Years ago I drove through this landscape and was in awe of it’s drama, starkness, and power. Yet at the same time realizing it was fragile especially when confronted with our desire to use and transform the earth with the least bit consideration for the life of the place before our needs.

I was struck by the beauty this place possessed when so little of the things we made possess beauty. The exchange of nature’s beauty, it’s truth, for the things we made seemed an inconceivable loss when looking at the strip malls and generic subdivisions we gained from it’s destruction. Where was the beauty to be found in the things we make? Perhaps we had forgotten how to make things of beauty. Perhaps we did not know how anymore.

These thoughts led to the initial research of my PhD….beauty was not really talked about in the academic World at that point. Beauty was seen as trite, mostly because beauty cannot be defined. Beauty slips by our need to confine knowledge in facts or lists instead of sensed Truth.

Earlier this week I was here again. Still impressed by the power, the immenseness of the experience. Beauty still lives here. In color, earth, sky, air, scent and song. We simply need to be to know it.