Walking the Stations in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains

By Emmy Savage

Artist and writer Emmy Savage can't recall a time when she was happier than when she was hiking as a teenager in the High Sierra. So when she retired at sixty-five, she moved from her home in Maryland to the mountains of South Central Colorado to be closer to nature and to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mountain Bluebird Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985928310

Book preview

THE SOUL’S

GEOGRAPHY

2011

The Soul’s Geography - Illustration

The Soul’s Geography

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,

from whence cometh my help.

My help cometh from the Lord,

which made heaven and earth.

—Psalm 121

I once lived where jagged-edged mountains rose out of the earth. I came to live there because I needed a landscape that wouldn’t lie to me, a landscape where I could grieve and begin to heal. I wanted to walk in a place where I could notice the scent of piñon pines and juniper and cottonwood after a rain, a place where God was present in the chiming whir of the broad-tailed hummingbird, the raucous conversations among Clark’s nutcrackers, the alpine blue of columbine and sky-pilots, the living and dying Engelmann spruce. Noticing birds on the trail, a singing thrush or a scolding kinglet, breathing the scent of pine resin, and noticing the sound of wind and water became a kind of spiritual practice. In this exquisite and fragile landscape of South Central Colorado, walking became a celebration, a prayer of devotion, and an act of love.

When life drops us to our knees, we look for permanence and we look for home. And like the psalmist in Psalm 121[1], we look to the hills and we ask for help. And often when we do, we become like Saint John of the Cross when he began his dark night of the soul. We call out and no answer comes back to us. We can’t know how Psalm 121 was meant to be punctuated. In the King James Version (KJV), there is no question mark after help. It was only added in later translations and versions of the bible. Ancient texts that emerged from oral traditions had neither capital letters nor periods, commas, or question marks. Words ran together, one after the other, and without punctuation, Psalm 121 is ambiguous as to whether our help comes from mountains or from the Lord. But the psalm’s power and poetry is in its mystery and ambiguity. Why was I called to begin a spiritual journey in a mountainous and desert landscape? What connected me so profoundly to Psalm 121? Is there a presence in mountains we won’t find elsewhere? Would I find my help and my home in mountains or in the Lord, or both at once?

My father died of pancreatic cancer shortly before I moved to Colorado, culminating a long string of losses including my mother’s death and the dissolution of my marriage. At sixty-five, I moved to Crestone, a small community at an elevation of eight thousand feet that rests at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo and the edge of the San Luis Valley. It is a community that includes twenty-seven monastic and retreat centers and a population that values landscape and silence. I was still grieving for my father, and I thought that Crestone would offer me a place to heal.

I so yearned to make this place my home. But loss and death and loneliness continued to stalk me. In the years to come I discovered that my attachment to a landscape that could be hostile (and a community that could be unwelcoming) was ephemeral—even the earth wasn’t home to itself. The beautiful multicolored conglomerate rock that composes much of the Sangre de Cristo was actually formed from a much older mountain range that now no longer exists. And when climate change and destructive water-use policies altered the landscape with each passing moment, home became a tenuous interaction between a passing physical landscape and my own inner soul-scape.

During my first spring in the San Luis Valley, a season when temperatures can fluctuate wildly, and winds can gust up to sixty-eight miles per hour, I developed a Lenten practice of walking and keeping a journal. This harrowing season can upend assumptions and all sense of safety, and walking and writing helped me come to terms with loss, and ambiguities, with growing old, seeking forgiveness, and finding a modicum of grace in moving through each day.

For several months after I moved to Crestone, my nose bled. I felt faint, and my mind—as if searching for a signal—received random memories of places I had lived in or passed through: an old-growth forest filled with birdsong; a mountainside covered in grass, madrone, and redwood trees; a midwestern summer morning when the breeze is still cool and just strong enough to lift the edges of the curtains while a meadowlark sings from a fencepost.

