Monument Valley - Part II

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park includes a visitor center and then a bumpy loop road that is best down with a higher clearance vehicle. The road meanders through rock formations that have been named: Western Mitten Butte, Eastern Mitten Butte, Elephant Butte, Camel Butte, Three Sisters, Totem Pole. The mind tends to leap to familiar forms when looking at the rocks against the sky….and we want to name what we are seeing. I always wonder if naming a rock formation after a familiar form reduces our perception of the details of the formation just as a stereotype about a group of people reduces our perception of the specifics about an individual. So - I decided to just include an unlabeled slideshow from Monument Valley in this post.

Desert Collages - March 2013

Today is a savoring of the vacation I had back in March in Arizona. I’ve made some collages of desert images.

Barrel cactus, lizards, cholla fruit, the edges of aloe, lichen. The eye searches for anything that is not the color of sand. The very sparseness of the desert highlights the shapes and colors.

The sky seems bluer in the desert. The tall spires of the desert spoon are not colorful but their shapes are classics of the desert.

And what about the saguaros and aloes. All the shades of green are there. One even has leaves outlined in white.

So - hear I am more than a month after the vacation - still enjoying the time in this place very different from the lushness of Maryland.