About a month and a half earlier, after a ten-year involvement in various Twelve-Step programs based on Alcoholics Anonymous, I had come to an unusual realization. For the first time in my life, I found myself expressing a desire to have a Teacher that would help facilitate my spiritual path. I was never one to follow anyone in my life. I knew that "following" wasn't what it all was about. I had no idea what such a Teacher would look like. I simply longed to be able to sit at the feet of someone of flesh and blood for a change who could perhaps model what a well-rounded relationship with Spirit was, perhaps just talk to me about such things...who knew? The gist of it was that I was tired of having my spirituality so deep inside me that it had no form.
Within two weeks of expressing that intention in my prayers, I was at a local coffee shop and saw a makeshift poster announcing a "Cannunpa (Cha-nupa) Ceremony," a ceremony with the Sacred Pipe by a Lakota family, who was in town. With no particular investment, I went to the address, only to find that it was at the home of a friend. Having never really been drawn to Native American ways or Spirituality before, I found myself in a circle with about twenty people, and quietly watched the proceedings. Curious. A Lakota Medicine family was there named Chips; a mother and her three sons, with a couple of assistants.
It was all very simple. The eldest brother, Charles, led the ceremony after talking a little bit about their lives on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He said nothing at all astounding or earth-shaking, and I suppose what I appreciated most was that he seemed very aware, and happy to be alive. He said they were there doing healing ceremonies for the sick, that they had been invited, or "sponsored" by a local family, with whom they would be staying for a month or so. He spoke of the "Yuwipi" Ceremony where Spirit comes through his younger brother, Godfrey, and directs the people seeking healing. Through Yuwipi, Spirit tells them what they need to do in order to restore their health.
Having been involved in conventional medicine for sixteen years, and having had my own deeply Spiritual experiences with life and death, I was more than curious. I was determined to be a part of what they had to offer. In my typical way, after we had all prayed and shared the Pipe and most of the attendees had left, I lingered and queried as to what it would take to be a part of a ceremony. Of course I thought I might be able to step right in, and of course what I found was that such sacred things are not spectator sports. After a couple of weeks of maintaining contact with my friends--and, well, embarrassing as it sounds, lobbying to be a part--I was told that the family would be asked if I could attend an Inipi, better known as a purification or sweat lodge. I was told that there, Godfrey would "know my heart" and only then would I be invited to get more involved. Or not.
The Twelve Steps had taught me about surrender, and even with all my enthusiasm, I knew that the best I could do was to open myself up completely to what was happening and leave the rest up to Powers greater than myself. So that's what I did. After a while I was invited to an Inipi, and then another and another, until I did four nights in a row. My world was rocked. I went through what felt like the successive stages of a human being's spiritual development. There was little thought during the ceremony itself. In the midst of the ancient songs and drumming and prayers and heat and fear and relief and sweat and pain and expansion, contraction, deaths and rebirths, it felt as if my insides were re-ordered--every part of me. I had been brought from the visceral experience of the first person looking up and perceiving the moon in wonder to the expression of humanity that I was on that fourth day of ceremony in 1990.
On the second day of my Inipis, I began pitching in to help with the fire for the ceremony. I worked with a man named Richard, who I just assumed to be Native American. He was certainly weathered and dark enough. He grunted a lot and gave me little by way of direction. Before we started he told me that in the old ways, a boy desiring to become a major part of the sacred ceremonies would first have to tend fire for seven years for the people. In silence. Anything he learned would be picked up by observation. And that is, for the most part, how I was taught, by careful observation and mimicking all the things that Richard did until I got a sense of not only the nuts and bolts of firetending, but the relationship with fire and ceremony and Spirit that he embodied. It wasn't until a week later that I learned that Richard, in fact, was a fifty-year-old Jew from Brooklyn who had been setting Altar for the Chips for the last year on their road trips.
