Heavens and Howls

These storm clouds cleared away by the next morning, and the skies were a brilliant, cloudless blue all day October 9. One of the people in my class, Bill, said it would be a great evening for star-watching and invited several of us to join him just after the evening reading, after dark but before moonrise, for a brief star party.

We made our way out into the middle of the alfalfa field. The Milky Way stretched in a great arc from Kitchen Mesa to somewhere north of Pedernal, and grew milkier as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. Bill guided us as we found the North Star, then several other constellations (including a couple of new ones for me). Then he showed us the approximate place where the center of our galaxy is, and a hazy brightness that he identified as Andromeda Galaxy, the furthest thing that can be seen with the naked eye. Millions of light years away.

In the middle of the night, much closer than millions of light years, coyotes yipped and yowled and keened from the mesa just above our casita. The next morning, in the hazy dawn, I came upon a small rabbit as I walked from our casita to the library. I stopped. It stopped. I sang it a little song that I have been trying to learn from a Freyda Epstein recording: “Love is little, love is low, love will make my spirit grow.” It sat there and listened, then slowly hopped away, its tail glimmering in the dim morning like that faraway brightness, Andromeda.

Magical skies

Last time I was at Ghost Ranch, in early August, I could not stop taking pictures of hummingbirds at the feeder outside our casita. Now the hummingbirds are gone, and my focus has widened somewhat. This year, it’s the skies over Ghost Ranch that are thrilling me and compelling me to lift the camera and click. And I’m having a lot of fun playing with the Photostitch tool. This combination of two pictures is from this morning.

Ghost Ranch in the morning

This was the view at about 9:00 this morning as I wound my way up several switchbacks to meet my students at Coyote residence at Ghost Ranch. The day has been windy with occasional spatters of rain, clouds shifting and sometimes settling over Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pedernal. The temperature’s cooling. There is no place on earth like Ghost Ranch in autumn.