Through Fresh Eyes

Every so often I get lucky and things that I take for granted become new again. The past few days have been full of those moments, thanks in large part to my playing tour guide to a few of my colleagues from the east coast. In no particular order, here’s what I marveled at once again.

Lizards – My visitors and I walked on a little trail bordered by a wall, when one cried out in excitement, "Lizards!" She had spotted two New Mexican whiptail lizards running along the wall. For a time, my children kept one of these as a pet, feeding her live crickets and all. How do you sex a lizard? I don‘t have any pretensions of being a herpetologist, but with a New Mexican Whiptail it is easy because they are all female. Parthenogenesis in nature – awesome.

Night sky – even though John Fleck’s Twitter feed alerted me to the fabulous moon and Venus coupling on Friday night, we missed it! No matter, as my visitors revelled in the sight of the baby moon and our dark night sky later on, reminding me that it is indeed a treat to live where one can see, as one of my favorite philosophers would put it, “the starry heavens above me.”

Dirt – When you see adobe walls every morning as you're drinking coffee, it is easy to overlook what an incredibly brilliant thing it is to use this material for construction. Dirt and clay and straw, plus a little cooking in the sun produces something that is sustainable and beautiful. What more could one ask for? (Well, okay, low maintenance would be nice…)

Education – As anyone who has ever been a teacher or professor knows, one of life’s greatest pleasures is to connect with a student after he or she has moved on to other things.

This weekend I got to witness this from two angles. First, as a guest lecturer at the UNM Sign Language Interpreting Program, I spoke to a classroom full of lexical semantics students. What a kick to chat with students taking a class I took myself many years ago! More gratifying was the opportunity to publicly thank a professor who changed my life. Thanks again to one of UNM's true treasures, Professor Phyllis Wilcox!

The next evening, I watched this scene out in a different way when my colleagues and I met up with a graduate of our program who has settled in Albuquerque. What a delight to see my quiet and shy colleague grin with pleasure at her student’s success here in Albuquerque! (And what a good thing it is to see a student with an undergraduate degree in philosophy gainfully employed...)

Bosque – whenever I’ve been away from home, the first thing I do to reconnect is to take a walk in a section of the Rio Grande bosque that I’ve been taking daily walks in for over a decade. It rejuvenates my spirit in incalculable ways. Most times, I notice the small changes, the minutiae. I note the shoots of green poking up through the litterfall, a newly sheared branch, or animal tracks dried in the dirt.

Sharing this walk with a colleague reminded me again of the big picture - the marvelous color palette that is the winter bosque. The burnished red willow twigs against our blue blue sky, the soft straw hues of the dried bosque grasses, and the elusive changing color of the rio as it rushes past, create a sensory experience that is beautiful and soul-satisfying.