After my fourth Inipi, I asked for permission to move onto the property of the sponsor to help wherever I could. Given the okay, I dropped everything and did so. Slowly, I got to know the family a little better and after a couple of weeks of tending fire, was invited into the Yuwipi Ceremonies. There was a ceremony each night for the next two weeks, beginning with an Inipi at dusk and then ending with a "feast" at around midnight after the ceremony. People were literally, physically, touched by Spirit. People were transformed. People were told that they should prepare for death. People were told that they had to change their lives. People were instructed where to find specific herbs, and how they were to be prepared and taken, to effect healing. My experience was that Godfrey, bound tight and completely in a blanket and laid down on a bed of sage in the pitch blackness, did not do the telling, touching, or instructing. There were other "things" there that did the work. He was just the Spirit Caller.
Amidst the cacophony of dashing lights in the dark, voices from nowhere in the silence, and the circles of sometimes desperate prayer focused on the greatest good, some people were healed, and some left to go on with their deaths. To a one, each of the people involved had nowhere else to go but to these ceremonies, as "Western" medicine had exhausted all of its options with them. Naturally. After all, they were seeing a Medicine Man! Cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Immune Disorders including AIDS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome were all dealt with, and each outcome was different. No one left those ceremonies without being deeply affected. Some people left in terror. Others left whole.
What I grasped was that in the ancient ways it was found that if things were done in a certain way, certain things would happen. Over years and years--perhaps millennia--of trial and error, visions and personal instructions by Spirit and Nature, it was found that the right combination of preparation, songs, intent, and action would beckon Spirit to appear, advise, and affect; time could be dissolved and the miraculous would be attainable.
What I witnessed was four individuals, Unci (Grandmother), Charles, Phillip (who, a paraplegic from a car accident, sat in a wheelchair), and Godfrey, the Yuwipi Man, working the space of the ceremony room, speaking to each other, sometimes in Lakota, sometimes in English, cobbling together different parts of the ceremony during their preparations, sometimes instructing, "no, NO the rattle goes over THERE," "spread the sand from Wahinheya (the Mole) from right to left, not left to right," "that song goes like This," all in precise detail with no guidebook or directions to follow but the memory of the way things had been taught them by their ancestors.
And all throughout, what became more and more evident to me was that there was a consistency of intent amongst them, an approach that crescendoed into the feeling that, indeed, they became, through the process of preparation and delivery, of one mind, one heart--all in service to the individual needing help. This was the gift that they passed on to me by their example, and I embraced it. But there was more: what I was a part of with them felt very, very old. At first this was just a feeling, but as time unfolded, I learned just how it was grounded in fact.
Nobody knows how far back the Chips' lineage goes. It's fair to surmise that it went way back, perhaps thousands of unbroken years along with the Sioux. The records start in the early 1800s with two boys from different families who were orphaned at an early age. They were adopted by a Grandmother, who raised them as brothers. One's name was Woptura (Wo-p-tuch-ha). The other one's name was Curly, better known as Crazy Horse. Woptura was recognized early on as carrying the Medicine. Some say he is one of the Immortals. It was he who made the medicine bundle that Crazy Horse wore in his hair that kept him impervious to bullets in war. (He did have his jaw shot through by the jealous husband of a lover, but that was the only such scar he suffered in his time.) The day that Crazy Horse was lured into a nearby fort and held captive, family legend has it that Woptura rode behind him, furiously trying to catch him to give him back the bundle, upon which he had been making repairs. He was too late. Crazy Horse, unprotected for perhaps the first time in many years, had been killed.
Woptura lived in very turbulent times. Around the turn of the century, all the Sioux children were taken from their families and put into Missionary Schools. Speaking the Native languages was forbidden, and all practicing of the medicine ways, songs, ceremonies, and rituals was banned at the risk of heavy punishment by the government. Woptura went underground and kept the medicine ways alive. John "Fire" Lame Deer states that all Lakota Medicine people today trace their lineage back to Woptura. It was Woptura, most believe, who originated the Yuwipi ceremony. Woptura had a son who inherited his Medicine. He was named Charles "Horn" Chips. "Chips" was the best the government agents could do when the family tried to explain that woptura was the thin, fine particulate film that lies on the very top of pond water. Others described it as the very fine powder from ground buffalo horn.
