The ground is rich with opal here. Mostly, it is in thin sheets repairing the splintered rock from the violent collision that made this land.

You can read it, though.

On the one hand, it shows the stresses of the rock. You could read a lot about the lay of the valley by reading these opal seams on Turtle Mountain.

But you could read your own mind, too, especially the way in which story-telling meets archetypal forms.

If modern psychology can do it with ink blots, or modern poetry can do it with the haze of attributions and associations that hover around words (like mosquitoes, eh), then why not the shaman above, rising above a bat, or the angel below, becoming a river?

Or this coyote?

There’s more life here than just a stalk of cheatgrass.

You are here, always. Now, these photographs are one thing, but touching these forms at the same time they appear in your mind, that is something special.

It opens a river that you flow along, or that flows along you, or through which the Earth speaks. Say it how you like. This is strong medicine. Poetry can only approach this if you speak it to the one you love, while touching, and I can’t think of anything better.