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Full Sky
Beyond the heartbeat or the drumbeat
there is a rhythm to this rock
to this planet that sustains us and a rhythm to
the desert, where the earth’s stone skeleton
juts from its granular skin like fractured bones.
People living here before us: Chemehuevi, Cahuilla, Serrano
looked down at the chia and buckwheat
looked out at the granite and mesquite
looked up and into the sheet of sky
to know their home.
We who work in the national park also strive to know this place
and understand its genius loci, identifying plants and animals
the traces left behind by others, and the geologic features
so that we can speak about these things before the language is lost.
Before we lose sight of what is fading:
The scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein.
We are mandated to provide for the enjoyment of the same while we
leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.
Our future generations: our children, grandchildren,
nieces, nephews, the unborn.
People living here before us: Chemehuevi, Cahuilla, Serrano
looked into this sky to monitor their progress
around our closest star, the sun.
Long before we could choose among a thousand
calendar themes: swimsuits, surfers, songbirds, sailboats, superheroes
stacked on shelves in megamediastores
the act of tracking seasons and days of the year
was a sacred task.
For the desert Indians
knowing where they were in the sky was a matter of survival
signaling the time to hike into the mountains
leave before the summer heat bore down on them. It meant
synchronizing their movement with the appearance of acorns
or the migrations of a herd.
This knowledge has faded.
Witness: an astronomer friend at the Griffith Observatory told me this:
the Northridge Earthquake of January 1994
shut off the flow of electricity to thousands of people’s homes.
That night, it was pitch dark.
Hundreds called the observatory to ask,
What are those strange little lights in the sky?
Before the language is lost, before the darkness fades
turn off unneeded lights, shield the ones that burn
learn the names of constellations and teach them to the young.
Corona Borealis, Scorpius, Hercules, are visible now,
revealed in the night’s canopy as we rotate and face away from the sun.
Sagittarius, Aquarius, the Milky Way Galaxy, still fill the sky from which we breathe,
that sky into which we all exhale.
Though these stars may no longer guide our actions, signal a time to leave or
lead us to a source of food, we can look to them for a sense of where we are,
what we want to be, and listen to their rhythms as we circle around and around,
each moment another possibility.
Bio:
I have worked as a park ranger in the education office of Joshua Tree National Park since 1999. I present environmental education programs to students throughout the Morongo Basin, Coachella Valley, and as far west as Hesperia. Prior to this position, I worked as the Museum Educator at the Hi-Desert Nature Museum in Yucca Valley, a Desert Studies Outreach Instructor for the Palm Springs Desert Museum, and for the Morongo Unified School District. I moved to the desert on Halloween night, 1987, in a drenching thunderstorm.
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