GrowIng Roses in the Clouds - A Safe Haven (revised and completed May 31)

 

Clouds clustering over the Sandia Mountains (in the distance), Albuquerque, May 19 - cellphone photo - 2025, DS.

"A cloud forest, also called a water forest, primas forest, or tropical montane cloud forest, is generally a tropical or subtropical, evergreen, montane, moist forest characterized by a persistent, frequent or seasonal low-level cloud cover, usually at the canopy level, formally described in the International Cloud Atlas (2017) as silvagenitus ('created from forest')."

- A misty, moisty, mossy forest is the stuff of European folklore and fairy tales... bringing to mind a spooky sort of magic. The true cloud forests (via Wiki) - generally found on cloud-covered mountaintops -  are mostly a phenomenon of tropical climates but they can also be found in temperate zones. The Appalachian mountains are a stunning example. But, can they exist in the American southwest?

Large cluster over the Sandia Mountains, Albuquerque, May 26 - cellphone photo 2025, DS.

Probably not. But, I can dream... and I can wonder about the frequent cloud clusters that seem to stretch over the Sandia mountains, regardless of the weather. The photos above was taken during a bright respite after 2 days of rain but the Sandia cloud phenomenon was the first thing I noticed upon visiting New Mexico and it continued to amaze me all through my peak travelling days.

As for the cloudscapes - or cloud terrains - on top of the Sandia mountains, see the collection of photos linked to from this page, and see if you can find evidence of one. (There is!)

Large cluster over the Sandia Mountains, Albuquerque, May 26 - cellphone photo 2025, DS.

"Monteverde has unquestionably become one of Costa Rica's most popular draws, making it a must-do for 70,000 tourists each year. Its popularity is largely due to its many protected reserves, including the star of the show: the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve. Listed in National Geographic and Newsweek as one of the top cloud forest reserves in the world, the government even deemed it one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Costa Rica.

...Interestingly, its origins can be traced to Quakers who settled in the area in the 1950s. After fleeing the US to avoid the Korean War draft, the cool climate of Monteverde allowed them to set up dairy farms in the region."

- Via the article: Ultimate Guide to Monteverde: Costa Rica's Lost World. The photo of a suspension bridge inset left was found in the Wiki entry for the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve. Suffice to say, the world's cloud forests are allegedly vanishing... however, dreams of cloud cities begin to arise.

"Roses – native or naturalized wild roses, old roses (dating prior to the development of hybrid tea roses in 1867), and modern cultivars grow well in New Mexico. Perhaps you’ve admired them blooming in summer, in filtered light along mountain trails and in canyons, on abandoned homesteads or historic sites, and along irrigation ditches and streams, as well as in urban gardens."

- Excerpt from an illuminating article from the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. According to the article there are five species of wild roses native to New Mexico! The photo (Credit: Paul Rothrock) inset left is of an Asian, naturalized variety: Rosa multiflora. Allegedly, this beauty is considered an invasive species, but, in my estimation, if roses were invasive we would all live in paradise.

(Continued below the jump...)

Cinco de Mayo - the New Mexican Skies (revised & completed May 9)

Albuquerque clouds in May - cellphone photo - 2025, DS.

(Text added May 7)

This past Monday was Cinco de Mayo - the 5th day of the fifth month in the 25th year of the 3rd millennium. You might say, due to all the 5's, it was a golden day, and, coincidentally enough, one tradition of the holiday is kind of an unintended nod to the pentagonal golden spiral.

The China poblana, the colorful costume featuring a voluminous castor (circle skirt) worn by festival dancers - like the one inset left above (found here) - are really something to see in action. The circle skirts generate spiral shapes continuously as the dancer swirls through her routine. For a regular Phi festival view the short video below the jump break.

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Albuquerque clouds in May (#2) - cellphone photo - 2025, DS.

(Text added May 9)

I guess, in keeping with the times, it isn't too weird that this post has been almost completely revised before it was even finished. But, don't worry, I have no desire to address the "times" nor the shit-storms that (too) many of us are dealing with these days. My goal is to regain a vestige of mental equilibrium again and experience tells me there's only one place to go: back to the natural world. Some of my most serene moments in New Mexico were spent photographing the Sandia mountains, and, in ways, I'm doing the same again; but my view of the mountain range has changed... and, this time I'm obsessed with the clouds.

