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The Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve, Layton Utah

My mother grew up less than a mile from what is now a Nature Conservancy preserve on the Great Salt Lake. This landscape has fresh water and salt marshes, ten foot high grasses, ponds and pools, mudflats and fields. The colors and textures change constantly throughout the year, so every visit is a surprise. I have never been to the cemetery where my mother is buried (just a few miles north of this place) but coming here feels like the best way to commune with what was my mother’s earthly substrate.

The preserve is also an important stopover for all kinds of migrating birds, a rest area for pilgrims winging their way from Canada to Central and South America. How appropriate. Many creatures come here before continuing on journeys that cycle rather than terminate, perpetuate rather than complete. This spot is my personal sanctuary of remembrance, my way of staying connected to what has been.

And lucky for us, there are so many ways to do that. It is often hard to describe, and sometimes you just have to be with it rather than talk about it. I had that feeling over and over during my time in Utah and New Mexico. Two weddings, each with specific rituals to sanctify and seal. The desert landscape, full of evocation and imagination. The quiet power of the little village that harbors El Santuario de Chimayó, a pilgrimage site outside Santa Fe. Crosses. Saints. Roadside altars. It is an immense net of remembrance and sacredness.

In All Things Shining, authors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explore how literature can help us reconnect passionately with the world. They take us through a tour of meaning from the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Augustine, Dante, Kant, Melville and David Foster Wallace. (The chapter on Moby Dick should be required reading.) In redefining what is sacred, they quote DFW:”You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or to try to define it in terms of what it is not.”

Dreyfus and Kelly add this point:

This glancing approach is inclined towards reconciliation instead of purification. It involves a fully human notion of the sacred that lives not in the repudiation or transcendence of pain and boredom and anger and angst, but rather in the recognition that these difficult aspects of our existence live together with the sacred moments, that they complete one another, and make sense of one another.

Meaning is afloat, in the grasslands of the Great Salt Lake and the desert skies over Chimayó. Leaning into reconciliation rather than purification feels right to me.

Inside a church in Chimayó

Altar in Chimayó

Remembrance in Chimayó

Crosses on a fence in Chimayó

After enough years, the crosses placed on this tree have become embedded in the bark

Desert sky (This is not painted. Amazingly.)