Standing here,
atop the easy climb of the red-capped dome of Overlook Point,
the impact is obvious, it is overwhelming, it is of course the view from here,
it is why you have come & why you are standing here,
you’ve undoubtedly come for
The Encounter—
The Encounter—
How it hits
you, with an immense, intensely silent, profound Earth presence
Beauty,
a Beauty not ephemeral in any day-to-day human sense,
a Beauty not born & passing away on any lifetime biological scale,
not even a Beauty lasting for more than a geological blink of an eye,
but a Beauty almost seemingly beyond time, as nearly permanent
as we could know—
Oh, a few million years might change it just a bit.
The Encounter—
Looking out over the Red Rock-banded Sedona valley, it draws you,
draws you out of the boundary of little self,
out into a larger Self of Gaia-defined space that exponentially expands us—
You cannot conceptualize it as if to attempt to capture this presence,
it is that you are immersed, in the overwhelming feel of it.
The Encounter—
To the east you behold the long,
closely green-cropped
broken fore-edge of
like an enormous rock bowl enclosing the whole of the Sedona valley,
an intensity of solar fire,
how it must build here throughout the day;
the valley itself a vortex, such an energy must be contained here.
To the right, rising like a solid, many-pillared, enormous monument—
Courthouse
further right, the famous cone shape of Bell Rock;
& in the fading hues of approaching sunset
the daylight reds take on
a deeper red.
The Encounter—
People here, all around me now gathered, have come, to turn their gaze
to the west,
it is the call of the sunset that now brings them,
it has long been a tradition here, as you also find further up the road,
where so many always gather at sunset at Airport Overlook—
every evening of the year they come.
To behold, to take in, to let soul contemplate another day’s end on Earth,
its ritual of sunset—
They all come for it,
this larger Self participation that draws us outward,
to this encounter—
And how the colors of this Beauty fade out, if only for another night;
and already the coyotes are yapping, yapping.
In the near west,
primal thrust of presence,
ascendant above the first of Sedona’s lights coming on of evening,
merges slowly into the stars
of another night.
Sedona
May 2003