The Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve, Layton Utah
My mother grew up less than a mile from what is now a Nature Conservancy preserve on the Great Salt Lake. This landscape has fresh water and salt marshes, ten foot high grasses, ponds and pools, mudflats and fields. The colors and textures change constantly throughout the year, so every visit is a surprise. I have never been to the cemetery where my mother is buried (just a few miles north of this place) but coming here feels like the best way to commune with what was my mother’s earthly substrate.
The preserve is also an important stopover for all kinds of migrating birds, a rest area for pilgrims winging their way from Canada to Central and South America. How appropriate. Many creatures come here before continuing on journeys that cycle rather than terminate, perpetuate rather than complete. This spot is my personal sanctuary of remembrance, my way of staying connected to what has been.
And lucky for us, there are so many ways to do that. It is often hard to describe, and sometimes you just have to be with it rather than talk about it. I had that feeling over and over during my time in Utah and New Mexico. Two weddings, each with specific rituals to sanctify and seal. The desert landscape, full of evocation and imagination. The quiet power of the little village that harbors El Santuario de Chimayó, a pilgrimage site outside Santa Fe. Crosses. Saints. Roadside altars. It is an immense net of remembrance and sacredness.
In All Things Shining, authors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explore how literature can help us reconnect passionately with the world. They take us through a tour of meaning from the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Augustine, Dante, Kant, Melville and David Foster Wallace. (The chapter on Moby Dick should be required reading.) In redefining what is sacred, they quote DFW:”You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or to try to define it in terms of what it is not.”
Dreyfus and Kelly add this point:
This glancing approach is inclined towards reconciliation instead of purification. It involves a fully human notion of the sacred that lives not in the repudiation or transcendence of pain and boredom and anger and angst, but rather in the recognition that these difficult aspects of our existence live together with the sacred moments, that they complete one another, and make sense of one another.
Meaning is afloat, in the grasslands of the Great Salt Lake and the desert skies over Chimayó. Leaning into reconciliation rather than purification feels right to me.
Inside a church in Chimayó
Altar in Chimayó
Remembrance in Chimayó
Crosses on a fence in Chimayó
After enough years, the crosses placed on this tree have become embedded in the bark
Desert sky (This is not painted. Amazingly.)
Thanks for sharing these photos — and your memories. I just returned from two weeks in Arizona, including four days at the Grand Canyon. The light, the desert, the silence, the history. All of it is transformative and I really miss it when I am home back in NY, dreaming of the next visit.
Having also traveled NM, and to Chimayo, I can see why you were so moved by it. My husband was born in Santa Fe and misses it terribly.
Caitlin, I am a fan of your writing and really appreciate your comment here. Glad to learn we share a similar approach–live in the verdant east but long for the western desert. It’s a tension I hold on a daily basis. Thanks again!
Wow, thanks! I didn’t know you read my writing.
The desert is extraordinary. I wept (!) when I drove away from the Grand Canyon. It touches me in ways the greenery of this area does not.
Wonderful post, Deborah. The preserve is gorgeous.
I hope to get back to Santa Fe at some point and to see Chimayo again. It’s been more than a decade since I visited.
Thanks M. I hope you find your way there again soon. It does shift the soul in a way I don’t know how to describe.
You take a wonderfully open stance to life, Deborah. Mine is more of a flinch. Seeing the world through your eyes is broadening.
A flinch, what a phrase! You know I adore seeing the world through your eyes and hope we can continue to share our viewfinders (so to speak!)
Deb, crosses embedded in the bark — a sutra, a novel, recorded testimony. I looked up sutra to be sure it was apt and got this: ‘Literally it means a thread or line that holds things together and is derived from the verbal root siv-, meaning to sew.’ You in the salt marsh with your mother’s heart.
Ah my wordsmith extraordinaire, Sloan. Thank you for this. What an insight. It really hit me what you wrote. Perfect.
Beautiful words and images!
A beautiful post, words and images.
Chimayo is magical. Glad you enjoyed your time there.
Chimayo is one of my favorite places on earth. A magical town with extrordinary energy. Whenever I am in Santa Fe a trip there is a must. You have captured its beauty wonderfully. A place of profound heart and soul and wondorous spirit.
Beautiful. I love Chimayo. The Great Salt Lake preserve makes me think of Terry Tempest Williams…the third photo here is dramatic and wondrous fine!
Ann, this is Terry Tempest Williams land for sure. Thanks so much for your comment.