Quotes from Ann Zwinger

The sky is a meadow of wildstar flowers.

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I'd like to be. I guess I'd like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone- how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine?

This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash, flipped through in succession, leaving a richness of images imprinted on a sunburned retina.

I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.

The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.

This stretching of self beyond stretchable boundaries, this glory of being where few have stood, of listening and seeing, of feeling the sun and the rock, somehow matters very much. The exhilaration is worth every bit of the discomfort and duress. I have pushed through discomfort to another level of being. I love being here, shot through with sunlight, incandescing it outward as I receive it inward. I feel an outer glory like an aura or a nimbus

My curiosity about this country intensified…and so I went. I discovered that, like all canyons, they have a powerful sense of direction and this becomes imprinted upon one's way of thinking: there are upcanyon and downcanyon, and one adjusts to that simple fact. More than anywhere else I sensed that here one must fit into the landscape, must know what is there and where, in order to survive. These canyons, like the ocean and the air, are unforgiving.

I wish I could sit here for eons and watch as these sandstone walls crumble, grain by grain and fall to floor this dry wash, become rearranged by water and wind, compressed to other cliffs, excavated into other canyons, and feel the wind all the same. The rock changes, the channel changes, the wind just carries air from one place to another, more constant than the rock. The rock is ephemeral, the wind, eternal.

Did an Anasazi once stand here, pulling strength out of the earth as I do, making obeisance to the gods of the winds? …Perhaps when one scratches the underside of heaven one is granted a special grace. The euphoria remains, and I can still call back that feeling of being astride the world and what it was like to be charged with the energy of the universe…the particular charge of serene energy to bring out whenever needed.

A beaver does not, as legend would have it, know which direction the tree will fall when he cuts it, but counts on alacrity to make up for lack of engineering expertise.