The Domain of the Earth

I love the midwest: the rolling farm fields, big green trees, rampant weeds, rivers, streams and lakes, pale blue sky (or gray, depending on the day), cows, corn.  Every time I go I admire them all, even take special extra drives into the country.  


But I don’t want to go back.  


And when I return to Arizona, I watch the appearance of the rocky hills, the dry washes, the great dry open spaces, and feel a kind of relaxation, a letting go, a pleasure in the naked beauty of the earth.  I don’t quite know if I love it more, or just differently; but it stimulates a different part of me.  


The desert is subtle in its beauty – you have to look more carefully to see the green, the differences between the summer and the winter, the slow growth of the desert plants.  The midwest seems almost ostentatious in contrast, with its heavy foliage, outsized plants (really – do they NEED to be that big?), lush grasses, abundance of water.  The sky is so wide, so blue here; and when there are storms, there are storms.  I feel more of the scope of the earth, even with the immediacy of the rocks under my feet, or the cholla just an inch from my knee.  The mountains rise up, the canyons cut down.  The earth presents itself.  I can see, can touch, the different layers of rock slicing through the slope I’m climbing.  


The plants live here, as do the animals (and humans), but it’s not their domain – it is the earth’s.  And I find myself over and over looking at this or that rock, or mountain, or horizon, or wash, or canyon, and feeling the wonder of it move me.   And move me it does.  I don’t always know toward what; but is definitely toward, rather than away from.  It draws me, makes me wonder what is farther along – just over that hill, or beyond that horizon.  The midwest never quite did that.