I gazed out across the Black Hills of South Dakota: a lone, ominously dark mountain range isolated in the Great Plains of the north. Here, granite is muscle and pine is skin. Obscurity blankets the cliffs in a perpetual dusk, and beauty is present in a chaotic peace. A quilt of poison needles cloaks the landscape, but has no intent on bringing warmth. Instead, the blanket shrouds the world’s bouldered bones with a somber complexion. Euphoric tears of the firmament gather in great pools composing mirrored utopias between the cupped fingers of ancient, frozen magma. Vertebrae arch skyward like a great cat ending a reticent vigil and eroded claws grasp and scrape the sky. In the daylight, this Empyrean burns azure, roasting the land in an elemental fire of plenty, but when such luminous blaze is absent, the cosmos beams down at the minuscule fragment of terrestrial acreage in awe. And yet, for all the pure wonder I presently envision from even the dullest of memoirs, my eyes as of then were sealed.