High Sierra Winds
"For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air.
I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean.
Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.
" I read Kathleen Norris' Dakota, A Spiritual Biography, years before I had heard of Benedictine monks, the winds of the high desert...
while I was immersed in that soul searing search for that place I could call home.
I recall my delight and curiosity while reading Norris' rich prose and felt as if I'd found a friend in the narrative of a displaced New Yorker who finds herself suddenly in the midst of nowhere.
After 10 years here in the high desert of the Sierras, I have become intimate, not with the 'hard Dakota wind', but with bursts of winds which roar down the valleys of the Pine Nut mountains behind our house so ferociously that when the burst is over, I can touch the silence.
A prelude to rain, snow or perhaps simply higher or lower temperatures, the bursts can stop the dogs and me in our tracks and force us to turn our bodies so that our faces are shielded from the force of the assaults.
I laugh when I hear the Reno weather predicting 60 mph "gusts" because we know the force here in our valley is far greater than those in the city 150 mile away.
The peculiar saucer-like layering of the clouds we see herepredicts the winds; I have seen these cloud configurations no where else that I have lived.
The boys and I can resume our hikes on the 1st of March because the trapping season will be over; the boys can then run free through our 90 minute to 2 hour hike- I look forward to those hikes each year, even when we are forced to stop and turn our backs to the episodic torrential roars.
Like Norris, we are literally bent over, humbled by the sheer purity of energy which seeks to empty us out...
make room to perceive the truth right beside us.
I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean.
Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.
" I read Kathleen Norris' Dakota, A Spiritual Biography, years before I had heard of Benedictine monks, the winds of the high desert...
while I was immersed in that soul searing search for that place I could call home.
I recall my delight and curiosity while reading Norris' rich prose and felt as if I'd found a friend in the narrative of a displaced New Yorker who finds herself suddenly in the midst of nowhere.
After 10 years here in the high desert of the Sierras, I have become intimate, not with the 'hard Dakota wind', but with bursts of winds which roar down the valleys of the Pine Nut mountains behind our house so ferociously that when the burst is over, I can touch the silence.
A prelude to rain, snow or perhaps simply higher or lower temperatures, the bursts can stop the dogs and me in our tracks and force us to turn our bodies so that our faces are shielded from the force of the assaults.
I laugh when I hear the Reno weather predicting 60 mph "gusts" because we know the force here in our valley is far greater than those in the city 150 mile away.
The peculiar saucer-like layering of the clouds we see herepredicts the winds; I have seen these cloud configurations no where else that I have lived.
The boys and I can resume our hikes on the 1st of March because the trapping season will be over; the boys can then run free through our 90 minute to 2 hour hike- I look forward to those hikes each year, even when we are forced to stop and turn our backs to the episodic torrential roars.
Like Norris, we are literally bent over, humbled by the sheer purity of energy which seeks to empty us out...
make room to perceive the truth right beside us.
Source...