SILENT INTERLUDE

Editorial Note

We received Mrs. Harris' letter last spring, but due to the nature of our schedule and production, it is only now that space and format permit us to use this work of insight and beauty.

My daughter, Lynn, died last year (1972), just before Christmas. She had been a student at Mesa Community College, where she was on the dean's list, for four years, and had just completed one semester at ASU. She was a Tutor in the Special Services dept. at MCC during this time.

While going through her papers, I saved her poems and themes, retyping them for a collection. I have read and re-read one of them. I find it very moving and beautiful... but, perhaps that is just a mother's prejudice. I am enclosing a copy of it for you to read, as it seems to me, perhaps you could use it in your beautiful magazine.

Sincerely, Evelyn B. Harris As soon as you leave the cities and arrive in the desert foothills, for the first or the tenth time, you immediately notice the silence. An incredible stillness prevails outside of the town, as if the quiet was a conscious force, resenting the intrusion of noise and acting as a buffer to minimize and disperse sound.

Then there is the sky... compared to which, all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it stretches above the tortuous landscape. When all daylight has gone, and space is thick with stars, it is a still and intense burning brightness darkest and blackest overhead, paling towards the horizons, so bright with stars that the night is never really dark.

Leave the town behind. Pass the ranches and the farmlands lying outside them. Go up into the dunes or out onto the hard, stony plain... just stand there awhile, alone, marveling at the fantastic maze of sharp defiles and rose-shadowed ravines. Mauve, scarlet, red and golden peaks, cliffs and crags an incredible range that surges like a sea of flaming color against the dun-colored desert lands.

Presently, you will either shiver and hasten back to the dubious safety of the noises, crowds and lights of the town... or you will remain standing there and will allow something peculiar happen... something that anyone who has lived on the desert can understand. It is a unique sensation. It has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here... in this totally alien landscape, lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but the sound of your own breathing and heartbeats.

A strange, and by no means unpleasant, process of reintegration begins within you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting upon remaining the same person you have always been, or, you can relax... let it take its course through your soul. Soon you will find that your will twists and disappears, like the dry stream beds that writhe among the boulders at the base of the mountain.

Stand your ground... do not retreat to the shelter of a room. You will be changed, for no one who has drunk of the desert for any length of time, has ever been the same when he left. There is a projection into the future of the beauty and love which all races, sharing the same galaxy, will come to feel for each other, if they will only open their minds to the beauty of the difference.

The cosmic and universal impact is clearly felt; the real significance of this landscape is that it can change people. Day and night, passersby can be seen, thoughtfully and quietly, contemplating the tortured spires, the vivid colors and the integrated relationship of canyon and mountain. Out of this experience comes a new relationship, a sharing in universals, an experienced equality, a new enriching tolerance and understanding and a breath-taking, vision of beauty. And, perhaps, for those who put themselves under the spell of the desert, and endeavor to match it with their own deepest insights, it will serve to induce a type of personal and social integration, so much needed in these disturbing times.