Arizona landscape driving east from Flagstaff to Santa Fe: a flat plain interrupted by shallow ravines, the occasional wash, plateaus, mesas; dotted with pastel, mute, sagey green shrubs large and small. The occasional tree. The colors of the land, various and multitudinous: greys, siennas (burnt and raw), ochres, umbers, oranges, reds. On the whole, unsurprisingly warm.

Ahead, something that lies visible but which I can never reach, tantalizes with its unknowns, its questions: the horizon, a flat line like that which separates, yet holds together, ocean and sky, as if without it they would burst apart and anything and everything would be flung off, ejected, torn into the vacuum of space.

Very much a ranchers’ landscape and, once a wilderness where buffalo freely roamed, and the Navajo with them (or so I might imagine).

Railroad tracks paralleling Interstate 40, and a miles-long train, its individual cars bound together with an invisible string stretching from coast to coast, like a necklace encircling the throat of our mother, Earth.

Signs for Indian gifts, moccasins.
Earlier: “Petrified Wood From the Forest”
“Rugs”
“Indian Ruins Gas This Exit Save”
“Indian Ruins Exit Don’t Miss It”
“Indian Center”

Here is one of the loveliest, most enchanting landscapes I’ve ever experienced. Today the air so clear. The horizon crisp.

Does a horizon have a beginning or ending? Does it simply go on forever, an arc around a human body? A halo played like a hoola hoop, as well as a symbol of divinity, rather than just worn as a crown?