Connecting at the Baderville Praire Dog Colony
Just a few feet from busy Highway 180, not far from the noisy traffic and near the turn-off for the Arizona Snowbowl, there is a place close to the city, yet far removed from city strife.
I come to this place and find my rock — the largest rock in the shade of the ponderosa pines close to the fence. I sit on the ground, leaning back against the pitted volcanic rock, and feel the secure earthy support of this resting place. I sink softly into the ground and smell the pungent earth. I rest my hands in the dusty dirt and let my fingers till the loose soil. The earth feels good.
My sight is soothed by the colors of the red Indian paint brush and the yellow sunflowers. My eyes are drawn upward to the floating, frothy, endless sea of blue sky and while clouds. The bold white tips of the San Francisco Peaks part the airy sea. The hawks and crows are weightless in the light swells above.
Across the field I see the prairie dog mounds and then the prairie dogs. One alter another, the mounds become perches for the emerging prairie dogs, running from their burrows to find seeds, to greet one another, to play in the warm sun. These are fat prairie dogs, who have ancestors that lived here over 200 years ago, who have survived many seasons of the hawks overhead, and the coyotes and foxes that traverse their home ground. I have seen the hawks and the coyotes and the foxes and more. Here in this place there are jack rabbits and skunks and horny toads and birds, all of them thriving and busy. Busy with their struggle for life, and something more. They are connected. Connected intimately to this ground, to this air, to this place and to one another. Connected to life.
I hear their song, their hymn of gratitude for this place and this day. Here. And now. They sing. I hear the yipping, excited chorus of the prairie dogs, and the lilting, merry refrain of the birds. They sing for this place. For here and now. They are grateful, for they know that they need this place.
And when I leave, I know a secret that the prairie dogs know, that the birds sing about: We ALL need this place. The human soul needs a place that is more than the resources and profit that we can take from it, more than recreation, more than aesthetics. The human soul needs a spiritual place — a place to rejoice in our connection to the created world.
Even though I must leave this place, I leave with a memory — not just the sights and sounds and smells that my mind recalls. My whole self has a memory of this place. My body has a memory — a knowing in my bones and in all of my flesh, the knowing of the coyotes who hunt here, the knowing of the prairie dogs who cultivate this soil. My heart has a memory — a sacred oneness with life.