This beautiful photo Meadow Mists is by displaced soul on Flickr. Check out all of displaced soul's photographs. They are really beautiful. See the set entitled Land of Enchantment, which is what New Mexico is called.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. --William Blake

We are up at dawn to go cut wood. They say when you cut wood, it warms you three times before you ever even get around to burning it--once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you stack it. But this morning is cold, and I didn't bring my jacket. "You'll warm up once we get going," Dennis says. He is the wood cutter in the family, wielding the Stihl chainsaw that still makes me nervous with all those steel teeth, it's rip cord brain, it's gasoline breath. It seems a little too eager for an arm or a leg when all it gets is a mouth full of tree sap. I keep a wary eye on it.

I am the stacker. Me and the kids. We pile the fresh cut logs into the back of the truck until it's full. But they're at their dad's this weekend.

The clouds are hanging low, so low they settle on the buffalo grass until they are embraced by the drought-brown blades. The morning is all wrapped up in lamb's wool, strangely insulated. Usually the sun is so bright here you have to wear a hat, a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and boots, even in the heat of summer, just to not get eaten up by it. I'm talking devoured. One look around at the weathered fenceposts, weathered barns, weathered sunflowers, weathered blackbirds, weathered coyotes, weathered faces of the people who've lived here close to the sun for a very long time at something like 6,400 feet above sea level and higher, and you'd understand what I'm talking about.

I'm sitting on the tail gate of the truck, drinking my coffee, watching the mist walking between the Ponderosa like long-legged, silver giants. The idea that I have a whole thermos full of the hot, black elixir is making up for the fact that my polarfleece jacket is draped over one of the pine chairs in my dining room at home, a place that might as well exist in a whole different universe from where I am right now with the mist settling on my face in ozone-tinged droplets. I close my eyes, hear the argent ghosts murmuring, but I can't make out the words. Lick my lips. The taste of clouds and coffee is not unpleasant. I take another sip of the scalding stuff and watch the heelers disappear down the Forest Service road, squeezing through the weathered gate that hangs at a crazy angle between two weathered fence posts that aren't long for this world. The sister dogs travel side-by-side, like they are yoked together, and disappear into the shimmering curtain of white.

I step off of the back of the truck, and walk towards the gate. Stretch my hand out just on the other side, across the uneven top where the sun has been cribbing, naughty boy. And for a moment, I hope he gets a case of the colic. I try to touch the mist. But it disappears beneath my fingertips. Swirls and dissipates into mystery. I wonder what is on the other side of that gate, and where my silly dogs have gone off to.

One good rip of the cord, and the greedy chainsaw is chewing up all the silence of the morning. It flies all around us in pieces and bits to cover the earth like mulch. The heelers come trotting back like wind-up dog toys, tin ears pricked as if they are trying to see me through the increasing drizzle that makes me think longingly of polarfleece.

I'm surprised that the pale denizens of the Ponderosa forest don't turn tail and run. They cluster together beneath the pines land watch, like the the herd of Forest Service horses that usually winter here.