Charles "Horn" Chips had a son named Ellis. Ellis did not inherit the "Powers," yet he was a tremendously accomplished Singer who went on to create the Sioux National Anthem. Ellis, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation, married a woman named Victoria from the Rosebud Reservation, about 75 miles East, and they had three sons. When it was found that the youngest, Godfrey, would talk to the Spirits during Yuwipi Ceremonies, Ellis obtained government permission to remove him from Grammar School and take on the full-time duty of training him in the Medicine ways--to the best of my knowledge, the last such Medicine Man to have been granted that privilege. The "edict," which I saw, stated that if father and son, or Godfrey alone were found in town on a school day, they would both be jailed. Ellis brought his son from Medicine Man to Medicine Man for his trainings, while also teaching him all that he himself had learned.
It was quite a while before I became familiar with this history. For the longest time, all I knew was that this family, whom I was quickly learning to love, carried something very powerful and special when their intent was focused on the good of others. Indeed, I had been brought to some people to be shown an example of Spirit in action. And the key to my being able to be in relationship with them was that they allowed me to learn and participate with them in ceremony and ritual. Not once was I told what or how to believe. I was always directed to continue to cultivate my own relationship with Spirit, to build my own medicine, to find how Spirit spoke to me so that I could then help others.
And this was why, when I was asked about Sundance, even at this early juncture in my relationship with the Chips, I knew it wasn't Godfrey's request.
At that first Sundance, I was thrust into an alternate reality. A brutal reality. The three counties that compose the Pine Ridge Reservation are the poorest in the nation. At that time, in 1991, the average life expectancy of a resident on the "Rez" was 48 years. Infant mortality was at a rate six times higher than the general US population. Alcoholism and drug use and gun play and car wrecks were rampant. Perhaps 85% of the population had nothing to do with the traditional ways. They were oriented to Christianity, and had more than a little fear of the things they surmised were going on "up there." I was told, if I were to come out to Sundance, to be prepared to die.
They weren't kidding, and it was not necessarily about Sundance itself. It was about being on the rez. During one six-week stretch while I was on Pine Ridge, which has a population of about 20,000, there was one violent death each week.
The Chips' home (inherited from Woptura) was about 640 acres on the prairie adjacent to the Dakota Badlands. A log cabin built in the 1920s, a clapboard house with ceremony room, and a trailer were the family homes. Water came from a persnickety hand pump, outhouses were the only privies, and the roads were no more than splintered and sliced asphalt, if they weren't gravel and dirt. Winters were brutal, insulation was sheets of plastic stapled to the inside of the walls, and the diet was primarily canned and highly processed goods called "commodities" dispensed by the government. With the nearest hospital over 100 miles away in Rapid City, I as a former paramedic knew that I could easily die from something as simple as a badly broken leg. Perhaps the strongest prayers of my life were prayed when I first understood the danger of the environment I was in.
Arriving about two weeks before the Sundance started, I was asked to tend fire for it with a few other people. That meant hauling firewood out of the creeks with no more than a 1960s vintage pick-up, and chain sawing up over six cords for use during the ceremony, which lasts for an "official" period of nine days. Four days of this are preparation, during which time there is a least one Inipi per day. One day is called "Tree Day," on which a tree is sacrificed and placed at the center of the arbor where the ceremony occurs. The following four days are the Sundance itself, which involves three Inipis or more each day. Along with traipsing far into the hills and gathering hundreds of Stone People for the lodges, re-building the arbor, which had a diameter of about 200 feet, and setting up camp sites, gathering sage, and tending fire for Inipis, I was working 14-hour days. I had been given no more spiritual direction than "Live your life as a prayer as you build a place for the people." I had to thrust myself into a world where my primary relationship was with Nature. And Nature told me what to do as it placed me closer and closer to the thin line between this world and that which lies beyond death. My solace was found by constantly turning to my relationship with my Creator for strength and understanding and the clarity to help others. By actively giving thanks for everything that was around me, I found that I received many "you're welcomes" from nature that were both deeply personal and objectively obvious.
