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reaching for the sky just to surrender
For reasons that I don’t understand, Leonard Cohen’s music became my personal soundtrack while I was on the dunes. I don’t mean that I was listening to the music through my phone. I mean that bits of his lyrics would appear in my brain from time to time, unbidden yet still welcome.
In this case, I heard the line “reaching for the sky just to surrender.” This yucca will lose its battle with the movement of the sand, as have the ones that were there before and the ones that will come after. All of them reach for the sky for a time before their inevitable acquiesce. It’s the way of things.
White Sands National Park, New Mexico
photographed 12.13.2025
it intersects past the end
The long shadows and the clouds above seem destined to meet, somewhere on the other side of the dunes, on the far side of the mountains, maybe in Mimbres or Silver City or even Upham. Or maybe they decide to stay there, on an alkali flat in the middle of the gypsum dunes…
White Sands National Park, New Mexico
photographed 12.14.2025