(Continued below the jump...)

Mystical Sandia Crest - The Lost Mountain

(Between the large cloud (in the image above) and the rooftops of human dwellings in the foreground is an unusual, undulating veil of mist striated with the sun's rays. Beneath the veil - stretched out from left to right and lying in shadow - is Sandia Crest, the main body of the Sandia Mountains. This is a cell-phone photograph shot in late March of 2018 while I was still living on the road. It is amongst my last photos of the Sandia Mountains. The rest will appear further on in the post: formally the last post of the Traveler & the Mountain series. (Part 1 & Part 2). Click on all images for larger view.)

***

"The sense of the sacred does not require any image of the gods. There will be no more gothic cathedrals built to exalt humankind to the heavens; no more prophets to lead humankind to the divine; and no more Holy Grails to entice humankind upon the Quest – we now have the sacred suffusing us en masse, manifesting as both the tangible and intangible. Our cultures are being finely renewed from the inside-out by a subtle vibration that has come to us through a myriad of emanations in different forms.

Our ancestors were aware that they lived in a sacred cosmos, where the physical world existed in communion with the unseen dimension which ensouled and sanctified it. There was no rigid line drawn between what was the inner world and what was external reality, because both domains were in correspondence. The individual human soul was a part of the greater sacred reality. And just as the sacred is an instrument of the human, so the human is an instrument of the sacred. The sacred worldview is one that accepts not only the metaphysical but also the magical and the mysterious – the magnificent wonder in everything and all. As the Greek Orphic Mysteries of 2,500 years ago spoke: ‘I am a child of earth and starry heaven, but my race is of heaven alone.’"

- Via Kingsley L. Dennis’s Reality Sandwich article: Magic Never Died: The Sacred is Still Alive.

"There is, we feel, something different about a sacred mountain which cannot be easily explained, something that makes it exceptional. It possesses a kind of energy that’s unique to itself, which can be sensed and felt as much as seen. It draws people to it…inexplicably, mysteriously: 'The power of such a mountain,' writes Lama Anagarki Govinda,
'is so great and yet so subtle that without compulsion pilgrims are drawn to the mountain from near and far, as if by the force of some invisible magnet, and they will undergo untold hardships and privations in their inexplicable urge to approach and to worship the sacred spot. Nobody has conferred the title of sacredness upon such a mountain; by virtue of its own magnetic and psychic emanations the mountain is intuitively recognized to be sacred. It needs no organizer of its worship; innately, each of its devotees feels the urge to pay it reverence.'"

- Via a 2017 Graham Hancock article written by Dustin Naef: Mount Shasta: California’s Mysterious Mountain.

***

The mountain lies in its own protected dimension.

It asks nothing from the world of women and men... 

except, perhaps, their acknowledgement... and wonder.

It does not ask for reverence... and, yet, it is revered by all those who witness it. It has little contact with humanity... and, yet, its presence orders human lives.

Found flying above the Sandias 2 days ago. DS

For instance, the mountain orders the weather.

It orders tides where there are none... and clouds where there are many.

It orders birds... and birds are made.

Although the mountain does not order the sun, it sometimes orders the clouds to appear in the setting sun's nightly stage production... a very colorful event!

But, in the end, the Sandias serve a larger, mythological purpose...

Back to the Mountain

It snowed in the Sandias the other day for the first time this season - you might say my third "saison en enfer" - and, although I had just shot some mountain photos over the weekend (above and after the jump) well, I had to drive back. It is, after all, both my mission and my pleasure (emphasis on pleasure).

Speaking of which, and for the record, I'm holed up in a motel again... attempting to recuperate from a respiratory infection that's been going around as of late. It's one of the hazards of the road. More human contact = more human contagions. Can't get around it. 

The good news is that I'm sleeping in a real bed again. (Ah, the luxury!) And, for this brief respite, I have a benevolent cousin and her husband to thank, who (graciously) contributed to the "cause" (i.e., my survival) this Christmas; thereby prompting me to amend this statement from my previous post: "because, quite literally, it is my friends, and only my friends, who are currently keeping me alive." In reality, family members, too, are a portion of our human equation. You'll have to forgive me; no longer having an immediate family, I forget this at times.

