Healing and Hanging in the Desert...

This Easter weekend we journeyed to the desert for our first camping trip since the accident. We packed up our gear and the dogs and headed out to the edge of Cedar Mesa in SE Utah. Our expectation - and our expectations are few these days - was to hang at camp and take some short strolls across easy slick rock or down a dirt road.

As it happens, a fellow desert rat gifted us with a rough map that depicted a hidden pictograph panel beneath the rim of the mesa. For those of you not familiar with the area, it was once inhabited by ancient peoples, 900-1200 years ago. Among other things, they left behind cliff dwellings, pottery shards and pictographs - drawings on the rock. Appropriately - this panel depicted birthing and Marilyn's hike and scramble to get there was just that - a rebirth of what she used to do and what we were so afraid that she had lost.

A link to that trip is here.
Click 'Start Slideshow' for the full effect with groovy music.

Longer desert treks and mountain peaks can't be far behind...

You can talk to Buddha and listen to his casual reply

If you know me, you know my living in Colorado is no random place, like where I happened to be born, but intentional because of its beauty and my love of the mountains. Gareth grew up here, but it has been his self-found love of these same things, with a greater intensity, that he possesses as a result. I have a level of respect for the mountains that is lost to him in his intensity of love for them (i.e. I couldn't climb or ski the peaks like he does). But I have claimed an intensity of love of the "products" (facial toners, moisturizers and cleansers that are too expensive for me to buy nowadays) which is greater than his, but then again, he is a boy! (Product girls, you know who you are and can relate, now imagine of you woke up with no product, no income and a super-great BOY telling you he will get whatever you need and your 1 oz. facial lotion is only available fifty miles away and costs fifty bucks... try justifying that over the local cheap"Dove" products... product girls, you know what I'm talking about! I hope you don't know but you can imagine the horror!)
So we had a long overdue camp trip to the Southeast Utah dessert over the weekend and it was much -needed by our psyches. We car- camped in the "Westy" and brought our doggies along. I slept great and I did walk with my love Gareth on a hiking trail that went down to the level below us so we could see petroglyphs and I can say for sure that I have not lost my love of hiking or of camping or of the outdoors! Being so immersed in such beauty helps a person forget the terrible things (like my physical challenges, though the trail reminded me) that may be going on around them. My mind finds these things so much more beautiful than I have ever thought and every camp trip I go on will be that much more appreciated as a result. Colorado is where I can be found, thankfully!