I was grateful tonight to go out and walk with my sister on the trails in the foothills at the east end of Spain Road.

By the time we were a decent distance from the access parking lot, the sunset to the west was fading, and shadows were melding with the charcoal luminescence of night.

A crescent moon helped us, though, to stay on the trail, and to stay vertical as we walked, when we opted to not use out flashlight and headlamp.

The air was crisp and mellow, fall cool, but not sprinkled with the crystalline cold of winter air. The trails were basically empty, except for a few walkers and bikers heading home. It was mostly quiet, and in time, the stars burned through the city hazy sky, and we stopped and looked up for a moment, lamps doused, scanning for Orion, our old friend and familiar guide in the nighttime sky.

It was not a hard walk, but it was good. We moved for 40 or 50 minutes. We were beyond the reach of a television, and with that, we were guarded from depressing or derisive or divisive news stories, from political posturing and inflammatory ideologies, from winning and losing and the thunderous roar of fans filling a stadium at a sports event, from tele-temptation and tele-trauma and tele-trivialities.

We talked here and there about our lives, here and now, as we carefully navigated the approximate rises and falls of the trail. There is sorrow and strife in daily living, watching the world around you swirl and swerve. Even a year can throw you into a dark dell and leave you wondering how you got there.

On our return serpentine over rises and falls and around bushes and boulders, we heard the curious laughter of small children- the chattering of coyotes- somewhere near enough to us that they stopped speaking when they heard us talk about them.

We continued to walk on the winding trail, under muted moon and starlight, comfortable before the silhouette of the Sandias in this local wilderness.

It was peaceful, we were small, and we breathed the invigoration of the universe falling from the canopy above us, and we were siblings taking a nighttime walk in the foothills to just exercise and rest for an hour from the carousel of life-making.