We cannot shake the effects of the beauty of nature that surrounds us. While humanity is old, some 200,000 years old, the rocks, the hills, the mountains that surround us and shape our environment are much older. The Rocky Mountains, that divide and shape the Western portion of the United States, were pushed from the ground by the movement of plates during the Laramide orogeny, a geological event 80 million years ago. There were no humans to see the mountains rise towards the sky and no one human could have, as the movement took millions of years. It would have taken generation after generation, each passing along the story of the movement of the land, without a break in the sequence, without a single generation disconnecting or moving on.

As technology and hubris has developed within our species, we assume an ability to control nature around us. With our machines and engines, we push and tug at the land, we strip back the trees and dirt, we drain lakes and shift rivers, but the land continues to shape us as much as we shape it. We pretend to be god, but there is a limit to our power. Our effects will fade as quickly as they are made, as the Earth will continue to exist - long after humanity has burnt itself out. We will leave scars but the elemental movers of the world - wind, rain, the movement of the plates - will eventually smooth those into oblivion.

But in the moment, we can look up to the mountains that stand above us and acknowledge their seeming eternal nature - that uncounted generations have each looked above themselves, into the points that pierce the sky and cut the clouds, and felt their own smallness. And while that feeling may be intimidating for some, it also inspires the soul to create - something lasting, like the mountains above.

The southern New Mexico town of Las Cruces is dominated by their own mountain range, less famous than the Rockies and slightly younger by 20 million years (but who’s counting) - The Organ Mountains. The range was originally named “Sierra de los Organos” by the Spanish explorers that came through the Southwest hundreds of years ago. Los Organos because the peaks resembled the pipes emerging from the church organs in the cathedrals of Europe. While the town of Las Cruces, NM wasn’t founded until the 1840’s, the area has been inhabited for hundreds of years earlier, first by native people, then by the Spanish. But the town has never been that large, dominated by the popular cities in the northern parts of the state and by El Paso, 45 minutes down I-10 in Texas.