Over the course of a number of visits to the rez over the next few years, I began taking on the responsibilities of Chief Firetender for the Sundance. Charles Chips, the Spiritual Intercessor, prepared all aspects of the ceremony itself, including choosing and working with the Dancers. I was responsible for everything that had to do with the physical aspects of the ceremony and grounds and, since I was very familiar with the property, mobilizing and working with the 100 or so supporters who arrived to assist about 50 Dancers. In this role, I passed on the little I knew about moving people to "one mind, one heart."
I had experienced the "idea" of preparing ceremony through Inipis in the small scale during the Yuwipis. Sundance seemed like a completely different matter, but I found that no matter how daunting the size of the event, no matter how complex the details, or foreign the language, what allowed things to happen in a good way--what provided a home for Spirit and fostered the allowance of miracles--was the intent of the people who participated to be there for others. I found that regardless of the knowledge or use of the ancient prayers, as long as the intent of the participants was clearly for the greater good, that is exactly what happened. It was that which I learned to work with.
As each year went by, and the family became a bit more splintered, I witnessed much loss of tradition. At my first Sundance all of the family members worked in unison--as I had witnessed in the Yuwipi Ceremonies--to get the specifics down as they had been passed on to them. Each successive Sundance--as Godfrey was unable to be present and took Unci with him, and then Phillip was killed in a car crash--seemed to have lost so many of the details that I had once thought were essential. Without many voices to guide me in the part that I was called on to play, I found myself learning to focus my intent on others, open my heart, and beckon the Spirit of Woptura to be present, even if I didn't have the words and had lost many of the details of the Sundance itself.
Spirit never ceased to appear and affect the people. The miracles never stopped. One individual came to dance with infected abscesses on his feet that I recognized as being on the border of gangrene. I lobbied long and hard for him to go to the hospital in Rapid City. He ignored me. He prayed hard and was able to walk by Tree Day, and then went on to complete the Dance, during which time his foot completely healed. There was something going on there that seemed to go beyond the words, the songs, the nuts and bolts of the rituals; as if just knowing the essence of the Spirit he was calling in was enough. It wasn't that particular Sundance that cured him, it was his intent to dance "so that the people may live," strengthened by the intent of the others around him for the same.
Not too long after my last Sundance on Pine Ridge, and shortly after Unci blessed my Cannunpa, a pipe I had taken a year to make myself as I was instructed, I started doing prayer circles. I was full of myself. Impressed by my own knowledge, there was an element that I soon had to come to terms with that was living inside of me. I wanted those people involved with me to know and experience how adept I was with what I was taught by the family. I came to recognize that my intent was geared towards making me look good.
I began by using some prayers in Lakota that I had learned in the Yuwipi Ceremony. In one of them, I called on Inktomi, the Spider. What followed was four days of what some would call psycho-kinetic phenomena: objects around me would spontaneously break, I experienced raindrops in sealed rooms, fire alarms would go off around me for no reason, even a computer started to spew out messages on its screen that were absolutely hauntingly specific to the people I was with--mean-spirited, isolated sentences dredged out from some deeply buried memory banks that supposedly had been erased by the prior owner. I felt an uncomfortable presence about me and literally felt hounded. My world had gone berserk.
Nothing I had ever experienced in my life remotely resembled this. To be honest, I didn't even believe that such things happened. I contacted the family, now back at Pine Ridge, and was told that Inktomi, the Trickster, was only to be called upon by an experienced Wicasa Wakan (wi-cha-sha wa-con), Holy Man, for its medicine is so strong and unruly that only a person so trained and pure could handle it. It is Inktomi that is called upon during Yuwipi Ceremonies. I was in way over my head.
