came back. When the wind leaves, the buzzing rises, busy coevolution.
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Map of Tinajas (water holes) in the Sierra Pinacate, prepared by Julian Hayden, archeologist.
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