The Enveloping Expanse

Arriving at dusk, the evening cool is a deceptive welcome, belying the withering sun that will find us on the hikes of subsequent days. The baking heat creeps up on you, covertly, like the ocotillo thorns veiled behind the succulent leaves. And yet your feet keep moving, drawn forward along the stony sand - sometimes upward, sometimes downward, but inexorably onward - beckoned by an inarticulate invitation; felt, rather than heard, toward...

What?

Perhaps toward more of oneself. Perhaps into a vaster comprehension of the yet inscrutable magnitude of creation's subtle immensity and complexity. Perhaps those are ultimately one and the same. These lands - we - are as towering and sculpted as the stone canyon walls; as tenacious as the desert streams; as poised and posed as the balanced rocks; as beautifully shy as the succulent blooms, seduced into color by the evanescent dew; as determined as the coyote scavenging for food; as dangerous as the mountain lions and as irritating as the thorns; as known and still unexplored as the caves, the canyons, the looming peaks, the miles of cactus-pocked sand.

Big Bend is as evocatively compelling as it is foreboding and dangerous. Like trekking the soul, exploring this larger than life landscape is as precarious as it is instructive; as grueling as it is nourishing.

Heavy-soled shoes seeking purchase; bodies bending to avoid the pricklies protruding from almost everywhere; eyes scanning for spiders or snakes.

Everything at Big Bend National Park bites, burns, punctures, trips or stings.

And takes your breath away with awe.

When the heat finally finds you, next steps begin to elude you.
​"I look to the hills. Where does my help come from​?"
Water bottles are soon as exhausted as legs. Lips crack. There are miles to go.

How can one endure an hour longer?
How can one possibly leave?

The enveloping expanse first shrinks, then expands you; first decimates, then opens you to unexperienced majesty.

My foot slips climbing the stones, who unapologetically scold, "Pay attention!" My sleeve snags on an encroaching thorn which scoffs and advises me, "Watch where you are going!" A snake slithers across the trail, pausing long enough to admonish me that I am not the only one here. My irises swing between expansion and contraction, torn between taking in the horizon versus focusing on the details.

And then the sun goes down - the mountains and stones and fatigue dissolve into stars. Black and unmitigated sky as vast as the sands, and stars the diamonds envy.

And we are one of them - one with them - born by the desert winds and God's own Spirit into the heavens.

And then the sun rises, and all begins again.