February 27 - A Landscape
Harsh, unforgiving sandscape forged in fire and time.
Pick a landscape and write about it for five minutes. Go.
The desert. Harsh, unforgiving sand scape forged in fire and time. Everything evolved under pressure. Everything trying to kill you. The harshest conditions imaginable. Shifting sands. Winds that whisper messages from the future. Flash floods. Biblical snakes and thirst. Heat, relentless.
And yet. Stillness. Darkness. Stars. Relief. Silence so deafening, it’s like a vacuum. Coyotes scream.
Until I went to Joshua Tree, I’d never spent any time in the desert and had no idea how much I would love it. It speaks to me; that ability to survive and evolve. Or die. The dry heat that saps the moisture out of everything, your skin, your hair, your lips.
And at night—the temperature drops and suddenly you’re freezing. It’s a landscape of extremes. Joshua Tree is like visiting another planet. The shadows that bounce off the Joshua trees, arms extended to heaven. Shape shifting rock formations, half the Earth’s age old. What wisdom is contained in their make up? What planetary shifts have they lived through? What is their story? Does it contain dinosaurs and asteroids? How puny they must think we are.
I was thirteen years old and on a tour bus with my family through Greece. We’re heading up the mountain-side.
My grandmother is praying to Jesus, because of the narrow edge that the bus is on. She’s desperate for a vodka & orange juice. This journey is scaring her, but I can only look up and down.
And there, in the beautiful mountains of Greece is the monastery that we’re visiting. It looks like nature etched this building into the foundation of the mountain. The building has become one with the earth; flush against the ground.
It’s breathtaking.
Unlike a valley, a forest, or the desert, the mountains have knives for peaks and chasms for those it wants to deathly embrace. I feel small next to them and have stepped through a portal.
I could only drop my jaw and question how nature does these things. How humans adapt to such a danger. How the monks who live within the monastery feel. How the mountains protect, but endanger, everyone within their stone walls.
I am not religious, but when you’re at such a high elevation - you feel closer to God. Maybe, it was the monastery.
Mountains give me the true sense of wonder. The breeze that coils through their trenches, wicks the sweat off my neck and I feel alive. I feel as though I am breathing true fresh air. No inhibitions. I feel alive and healthy. I never want to return to the ground.
The patterns in the rock formations look like paintings and I want to write their stories. The trees and shrubbery that grow looked like spilled green paint. The sun highlighted the red roofing of the monastery and for a split second you remember that nature is the most talented artist.
Lagos Raki - that means the hare’s back in Greek. It's a ridge on a mountain 1000 feet above the Aegean, my little cell a small breezeblock shed in the garden of my friend's house. It looks east; every morning the sun when it rises shines straight through my window, blinding me in brilliance.
Below and in front of me is a green valley, criss-crossed with stone walls that wander over the landscape like snail trails. They look ancient, as if they were set down here in classical times.
Nothing intrudes. No telegraph poles, no power lines; a sort of track on the far side of the valley that runs down to a little church by the sea dedicated to St. George.
No sounds apart from the mewling of eagles, the occasional braying of a donkey and the constant tinkling orchestra of goat bells. I have no idea how many goats there are in the valley, possibly hundreds. The music of their bells never seems to stop.
There are sheep too. And little song birds and, occasionally, Gryphon vultures soaring above us, from their eyries on Mount Zass 10 kilometres to the south of us.
Beyond the valley there is the sea and then the islands - Donoussa, Amorgos, Ikaria, and, sometimes, on the horizon, Patmos, and over the horizon, Turkey, spawning thunderstorms and lightning displays.
And all day the dance of light, the mirroring of the clouds on the sea, the strange effect whether because of the latitude and the angle of the sun or because of this perspective from 1000 feet up, the way the islands appear to detach themselves from the sea, to float above it, disappear sometimes. And to fly away. It is a magical landscape.