Beginning the next series of posts. This time it's about landscapes, and how they can almost seem alive. Sometimes soft and gentle. Other times so harsh you can tell they don't want you there. Definitely something to consider when looking for a place to live.
Part 2 in our Landscape Lives series... It's so clear in the bright light at 11,000 feet that the land is alive. It's in a constant, slow-motion flux, just like any living being. Here, the hardest rocks are pushing upwards, while weather peels them back into big talus fields. Sometimes they dam up valleys to create short-lived lakes like this beauty. To us it looks big and permanent, but it's not in landscape time. If you live somewhere long enough, you might see some of these changes in action.
Part 3 in the "Living Land" series. This is more than a symphony in brown. It's a mini-landscape in the making. We could be looking at a dune-field in the Sahara here, but it's really the ripples in the bottom of a shallow Utah stream. Similar processes at work though, with particles moving and settling out constantly, sorting themselves by weight and creating a landscape that builds, rearranges and shifts. Good thing the local inhabitants are accustomed to dealing with it.
Part 4-- The "Land is Alive" miniseries. Mountains add breath to the living landscape. These skyrocket gilia flowers bend to their mountain's breath twice daily-- first uphill in the day as it inhales the warm valley air, and downhill at night as it exhales its cold air down slope. Of course the birds know all about these mountain air currents, and would-be residents should too.
Part 5 in "The Land is Alive" miniseries. Listen up to what this landscape has to tell you...you'll hear the thin San Juan Mountain air hurrying by in chaotic little gusts.
Part 6. From a flea's perspective, the elephant is a landscape it traverses and sometimes feeds off of. The elephant's skin creases are ravines and canyons, its bristles like the trunks of sequoia trees. I moved through a similar landscape today-- one of fire-blackened trunks, downcut by gullies triggered by the burn. It was an example of land, surprisingly dynamic and in constant flux. In this case, fire had vaporized the land's protective cloak of vegetation, letting rain tear at the earth and shifting the weathering-erosion--deposition process into high gear. This landscape was evolving faster than the neighboring unburned areas, and it showed how the land's surface is constantly fluctuating-- faster in some areas and slower in others depending on circumstances. Other instances of the living landscape surround us here in Colorado. Slow-motion mountain uplift and sudden landslides have caused alpine lakes to form, but they are short-lived in the time-scale of landscape evolution. Quicker processes like convection enliven the land with daily breezes and weather. Streams busily build, tear down and rebuild the land underneath. And the intensity of weather like heat and drought can make the land seem alive, and even hostile.
Naturally, the flea doesn't recognize the slow pulse of the elephant's blood is anything like its own hemolymph, or why things keep shifting around underfoot. Like the flea, there's a bigger landscape we move within, but usually forget that it lives in its own way, and at a pace that eludes us. So let's pay attention, if only to appreciate it more.
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