Wind in the piñon

If you are a regular Back Porch blog reader, you recognize the long gap between this entry and the last. Well, it’s been a busy time, but it’s been busy because of my trip back to this lovely place pictured that you just might recognize.

I am immensely lucky to return to the Nada Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado for a two-week writing retreat, this time flying solo. The official reason for my trip is so I can work on my book. And I will. So far, however, I’ve written a journal entry, a couple of poems, a note back home to Cindy Lou, this blog entry; taken a bunch of pictures; and napped a couple of times.

I first thought I would title this entry ‘Quiet,‘ in honor of the Sangre de Cristo mountains just overhead. As I write this mid-afternoon Mountain time, however, sitting just inside my hermitage’s open window, the whistle of wind picking up through piñon pine reminds me it is this sound, for one, that makes this native Ohioan long for time in the mountains. It is so lovely! True, I can hear similar zephyrs on my back porch at home on a breezy fall afternoon, but witnessing the live music of wind and pine needle in the shadow of Kit Carson Peak reaches deeper into my core. It’s part of the retreat I so love to come up here for.

I drove the 1300 miles from Dayton to the Colorado front range in three days, making stopovers in Topeka and Pueblo. Yesterday about noon, when I headed up over the pass into the San Luis valley from Poncha Springs, I was struck by the yellow of the season-changing aspen leaves cast against the still deep green of neighboring conifers. Higher in the pass, aspen leaves were down. Winter is nearer there.

But no new snow in the mountains. Summer’s heat depleted the Sangre de Cristos of all of last winter’s remnants. I remember when I hiked here in July 2009, snow was still evident from the valley below. Not a whole lot, but some. By fall 2010, all snow had melted off.

Still, nights are getting colder here. Last week when I checked Crestone weather, lows were predicted in the mid-30s. Though highs were predicted in the sunny 70s, I expected to see frost sometime during my stay and looked forward to a morning fire in the hermitage stove.

One never knows how much rain one will experience in the desert foothills, here, just a dozen or so miles north of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. Last night, as I looked west across the valley toward the darkened San Juans maybe 80 miles off, lightning flashed over the distant peaks. Hours later after I went to bed, rain hit the hermitage roof hypnotically. As Thomas Merton observed, It is important to listen to the language of rain on the roof. It seemed more like music to me.

And then this morning, while taking my first look east up into the 14,000 feet peaks, the first of winter’s snow was evident in the higher elevations. Wow, I thought. So special!

I hope this to be a good omen for my writing.

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For more information on the Nada Hermitage -- an absolutely beautiful place for a multi-week retreat for whatever reason you can conjure -- see http://www.spirituallifeinstitute.org/Nada.html.

You could come! ;-)

Today’s elder idea: If we skip discipline, an unfruitful looseness and lethargy result. If we leave ourselves wide open, we will never find our way to genuine freedom.

from ‘The Value of Discipline’

Spiritual Life Institute

Nada Hermitage