All of my life I have looked for a landscape I could call home. I have moved more than thirty times in the course of my life: across the street, across town, across the country, across the world: New York, Maryland, South Carolina, California, Virginia, Iowa, Europe, Mexico, Micronesia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. When I was young it wasn’t difficult leaving a place I had called home. Doors closed, doors opened, and I moved on to new adventures. But now that I am old and alone, I grieve for the places I have passed through. At times, I am gripped with painful and random homesickness for, say, a beach in Maine where my son and I vacationed when he was a little boy, or a school bus stop in California that smelled of grapes and dust, or a thin white line of waves breaking against a reef in the middle of the Pacific.

It is night, and my father steps through the front door, the cold radiating from his Navy greatcoat. He scoops me up in his arms. It is summer and my mother and brother and I chop onions and ginger and plums for chutney while the black cat we called Worcester rubs the backs of our legs. I ride my bike across dry sycamore leaves and out into the orchards my first year at U. C. Davis. My grandfather shows us how to polish the very top apples in the bushels he will take to roadside market: Macintosh, Winesap, Jonathan, and Cortland. What does one do with such memories?

I have a friend who is in his seventies and has climbed all of the peaks that rise over Crestone. I like it here, he says, but it isn’t home. What would make it so? I wonder. He talks of going back to visit Tennessee, where his ancestors were born, but what would he find there now?

Most Americans live in a kind of diaspora. We move constantly. Schools change, kids grow up and leave home, jobs are lost or transferred, people divorce and move out, or become infirm and move in. Most of us, if asked, wouldn’t know at what part of the horizon the sun rose or set in its journey north in summer and south in winter, or at what time or where to look for Orion or the Big Dipper. We can get ourselves to Walmart, but where do we look for the pole star? And where will the moon conjoin with Venus in the winter sky?

Many of Earth’s people believe that the souls of their ancestors remain attached to the land they lived on. We had an End-of-Life Project in Crestone where, if I chose, I could be laid out in my own bed when I die, then transported to a burn site at the foot of the mountains and, in the presence of friends and neighbors, cremated on a bier of fragrant juniper—my soul released to the wide-open sky above, my ashes collected to disperse in one of our glacier-carved meadows.

People in Crestone have quaint ideas about the spirit world, energies, and souls. But ash is ash, dust is dust, and air is air. Where would my soul turn when released; to what place would it home? Would it turn towards the cemetery in Connecticut, where my family has been buried since the 1600s? Would it travel to my childhood home in Maryland where the old-growth trees have been lumbered or left for slash, the house razed, and the land turned into a county sand and gravel depot? Would my soul be confused and lost there, now that the songs of thrushes and whip-poor-wills have been silenced, and the light of fireflies extinguished? Or would it try to find its way to the house where my father died, the house the new owners tore down to build something bigger, or to my grandfather’s orchard, which was developed for tract mansions? I remind myself that mountains come, mountains go, seas encroach and recede. In geologic time, there is no resting place. There is no permanent landscape.

It wasn’t until many years after I moved to Colorado that I understood why I was called to walk in the Sangre de Cristo. The mountains taught me to make peace with loss, and change, and with impermanence. All those places that I’ve passed through that are gone, all those moments that made up my life and that will not come again, all those beings who loved me and have died, reside within me like a gift.

My New Home

My house sat on edge of the San Luis Valley, a valley the size of Connecticut and circled by mountain ranges. The valley exceeds even the mountains in scale, and larger than both is the sky. Historically, the San Luis Valley was a place of wetlands, artesian wells, and tall grass. But today, it is a high desert landscape of tumbleweed, rabbitbrush, cactus, greasewood, sand and dust. Shortly after I arrived, my closest neighbor informed me that this desert is man-made, an ominous pronouncement I come later to learn more about. At intervals the desert is penetrated by long riparian greenbelts of narrowleaf cottonwood trees that follow the creeks and arroyos and canyons draining the snowmelt and rainfall from the mountainsides. To the north of my house runs Willow Creek whose water and pulse become an intimate part of my life. The small portion of the valley where I lived is called the Grants, a flat, arid place that looks across the valley to the San Juan Mountains to the west and the Great Sand Dunes National Park to the south. And to the east, the great hovering presence of the Sangre de Cristo is less than a mile away, rift mountains rising almost vertically from the plain to elevations of over fourteen thousand feet.

