I think I've started taking pictures in Sedona because I feel obligated. We are surrounded by monumental beauty. But it seems harder to see. Here, I feel an inner mounting disquiet. And since we arrived on Tuesday afternoon, I have been musing about why. Some might suggest that my feelings come from the vortexes and powerful energies here. I don't think so. Though I don't deny that something here might magnify my emotions. But the feelings I'm watching in myself aren't the most familiar or turbulent ones.

In Albuquerque, I felt as if I had been drinking coffee all day, after drinking none, or very little. I felt physically uncomfortable, almost couldn't get my breath. Later it came to me that maybe I was being affected by the altitude. I remembered how lousy I felt when we were here in 2002 driving through the Painted Desert. How I gave up taking pictures because I felt so bad. But here in Sedona, even after searching for, finding and drinking cappuccino, I have felt physically at ease for the first time in days. It's not coffee nerves. It's not the altitude.

Can a say it is a kind of grief? A kind of soul nervousness maybe?

Like so many towns, Sedona has grown hugely since we were here in 2002. It is, after all, a tourist town like Shelburne Falls where the tourism "industry" contributes to my livelihood. When I first visited Sedona, it was already commercial and growing. Yet the signs for psychic readings and vortex tours openly affirmed that what spiritual travelers sought could be found here—a place where the power of the earth could overwhelm the mundane. A place of majesty and mystery.

We humans are growing exponentially and because in America we're free to move at will, one must expect bursts of visitors and new inhabitants in places of exceptional beauty or prosperity. The high hopes of so many here are reflected in new homes, resorts, hotels, restaurants, and more of the usual found on every strip and in any mall. Heavier traffic follows, although well-defined bike lanes hint at the slower pace that some work to maintain here.

Area designers are aware of their responsibility to blend new structures with the surrounding red cliffs, mesas, rock formations and vegetation; subjugating nature would be a tragic mistake for tourism. So new gated communities nestle into hillsides. Or with more money, homes gain altitude, sidling up to where (I declare in anxious moments) only the gods and the winds and wild animals should be.

All this encroachment is at the core of my upset. As well as the fact that the exuberant and carefully crafted expansion is happening at exactly the wrong time in our economy. In this place I feel too powerfully aware of our dependence on producing, making, buying, selling. I feel here the rush to build and cash in and make a living and connect to mystery and community. And I feel here the sadness for us all; the long intake of breath at the realization that this way of ours is failing all over—in the beautiful places and those hardest for the spirit to bear.

Despite all my thought, re-writing, and the loss of my final conclusion just now in the blogosphere, I press on. I'm tired of thinking of how destructive we are, here among the rest of the living things, sleeping or waking, trying to find our way. What I am feeling now is compassion for us all.

I think it was John McPhee who wrote that the wild places must be preserved to sustain the human spirit. We need to be able to visit them, and if not, we must at the very least know that they exist somewhere. And perhaps, those of us who dwell in the beautiful places must graciously allow others to visit, let the city dwellers refresh themselves in our mountain streams.

For now, I am the visitor. I see and feel as we move from snow and sleet to saugaro and skirted palm. The red rocks are behind me now, and the anxiety lingers along with the compassion and hope for us all that rise like landmarks along the way.