Desert Spring

Friday, June 8 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

As I amble along a nature path in the foothills of Albuquerque's Sandia Mountains, I feel the stress and high anxiety of the day begin to dissolve.

It began this morning. In fact, I woke with it, with the unsettledness that comes of leaving two and a half months of what passes in my life for domesticity.

Today is the day the (relative) rootedness of a Santa Fe sublet makes way for a return to the mutability of a life in motion.

Today is the day that completes the printing and binding of The MoonQuest.

Today is the day one journey ends and another begins.

It's exciting, of course, but discomfitting too.


And so as my feet touch the feldspar, mica and quartz that comprise Sandia's granite, I'm grateful for the emotional grounding I always feel here. I'm grateful too for the explosions of brilliant color scattered through these desert highlands.

If you've never visited or lived in the desert, you probably think of it as not only dry but barren and colorless. Yet spring here in the high desert -- particularly after a wet winter -- brings with it not only infinite shades of green but the polychromatic splendor of desert flowers in bloom, their intensity heightened by the limited palette New Mexico normally offers.

The new growth and the vividness of the cactus flowers remind me that the same energy of renewal unfolding around me on my Sandia walk is also coming alive within me. Spring is here.

Sandia Photos by Mark David Gerson