the badlands

the other day, i was showing judy pictures of my trip to pine ridge and beyond, and I came across a video i took on my digital camera of the badlands. i was trying to capture how quiet everything is.

this morning i realized how entirely impossible it is to capture that. imagine... let me upload my video on to my computer (already we have the buzz/fan of the computer), i am sitting in a room or house with air conditioning and refrigerators and someone doing the dishes or eating crunchy cereal -- and i am supposed to hear that silence again by watching this video. Or i am outside where there are cars and people and sidewalks and construction, pressing "play" on my camera screen wishing silence could play out of the speakers and return me again to the calm of the land.

imagine sitting on the grass... and still feeling so distance from the true, rugged, unpopulated land.

the badlands hold the crumbling earth and let it sit there quietly and delicately. occasionally a bird will land on a fragile piece of consolidated dirt and it will slightly tip itself out of place and tumble as far down as its weight will carry it.

this land might seem scary... and lonely. but we need land like this. it holds the pain of humanity and lets it dry up and stay and take shape and fall apart. it is beautiful.

the calm of the land. i need that calmness sometimes, when i am hurting, to just let myself be the brittle fragile formations. to be in the quiet and solitude that listens and is silent and respectful to all that our soul is trying to hear and listen to and love.

the city has a different allure, the run-ins with strangers and unexpected encounters. things to buy from every corner of the world. a lot more things in general. pavement, covering up what used to be, containing the trees and the rivers to parks and pathways we visit when we get the extra time. time to be in nature.

well what if we are nature? part of it, i mean, not just visitors to it? it is part of us... for as long as i live, i hope the badlands and those hills in south dakota can hold that same silence... that they can always be a place to revere and respect what is desolate and fragile. that the only song you can hear is the wind and the insects and the birds. that the hum of everything else will have the respect to shut off and listen again...