On the other hand, for the sake of accuracy, perfect strangers sometimes arrive out of the blue, too, lending a helping hand when least expected. For instance, at one of my lowest points earlier in the survival game, a man I never met nor even saw before suddenly approached me while I sat in my vehicle in a department store parking lot, handing me $40 (!) and saying: "Homelessness can happen to anybody." I wouldn't take his money at first, but he wouldn't take no for an answer, briskly getting in his car and driving away before any of this could register. Later, I wondered, could this have been an angelic encounter? But, no, I'm fairly certain now - despite his timely (but unwarranted) generosity - he was, indeed, a human. It took some time for me to process the information, but, well, there you have it. Humans can be unbelievably kind with no ulterior motives at all. File that in your memory banks for a rainy day...

The Mountain and the Traveler (w/ addendum - 1/1/2018)

Sandia Crest in a morning mist.
(Click on photos - above and below the jump -  for enlarged views.)

"Every morning, thousands of Pueblo people in New Mexico offer their prayers to Sandia Mountain, which towers over the Rio Grande valley. "It has been very difficult to get the outside world to understand what Sandia Mountain means to our people," says Sandia Pueblo governor Stuwart Paisano. "It is central to our identity, religion, oral history, and songs. It is a source of life and healing to us, and we have a sacred duty to protect and preserve it."

- From an article found here.

"This is the secret. And this is the power symbolized by the mountain, which grasps and gives shape to the Creative. The Chinese consider the mountain a cosmic phenomenon; not merely an accumulation of earth and stones, but a center - we might say a center of magnetic and electric forces.. Something happens in and around a mountain. Life congregates, vapors rising from the earth condense there; from the hood of the fog that covers the mountain rains dash down to earth to make earth fruitful... A living organism covers the mountain like a thin green skin... All life rejoices in the mountains solidity, and the great power of the mountain nourishes all life."

- Excerpt from Richard Wilhelm's Lectures on the I Ching.

"Throughout history, mountains have symbolized constancy, eternity, firmness and stillness. Mountain tops, notes J.C. Cooper, "are associated with sun, rain and thunder gods and, in early traditions of the feminine godhead, the mountain was the earth and female, with the sky, clouds, thunder and lightning as the fecundating male." On the spiritual level, observes Cooper, "mountain tops represent the state of full consciousness." Cooper notes that pilgrimmages up sacred mountains symbolize aspiration and renunciation of worldly desires."

"Mircea Eliade in Images And Symbols, emphasizes the mountain as the center of the earth. He says that the "peak of the cosmic mountain is not only the highest point on earth, it is also the earth's navel, the point where creation had its beginning." This mystic sense of the peak, writes Cirlot, "also comes from the fact that it is the point of contact between heaven and earth, or the center through which the world-axis passes."

- Two quotes found on this page.

***

Most days I wake up just before dawn in a kind of amnesia. Where am I? Then slowly it comes to me that I am not in my bedroom... nor any room at all.

I look up at the fading stars. How did I get here? But, then, I reach up my hand and touch the windshield of my car... and remember. This is my home. I'm a nomad now... a traveler.

I sit up, gathering myself around me... tissues of lives both past and present as palpable as the blanket and garments which are wound around my altered frame. I take one look at my face in the rear-view mirror - haggard but presentable -  and then tilt it back in place. A rose-colored dawn is beginning to suffuse the rear window. I turn the key in the ignition... the engine hums. Time to move on.

Most mornings it's just me and the ravens. They've become accustomed to me now and they know, despite the larger size of my black vehicle, I am really somewhat like them. Road-runners, hares, coyotes... I imagine they all realize that the human they've encountered is likewise wild, solitary... and merely bent on surviving. They have nothing to fear. Not even the small rectangular weapon this human carries is deadly. Well, it doesn't shoot bullets at any rate.

But, it goes without saying, that the minute I lift my camera, the birds and animals scatter. Anything in the hands of a human is suspect...