The contours of the earth mirror the contours of consciousness.  Shortly after my divorce, I read in the Denver Post an article about Brown's Pass, a particularly remote spot.  Immediately I planned to backpack there.  Camping close to a spring just above timber line, overlooking a glacial valley by day and underlooking the Milky Way by night, my life felt utterly insignificant, yet inexplicably worthy.  Plans fell into place, but plans were only the surface of the transformation.  The veil between self and Life lifted.  Accepting mortality and imperfections, I became part of the broader story of this planet:

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Here I am of the earth and of the heavens.

Here I am utterly alone and fully connected.

Here I know that I will die, and here I know that I will live.

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Perhaps because of age, perhaps because we have retired in New Mexico, my connection with mountains has been augmented to include mesas.  When we're young, we think that there is always room to ascend further, as did the ancient Babylonians, who built increasingly tall ziggurats.  Mesas underscore the narrow stratum on which we live.  Standing at the edge, the perspective is like an eagle's, but horizontal lines proclaim that we live between the heavens and the earth, between aspiration and limitation.  This stratum of the earth's crust is where all my love, all my creativity, and all my transcendence belong.

 

These ten photographs are of mesas and of sedimentary hills that replicate the strata of mesas.