Holy Places

No Celestial room has ever comparedto the stalk of yellow bluestem held in my son's teeththree-quarters of a mile into a Sunday afternoon walk, feathered seeds dancing with every step.Sometimes I think the worst thing we ever didwas divorce the earth from holiness—there is no greed beyond this treading down what is free in our eagerness for exclusivity.Thirty-five years since I was in my mother, always of her:there is no parent I would rather claim than this world.I will not number creation one, two, one, two, you are sacred, you are not. How could I ask for a holier blessing than this August washingof feet by January's melted snowstorms, come downover forty-nine thousand feet of tumbled stone for me?Don't offer me my own family, forever (I have them now) if you cannot throw in peachy five-o'clock light.Raise me red-tailed hawks, chanterelles, pinyon pine—I might listen.I don't want a world too wonderful to imagine: I want this one.What sacraments have I passed up on the straight and narrow freeway to salvation?I once asked my father-in-law the name of the delicate silver-blue plantsthat mound into the Idaho distance, so lovely I ached.Nothing but sagebrush. Show me, then, the border of Eden.