My only recourse was to return to the Cannunpa, even though I was scared to death of it. I prayed with it for help to undo what I had done. I did so more humbly than I had approached anything in my life. I was in fear that the people with whom I had done ceremony had been harmed. The phenomena ceased. I came to realize that even separate from what I knew, separate from what I understood, there was a distinct Spirit that I called on that manifested in ways I could never have imagined. I had done things in a certain way and certain things had happened. What I had done was misuse my intent within the context of a Sacred Ceremony, and I had suffered the consequences. I laid down my Cannunpa for years, and only picked it up again when I understood that it was not for me, but for others. Before he died, Phillip, the middle brother, who was an exquisite singer and drummer, sat with me and we talked about the Yuwipi Ceremony. In it, right after the Yuwipi Man is encased and tied in the star quilt and laid down on the bed of sage, the lights are put out and the Welcoming Song begins. A rattle that is placed on the altar is taken up by Spirit, and shaking and glowing, it literally flies around the room barely above the heads of those gathered in prayer.
Technically, the rattle, made with the relatively transparent hide of a Buffalo's testicles and filled with large, luminous sand particles brought up from deep inside the earth by a particular ant that lives on the prairie, has the potential to produce this multi-colored, shimmering glow. But in the dark, no one in the room could possibly pick the rattle up and shake it so continuously, rhythmically, speedily, and precisely about the perimeter of the room without smacking a participant in the head, tripping over a person or object in the room, or, at the very least, disrupting the 405 prayer ties that form the outer border of the altar space.
Phillip told me, "When that rattle takes off, you just focus your prayers on the person who's there to be healed. Everything else is just Hollywood Bullshit." I understand what he meant now.
For more information regarding sacred ceremony, refer to Yuwipi by William K. Powers, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Russ Reina is Lost Valley's Conference Coordinator and a regular contributor to this magazine.
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual
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©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual
I grew up steeped in church life--my father the organist/choirmaster of my parish (as well as organist at a synagogue), my mother a choir member and, eventually, an ordained Episcopalian minister. My parents have authored and co-authored at least a dozen books, all of them relating to "spirituality, religion, and ritual" in one form or another (including books on prayer, yoga, sacred music, etc.).
Many of my childhood memories revolve around the church and around religious celebrations. The musical memories, instilled through my father's organ-playing and through congregational and choir singing, are the most pleasant and the most enduring. Singing with my friends in the boys' choir was an opportunity for lots of fun before, after, and even during practices and services (the adults always managed to be more solemn than we were, though we put on a passable act and descended into uncontrollable giggling on only a few very inappropriate occasions). The familiar seasonal rituals seemed special, too--the Advent candles, the Christmas pageant, the Easter egg hunts, the hymns that came at only one time of year and so gained an added emotional power.
Alongside those are the memories that are less pleasant. The constricting clothing we had to wear to church--especially the ties. The smoke-filled room at coffee hour (a.k.a. "the rector's forum") immediately after the service. The words in the liturgy and hymns that, once I began to understand and think about them, often said something very different from what I believed and felt myself. The internal church politics of which I slowly became aware, and which affected both of my parents in less-than-positive ways. The unconvincing (to me) spiritual devotion of people who drove to church once a week to get absolution for the sins they committed--by their own admission or insistence--all the rest of the week. (Driving to church itself started to count as a sin in my book, when I began learning about ecology and before I stopped thinking in dichotomies.) The heavy weight of "original sin" and guilt, still incomprehensible to a child, which seemed to burden some of the adults and caused them to need to repent every Sunday.
I absorbed many of the lessons of this religious upbringing. I am still grateful for a good number of them, though others have not always been helpful (for example, until I finally abandoned it in frustration, my earnest ambition to be "perfect" and Christlike was probably something of an obstacle to achieving that status).
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As a child, my own religion or spiritual path was play. I was hopelessly addicted to the pleasure I got from playing--from being in my body, being outside, leaping as high or as far as I could to catch the ball or the frisbee, eluding the catcher while playing "running bases," sledding down the hill in front of our house, taking part in innumerable childhood games both with and without rules, and generally having fun at every opportunity. My brother, my friends, and I constructed play houses out of refrigerator boxes, robots out of art easels (one of these squirted baby powder out of its belly button), a genuine illegal radio station (constructed from an electronics project kit) which broadcast for nearly a two-block radius, and a ghost-pulley system (rigged up between our attic window and the maple tree in our front yard) which had trick-or-treaters doing double-takes and sometimes beating hasty retreats at Halloween. We played with astronaut dolls to simulate moon landings and interstellar travel, put on magic shows, collected, traded, and flipped baseball cards, made forts in the woods and secret tunnels through the forsythia bushes, played "nerf" basketball and ping pong in inclement weather, and found countless other pastimes whose one common denominator was that they were expressions of creativity, exuberance, love of adventure and the unknown, and delight in being alive and being ourselves. I never felt ambivalent about playing--I did it passionately, and had to be dragged away from it for such necessary activities as eating dinner.
