“Oh-dark-thirty” my sailing partner used to call the predawn hour we met at the marina to launch. It was the same time I found myself following a steady stream of red taillights through pitch black New Mexico farmland heading for “fly out” at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge - 5:00 a.m. When dawn peeks over the mountains, it awakens thousands of sandhill cranes, snow geese and ducks overnighting in ponds, safe from predators. The clamor of whoops, calls, hoots, squawks increases until it’s overtaken by the sound of flapping wings in mass ascension. It is an experience not to be missed. Breathtaking. Incomparable. I was ecstatic. Bundled up in jeans, jackets, thermals, hats, gloves, scarves, forty “birders” stomped in the cold, cameras ready. So many snow geese flew over us at one time, barely any sky was discernable. The Rio Grande is a major flyway for migratory birds. Fish and Game rangers reported the arrival of 10,000 cranes, 50,000 snow geese and 120,000 ducks. Flying in from Canada, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, they winter in New Mexico. They “fly out” each morning to feed and socialize then “fly in,” row after row after row, at sunset to roost in the ponds. The refuge grows corn and other grains to feed them. Each November, the week-long Festival of the Cranes welcomes thousands of visitors for tours, lectures, workshops and an art show. Bosque del Apache is 20-minutes south of Socorro, NM, which is 90 miles south of Albuquerque.
“Don’t you miss the ocean?” I’m frequently asked by people who know I’ve lived by it my whole life. Surprisingly, no. I’m in love with the Rio Grande. The “bosque” is the forest along the banks of the Rio Grande and in its floodplain. It is lush, green, full of cottonwood and willow trees. How did an ocean girl wind up in love with a river? Like Hansel and Gretel, I can follow the breadcrumbs, or “clues” back to the first hints of this change in my life. These “hints” or “clues” provide me guidance. As an English Literature major in college, I was trained to be a symbolic thinker, so Spirit “speaks” that language to me, providing symbols - images and information – as a pattern of meaning. I always pay attention (topic of next week’s blog).
On May 5, 2008, in the Santa Barbara Independent, Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology (also featured, to my great joy, in Albuquerque’s Alibi) addressed me personally at a time of great turmoil in my life. LIBRA: “ ‘What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt,’ wrote columnist Hal Boyle. ‘It is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.’ Your assignment for the rest of 2008, Libra, is to do whatever’s necessary to make yourself fit this description. The next eight months will provide unprecedented opportunities to turn yourself into a river flowing toward your destiny with surprisingly sublime freedom.” I was so impacted by what it said, I cut it out, pasted it on a pink notecard, put it into my daytimer – where it remains to this day – and followed its guidance for the rest of the year. That was the beginning of my relationship with a river. Breadcrumb #1.
Breadcrumb #2 really got my attention. When you read something in a book and it takes physical form in your life in less than 24 hours, you don’t even have to pay attention – it’s hard not to notice!!! I attended several writing workshops in Taos, NM, with Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. My writing partner and I used Natalie’s book, Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir, for weekly writing prompts. When I read Natalie’s powerful story of Jimmy Santiago Baca, from Albuquerque, I cried. Orphaned, illiterate, poverty-stricken, he found himself in jail at the age of twenty on a drug charge and ready to stab another inmate. He learned to write – and to study poetry – in a maximum security prison. Poetry saved his life. The following morning, I found an email in my Inbox from UCSB’s (University of California, Santa Barbara) Arts and Letters announcing a lecture, by Jimmy Santiago Baca, to the Chicano Studies Department. He was receiving an award, one of many, for his writing and his work. I knew I had a divine appointment. After the lecture, I purchased his autobiography and one of his eleven books of poetry: Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande.
Two months ago, I found Breadcrumb #3 in the Albuquerque Journal. Bookworks, an independent bookstore in the North Valley neighborhood adjacent to the Rio Grande where I want to live, was hosting a book signing for The Rio Grande: An Eagle’s View. “This book will change your life,” an internal voice said. I knew I had to go. There I met John Horning, executive director of WildEarth Guardians, and Adriel Heisey, photographer, who dedicated ten years of their lives to creating a magnificent and intimate photographic portrait of the 1,885-mile-long Rio Grande from its headwaters in the Colorado Rockies to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t know why guidance has led me to this river for three years. I’ll just keep taking the next step. Is it my deep love of nature? Is it inspiration for my own creative self-expression through writing, poetry and photography? Am I to be active in the preservation of the Rio Grande? In recent years, sixty miles of the Rio Grande went dry. At the book signing, I asked John and Adriel, “What is your intention for this book? What would you like to see it accomplish in the world?” They want the river to have the right to some of its own water, to continued existence. They hope the book will inspire people to have an intimate relationship with the Rio Grande, the Great River, so they care enough to influence future legislation in favor of the river’s right to be. On my birthday, I became a friend of Albuquerque’s Rio Grande Nature Center. Last weekend, I joined the friends of Bosque del Apache. More to be revealed…..
After I finished writing this post, I read a story in the Albuquerque Journal about the inaugural issue of a new literary magazine titled bosque (the magazine) for serious writers. Story contest winners, from writers over 50, will be published in the 2012 issue according to the two Albuquerque women who founded the magazine. Their website was provided. Again, more to be revealed…..
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