I had only one friend in Crestone when I arrived, a small and skittish tabby tiger cat named Jasper Johns. Jasper had been with me through some difficult times, including my father’s death, and I depended on him for affection and emotional support. But he was beside himself about this move. He yowled the entire trip across the country from Maryland, and was appalled to find himself confined to a house in a desert full of danger. In Maryland he had had the run of the neighborhood where he quickly cleared it of feral tomcats. But here he was confined to a house empty of furnishings except a cat box and a sleeping bag. Things got a little better after the furniture arrived and we could snuggle on the couch while I watched movies. And then my friend Judy drove up from Texas to give me one of her rescue dogs as a hiking companion. Sarah was a red heeler-collie mix with the brains and loyalty of a heeler and a collie’s foxy good looks. Jasper was delighted and even tried to touch noses with Sarah. But Sarah made it plain that she didn’t like cats. After living with a gang of rescue dogs, Sarah not only wanted to be an only dog, she wanted to be an only animal. She coveted Jasper’s freedom to sleep on beds and couches and to snuggle next to me on the couch. As senior and privileged animal, Jasper began to look at his situation a little differently, although he was still depressed about not being able to go out.

My first summer in Crestone I fenced in a garden, had a painting studio built, found a friend who could teach me about the local birds, and though when it came, the winter was cold, the dryness and blue skies made it seem more like a celebration than an ordeal. Everything in my new home seemed to be turning out well. I took up skiing and snow shoeing, and although another new friend had to rush me sixty miles to the Salida Hospital at six in the morning for an emergency appendectomy, life seemed to be inching back into some kind of normalcy. But I should have realized that landscape is always shifting, and I had to let go of normal.

*  *  *

I came to Crestone, like Thomas Merton when he entered Gethsemane, seeking a life charged with the presence of God (1948, 191). However, if one is alert, one feels pretty quickly that this is a place with no indwelling benevolence. It is a place where, yearly, climbers fall to their deaths, and hikers are struck by lightning or drown in the lakes. It is a place where from loneliness or depression, people commit suicide. It is a place offering a dynamic of indifference and silence, of predator and prey, of nature at her most brutal and inhospitable, and now, it is a place where the gods of climate change grind exceeding small.[2] It is a place, if anything, charged with God’s absence.

My acknowledgement of my own fragility in this desert landscape began with the spring winds of 2012. The wind here begins in late winter and lasts into June or until the snow melts from Whale Hill Mountain. In short order after the wind arrived, it shredded the blue tarp covering my wood pile, shook my house, rattled the eaves, tore off the screens, left a film of dust over every surface inside my home, and penetrated and unsettled my sleep. The wind’s harsh wailing seeped its way through every chink and crevice, every un-tight window, every looseness and slackness. People and dogs kept to their houses, and Sarah and Jasper crouched in their beds. Outside I was reminded of avenging angels, the plagues of Egypt, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—scouring, hurling, and charging the sand-grit air with the force of hell itself.

Then, one fine warm day in March, the wind stopped to take a breath, and Sarah and I emerged from our house like blinking moles to warm ourselves in the sun. In the few calm days that followed, we were joined by a stray kitten whose energy sparked levels of exuberance in Sarah and Jasper the house couldn’t contain. I needed to finish some work in my studio and with judgment already impaired by my guilt over cooping Jasper up, I let Sarah and the two cats out on the front steps while I went to work. As I worked, I could watch Sarah and the cats from one of the studio windows looking back at the house. I could see what appeared to be cats jumping, tumbling, doing somersaults in the air, and a sleeping dog barely tolerating all the action. What I was seeing, as it turned out, was only one cat. When I returned from my work late in the afternoon, Sarah and the kitten were there, but Jasper was gone.

