I spent the weekend weaving and crocheting, trying to escape some things that are weighing quite heavy on my mind. I am not in the best frame of mind these days, and the weather is not helping! Last winter I wove a small tapestry that was not particularly successful. The image was dawn in the desert, and the original image comes from a book my son gave me that has beautiful photographs of earth's landscapes from many vantage points. This desert scene spoke to me on some non-verbal level. The image was so powerful (alas, mine is not!) and spoke to me of creation, and of something else. The idea that no matter what man does to this environment, it will be undone in a mere day. The winds in this desert erase all trace of us. Everyday is a new creation in the desert, and not in the "greeting card" sense.

I've been reading a good deal of Carl Sagan in the past few months. Dragons of Eden, Cosmos, and have just learned that his wife has published some of his lectures in a book titled The Varieties of Scientific Experience. I believe it will address his very reverent views on religion, for which he is labled an atheist. But getting back to deserts, I found some moving photographs on Sue Lawtry's blog, as well as her insightful comments:

“Here there isn’t a single trace of man’s presence… The wind shapes the landscape as it likes. It is an unchanging landscape which is constantly changing.”
Gerard Lanux

Wind on desert sand; water on coastal sand… the rhythmic passing of time.
I am guessing that every single one of the resulting undulating patterns is different. Like every grain of sand, every star, every pass of weft over warp, every found stone on a beach… all the same, all different. (Ref blog entries: Nov 15 2005 “notes for the day” and Nov17.)

Desert breeze, beach tide: both erase the marks of our passing, our presence merely tolerated.
It is the order of things here… to be rendered as ghosts in the landscape.

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I have only just discovered it, but I will be visiting it regularly.