The electric co-op magazine we get every month, Texas Coop Power, has an article this month by Kaye Northcott, "Blessed Are the Watchers," about Sandhill Cranes and Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas High Plains. Located seventy miles northwest of Lubbock, this is the oldest national wildlife refuge in the state.
Northcott found her inspiration in a novel by Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, to find and watch these cranes in their winter feeding grounds here in Texas. Her quote from Powers' novel struck a chord with me too. "They (the crane) converge on the river at winter's end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands...the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter-step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it's a beginner's world again, the same evening as the day...when the migration began."
"Beginner's world again," there is the inspiration, the pull to get back to the beginning. The Bible tells us God put eternity in our hearts but now I'm feeling a strong pull back to the "beginner's world." Is that The Garden? Or possibly, my personal world of beginnings the Beatles sang about in "Yesterday?" Either way, this pull is making me sad, as looking backwards always does for me.
Get out those binoculars, girl! Adjust your perspective to see further and focus your eternity eyes on what lies ahead. "...consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." Romans 8:18
Northcott pens her own poetic phrase, "...hushed under a vast obsidian dome of stars." Obsidian? Now there is my word for the day. Ob-sid'-ian...a black volcanic granite. I've seen this volcanic black glass- looking rock. I get it...a blackest black dome over the earth full of stars. The kind of sky and stars we use to see out in the country before light pollution erased them. There ya go. The beginning world before mankind polluted it with too much light, and too much noise, and too much traffic, and too much too much!
I'm hooked and ready to go, to pack up and head out. We planned a trip to Big Bend about twenty years ago and still haven't made it. I got the road atlas out and I'm ready again. First Big Bend and then maybe Carlsbad, because I've never been to Carlsbad, then onto Muleshoe.
I'm ready to travel so I began to flip through the different states. I remembered that the DuBois reunion (a branch of my family tree I only recently discovered) is this month in New Platz, New York. Wow, that's only a few steps up the Hudson River from New York City, one of Mike's dream destinations. Look...Montreal isn't that much further. Wait, a trip to Montreal would be better during the summer to escape our Texas heat.
I think Mother Nature just went from driving this vehicle to taking a back seat.
Before long I've crisscrossed the whole country looking at old favorites, starting a new list of dream destinations and wearing myself out. That was fun but you know you're old when...dream travel wears you out!
