Jessica Roth, writer, guest blogger, and friend of A Life’s Work, took these photos on a recent trip to Arizona and sent this bit of text along to accompany them.
I make an annual sojourn to this spot…alongside the river, in a cave overlooking it, near the mesa that coughs up chalcedony and jasper, above the low branches of the bosque. Every time, I discover something new. A pile of sun-worn bones and cicada wings below an owl’s roost. A new elbow in the river. Another cave, higher, whose shadows are lined with small bells. The beginnings to stories I’ve still to tell.
These photos show an important part of Arcosanti, that is, what you see around Arcosanti. The structure-town is not intended to dominate the landscape, but be integrated with it. These photos may show a tiny bit of structure, some bells, some presence of people, but mostly they’re about the natural landscape you experience when you look out of a window at Arcosanti or walk a few feet from one of its doors.
Jeff Stein said this in the recent interview:
So not only am I part of this powerful urban architecture, but the architecture itself is contained, and we’re on the edge of a cliff so I wake up in the morning and throw back the curtain and there, only about a 1/4 of a mile away, is the face of the opposing Mesa. I can see down a valley, there might be a herd of pronghorned antelope prancing around down there. There might be some cows on some grazing land up above. The sun is doing different things with cloud formations in the landscape and in fact it’s a wholly engaging and beautiful and rich natural landscape that we’re a part of.