I put the kitten back in the house, and Sarah and I set out to look for Jasper. Overhead, a red-tailed hawk hung in the sky, riding the tides of air. The wind came up again as Sarah and I followed the trail over to Willow Creek with its riparian belt of cottonwood and juniper. I called Jasper’s name, and the wind hurled it back at me. The cottonwoods made mewing sounds as the wind rubbed their limbs together. Then Sarah dove into the woods, where on the forest floor she found a cat-shaped outline of grey fur and one white paw. I took the paw home and put it in a raku bowl with bits of sea glass.

Those days when the wind stopped blowing had seemed so sacramental, joyous, and peaceful. They gave no indication of danger or menace. But even sacred days must cede to the implacability of natural law, the wear by wind and water, fire and earth, and elemental hunger. The coyotes here are fast and ruthless and nothing is exempt from their attention. The loss of Jasper brought up all my other losses and I went into deep mourning.

*  *  *

After Jasper’s death, the kitten’s owners claimed her and took her back to the stables a half mile away. Now the house seemed unbearably empty. This was when I began keeping a Lenten journal and walking the Stations of the Cross that led up to Nada Hermitage, a Carmelite retreat center about two miles away. Together, walking and writing became a spiritual practice and thereafter, in the years that followed, expanded to include the natural world in all its seasons as well as memories I revisited as I walked. Thereafter my practice of walking and writing became my refuge and my home.

THE BEGINNING

OF DEVOTION

2012, 2013

The Beginning of Devotion - Illustration

Lent

Lent, it seems, is when winter really begins in the Sangres. The winds break across the valley, slam into the mountains, and create a whirling, spinning vortex of dust and fear.

Before I set out today and before the wind begins to blow, I watch the valley as the sun rises from behind me up the back slope of the Sangre de Cristo to the east. As I gaze to the west, a thin line of light wedges itself between the sky and the San Juan Mountains on the opposite side of the valley. The thin line illuminates the blue of the mountains and the yellow-beige of the valley floor. When the sun arrives at the crest of the Sangres, it boils over the clouds, casting shadows and striking the peaks with pale fire.

As I watch, a coyote stalks and flushes a rabbit. The rabbit is quick, the coyote fast. They zig and zag. The coyote gains and the rabbit disappears down a hole.

Then the thin strip of light widens and slips against the darkness like a tide. The darkness lightens until the whole valley becomes bright with sunlight and snow, rabbitbrush, and sand.

Undaunted, the coyote smacks his empty jaws, paces around the rabbit hole, and trots towards the sun.

Later, on a drive across the valley, I witness a herd of a thousand elk swirling tsunami-like across the road in front of me. They hurl themselves at the fence—some clearing it, others eddying on the barbed wire, flipping, falling, staggering up, and then bounding away and melting into the vast plain that absorbs them as if their passing, like a human life, is nothing and has indeed, never happened.

As part of my Lenten practice, I begin each day reading from the Book of Psalms, The Rule of Benedict (Chittister 2009), and The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Then Sarah and I leave my house in the Grants, walk up to Willow Creek and cross the still frozen water near where Jasper died. We cross the road to the stables where the kitten lives, and a ravine tracked by mule deer, bobcats, mountain lions, porcupines, and coyotes. Beyond the ravine, we climb the high desert path that leads to the Carmelites and pass, as we go, the Stations of the Cross that watch and wait at the foot of the mountains. Tucked in the hillsides and at bends either side of the trail, the Stations are marked with crosses, not life-sized, but big enough to crucify an eight-year-old child. They give an order and a sense of sanctuary to a landscape that offers none. When I walk by, I don’t think of the literal