Finding Flow

Humans live moment by moment against the backdrop of deep time — of outer space and the geological history of our planet. Despite this, our existence here is far from temporary. Extractive technologies driven by capitalism have engendered enormous changes to our planet and its atmosphere. In “From Earth to Orbit: Excavating Time,” Naomi Ortiz offers an essay interweaving poetry, prose, and paintings, feeling through these different places where time is manifest. In doing so, they show how we can find joy and resilience with one another and our fellow creatures.

BY NAOMI ORTIZ

This desert was once an ocean
water lines mark mountain ridge
dry bajadas now silt stretch to floor
millions of years ago
or the period elders tell of earth-making spirits
depending on how you measure time

In the desert
packrat middens
carved under messy spreads of nopal pads
round and pancake flat
laced in thorns
conceals burrow dug deep
with collected pee-encased artifacts
that tell us the desert is not that old 

What made a person
think to carbon date objects and plant matter
coated in dried, gelatinous animal bodily fluid?

My family drives over cracked asphalt through small mountains and rocky cliffs. Old mines pocket the hillsides like gaping mouths, all talk, not much follow-through. Except now, with satellites and deep earth core samples they come to claim more. In the hunt for copper, multinational conglomerates pick up from where prospectors left off. No longer a human endeavor with picks and shovels but machine labor drills 8,000 feet deep. Makes craters that collapse the land a mile and a half in on itself. Imploding a landscape into a waste pit. 

The metal I criticize plink plinks in the engine of my truck as it cools from the long drive here. We camp amongst the creosote and ocotillos uphill from an intermittent river and on the other side of a narrow mountain from a mine. Even from miles away, the lights that tower from cranes wash out the stars, but we pick out those that blaze through and can still be seen. In the desert darkness, amongst coyote song, we try to remember their stories. The ones made popular by Greek mythology and the ones passed to us as secrets or in dreams. We cook a simple dinner over a small fire. The shadows of cacti stretch long. This might be an unexceptional place, not like the centers of culture and creation like Oak Flat, but the sounds like tiny bells or shells murmur through the river basin, water-blessings permeate the air surrounding thousands of feet.