56: Giving Stories Life

Walking north by northeast on top of the retaining dirt crescent shaped dam that overlooks the city of Las Cruces, my story continues to unfold. Shadows until given life. I celebrate story. I live in ceremony—awed by the magnificence that story holds. To my right, on the horizon, the majesty of the Organ Mountains are shadowed by the brilliance of the morning sun shining onto the fertile Mesilla Valley—home to the Río Grande, my foremothers and fathers, my family, sibling’s descendants and their descendants not yet born. Still to my right, below the horizon, at a close distance, two gravel pits scar the Chihuahuan Desert’s soul while housing developments tattoo its skin. To my left, the crescent dam protects New Mexico State University’s unnaturally green golf course and campus from the hundred-year flash flood that will come eventually; further west, at the foot of the Valley are Tortugas and Mesilla Park. Still to my left, at a distance, below the horizon, my sideshadow walks with me as it barely darkens the desert next to the unnatural green grass carpet. It follows me at a distance far below, never letting me forget that my sideshadow is simply a metaphorical tool to understand the complex infinity of story. Each sideshadow has its own back-shadow—its history, which, in turn, creates its own unique foreshadow—its future. How the future unfolds depends always on the stories we commit to tell when we commit ourselves to listen (Morson, 1994). All who are in the path-rays of the morning sun cast their living shadows. My sideshadows and all the stories they represent are still, humbly I say, an infinity of one. There are many more in this one valley, in this one space. The sideshadow I cast, on top of this huge unnatural shadow-mound melds with the early morning play of light upon the land stretching onto the panorama of another spring day in the Chihuahuan Desert; my terrain of engagement where my stories give to make of my life what it is today.