Someday I’ll learn the identities of clouds. Buy the chart, memorize their qualities and forms, and then watch the flowing sky afresh. This is, after all, yet another strand of mapping.

From childhood, I’ve absorbed maps. Mind travel. Concepts augmented by photographs and writings, which have often furnished a sense a such familiarity that when I arrive in a new place, strangers stop me to ask directions, even on my inaugural visit. Foliage, waters, buildings, and people fill in the lines of his maps as they stretch toward some new border. But this move, with its desert, has been an exception. Nothing’s been predictable or particularly comforting. Besides, I experience a vague agitation when venturing to the edge of my known universe. If possible, when visiting new locale, I push out a few miles further, to determine what’s over the next ridge or river — or at least down the road — as if to anchor myself within some context, rather than remain at its periphery. Curiously, I feel more secure when placing that border at some shoreline or rise — countryside, at the least — rather than within seemingly endless tracts of housing, factories, stores, and pavement. Even a round earth has places where monsters may lurk. Gaps exist in any map. Consider the clouds. Everything is, after all, changing. Even that rock, where Kokopelli is sitting.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

Any workplace holds confidences you can never reveal. Not that you don’t want to expose company secrets. Then, considering the office computers, fax machines, and photocopiers, you realize they’re incapable of guilt. They simply do their job — and you might find that unsettling.

Whenever I do manage to tap genuine emotions regarding this employment, no one’s more shocked than myself. Take something as simple as a pane of glass between my desk and the trees outdoors. Even on my job in Appalachian mountains, I wanted a window. One the size of a book would suffice, although a picture view would be preferred. I’ve always appreciated a panorama, a sense of precisely where I fit into the weather of a particular day. Instead, I feel trapped underground, half-buried in regulations and routine. Only a band of natural light at the far end of the fluorescent-and-steel expanse hints of sun, moon, sky, or clouds — and even that aperture is tinted. Why are my hours on the job so cut off from the rest of life? “We may as well be coal miners in carbonized veins or muscular razorbacks sweltering in midnight foundries. Is it only the sun we miss? Examine the calendar. Check on the moon’s phase.”

I could just plot my escape. I am surrounded by desert. Trek there alone. Right to the heart.

He recall the words of another friend who spoke of the paradox of Zen Buddhist freedom: the very limitations the practice imposes also lead to an extraordinary freedom. An individual who’s free in the Spirit can be placed in prison and yet not be captive — persecuted and yet unbowed — denounced and still spotless.

The Dedicated Laborious Quest, as my Teacher taught, is a truly free way.

Free, yes, with the labor.

I pick up the phone and hear Kokopelli’s whistle. He wants us to get going. Then tells me of the dance where we’ll be playing.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

As I listen, I realize the locals don’t consider the surrounding ridges to be mountains. Although these “foothills” or just plain “hills” are as tall as Pennsylvania’s Alleghenies, shorn of trees, to speak of “mountains” signifies that one must drive away into forest. The time comes to hike in unfamiliar high country.

I drive west, into a mountain pass, and park at the trail head.

Climbing through clouds on Sheep Lake Trail, I identify snow lilies, phlox, two whistling marmots I mistake for groundhogs, and a ptarmigan. In these topless mountains, snow and rocks glimmer atop jagged white threads that twist, plunge, and roar over miles. In this clarity I recount a friend’s determination to perceive the important task to perform each day — a focus she achieved in the sunset of her young death. Go on.

The next outing, I follow another friend’s favorite trail. My valley of orchards and meadows stretches behind in a twilight of small-city lights and barren blue ridges. In golden splay dusk, I learn to fear glaciers atop volcanic spines and in their grooved depths, too. So much depends on which way you turn. Clouds, one moment pink, shift into slate-blue. Think of a great-uncle’s farm in Ohio flatlands when green-wood ringed the fields and autos were novelties; and how, when the United Brethren in Christ build their new sanctuary, one tree furnishes enough lumber for all the pews. Such timber is long gone from most of the Midwest, and nearly gone here, as well.

Strangely, adjusting to such disorientation can allow one to see more than the landscape with fresh eyes. I begin reckoning my birthplace afresh, too. I perceive a native poetry now vanished: in flat terrain they coined Sweet Potato Ridge Road when they became sensitive to what had been called Nigger Pike, after work crews that came out from the workhouse jail in the city; Diamond Mill Road was made of limestone gravel flecked with quartz or mica, but named for the distillery beside the rails. What could be in those rural lanes I had sped along on the way to the farm to cause their ghosts to arise out here? I think, too, of the hayloft I had delighted climbing in, even though the old folks feared I’d fall through and be trampled by cattle; more ominously, some shed rafters I walked like a high-wire artist had hogs rummaging below, with razor snouts and teeth and a latent taste for blood. That farm acreage is scarcely like these Western orchards or open ranges, yet something echoes. It’s earth and air. Sunshine and clouds. My days in the mountains are airy conifers. I could be a pioneer, in spirit, at least. My ancestors settled those Ohio tracts. Another line, a bit earlier, settled North Carolina Piedmont. Here, I find unspoiled corners.

Perhaps bears do drink beer. Rocks, leap from mountaintops into oceans. Naked breasts, swell from snowmelt pool to sky.

Against this wall, between his desert and the frigid sea current, I declare my vast ignorance: left to myself, I’d likely starve, soon sicken of berries, and have never caught fish properly or gutted a rabbit. Somehow, I wait to be fed. Thus, one point of my Dedicated Laborious Quest involves learning to be wholly myself — embracing flaws as well as talents, as I search out my own boundaries.

Away from the office and encircled by an ever-renewing earth — even an apparently lifeless desert that restores his sanity and a brand of insanity, too — you may find that every trail you follow brings you closer to your own attainment, your emerging sense of place and mission within the universe. As for looniness — ah, loco! — you soon appreciate how all are in some way at least un poco, indeed.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.