44 WLT JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2015 photo : qq li I CLIMB TO THE PEAK of the mound in the middle of the Bisti Badlands—at least, the part of the badlands open to the public. The Navajo Nation has charted paths between headless, mushroom-like rocks for people to independently wander and has fenced off a lake reservoir and the more rugged terrain. A wide, dry riverbed is such a path, littered today with bentover small salt cedars with their wigs of branches pulled in the direction of a recent flood that came through the Bisti, all the water running quickly off. I am alone in the badlands at this hour. I step forward with Orso close by, weaving between a giant patch of rocks that look like fingers of a crowd pointing up to the sky. I look upward and see where they are pointing now—a wholly blue lateafternoon sky with two paintbrush-made dashes of cloud, one short in the shape of a cedilla, the other a long tilde. The finger rocks loom overhead against the pure and deep blue. For a little while, I can imagine that the rocks are alive, that I am walking on a creature, that I am a small bug discreetly inching my way across an animal hoping not to be discovered, and smashed by the animal, before finding safety on a floor or a wall. Maybe it is the smallness of myself in the desert of the Southwest that has kept me living and working here for fourteen years. The smaller you are, the greater the patterns. As a lawyer , I look for patterns in everything . If you see someone at a textile convention transfixed by simple repeating patterns, that person is not insane; he or she is a lawyer. The oral stories that form the backbone of the traditional laws of the Navajo people among whom I work defeat this yearning for patterns at first, since standing alone they are not laws. They become laws when fit delicately by the storyteller into the problem they are intended to resolve. The oral laws don’t become laws until married to the problem by a trusted elder. People who don’t work in traditional oral laws don’t understand this, and even those who come to it from laws of rules and violations may take the rest of their lives to accept it. Soon the fingers curling around back to the start give way to a fortress, then to a field of what looks like midget, man-made rock tombs of posts and caps, like Paleolithic tombs in the Irish Burren, but which are entirely natural. The line of bent trees in the dry riverbed points toward the fenced reservoir, on which someone has left a plaid shirt. Everywhere on the soft path are imprints of hooves of horses. They seem to lead toward the November sun sitting three and a half of my fists above the horizon in the western half of the sky. My mind feels at peace; serene is the word I think of. Suddenly I think of seeing through blindness . I think of the blind Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges who wrote in Labyrinths, “it is not darkness, yet.” I am asked sometimes why I immigrated to America from Malaysia just to work in the middle of a desert so empty that school buses seem to leave small tribal children sometimes in the middle of nowhere. In this place, poverty and hopelessness shout loudly in remarkable quiet. The pride of a people wanting to be selfsufficient and retrieve for themselves their own lost culture is barely a whisper. It’s the law of life, maybe, that you just follow your unfolding life, and that you believe everything is as it should be, and that you are where you ought to be. That law is a river you don’t swim against. The peace of mind in being gentle and responsive to your life is why I am here. As Orso lounges thirsty in a long shadow , I pour him some water in a fold-a-bowl special section flash nonfiction Southwest Pattern by Josey Foo It’s the law...