Intellectually and as part of my bond with my family, I maintained allegiance to Christianity, and as a child I took it seriously with the same kind of respect I gave to most adults, especially ones I loved, like my parents--after all, these adults seemed to "know" about such things. But I never did understand some of the doctrines. My true passion--what connected me to life as no church service ever did (except, in moments, through some of the music)--was play.
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Play exited stage left sometime early in my high school years, as did my attempts to be a good church-goer. These were replaced by a much more structured form of physical activity and release--long-distance running--which, along with schoolwork, became my religion for several years. I did have many transcendent and mystical experiences while running, but I found these difficult or impossible to incorporate into the rest of my life. My early childhood spirituality--which embraced life through play, and made the world feel whole--had become a much more ascetic, painful spirituality, in which I was conscious of living in a very fragmented, "fallen" world, connecting with the sacred by running away from the mundane. I fell in love at the age of seventeen, and discovered a renewed appreciation of life for a period, but ultimately was still unable to connect the different parts of my world. Spirituality was something I couldn't seem to experience with most people. I had to hide it, grab it in snatches between classes and schoolwork. It was therefore fun only in a relative sense.
Fast-forwarding a few more years (since various versions of my life story have appeared previously in these pages more times than I can count), we find me on the Hopi Reservation, drawn by the ceremonies I had witnessed while visiting as a student during my last years of college. The Hopis' dances expressed everything that had been missing from my life and from the formal spiritual paths I had known: a beautiful melding of reverence and irreverence, wisdom and whimsy, creativity, story, art, and real connection to the land and to each other. Hopiland itself seemed like the most sacred place I had ever been--and it still does. Perhaps this is because, for thousands of years, it has been held this way by the people living on it. Of course, every corner of the earth is sacred, and every piece of land I've lived on before and since has been sacred too--but in Hopiland, the intention of the inhabitants to hold their land that way was palpable. Ceremonies were performed constantly; prayer feathers could be found on the sides of all the mesas; photographs were frowned upon and even disallowed, for they were believed to steal some of the spirit of the place.
My role at Hopiland, I discovered, was not to become part of their traditional ceremonies--but instead to help as I could, which was working as direct-care staff at a center for developmentally disabled Hopis. I developed my own rituals, which consisted of spending most of my free time (and much of my working time) taking the residents for walks up and down the beautiful canyon in which the center was located. I experienced a timelessness in that place that I have not known in the same way before or since--a timelessness related, I am sure, to the timelessness experienced by the residents themselves, as well as to the ancient geology which surrounded us. I was almost constantly in awe of the place where I was living and the experience I was having. I felt as if I'd been born into a new world, that everything here was new--as indeed it was for me, since I hadn't known anyone before arriving, and had relied on none of my previous work experiences or developed skills to find or create a role for myself in Hopiland. I was living in a dream, it seemed.
And eventually, the dream had run its course, and I recognized that the kind of relationship to the land that I sensed in Hopiland--that permeated all their rituals, that created their social structures and mores--was based in their ability to feed themselves from the land. Their prayers and their dances were all about asking for abundance (or at least sufficiency) in this challenging desert environment. Their culture, which had so enticed me and drawn me to Hopiland in the first place, was based on agriculture. And I knew not a whit about agriculture.
For various reasons, I sensed that Hopiland was not the place for me to learn about agriculture. I was overcommitted at my job at the Hopi Center, had found no gardening/farming teachers on the Reservation, and didn't know where to start. So my spiritual attraction to Hopi ways, which led me to live on Hopiland for a year-and-a-half, also caused me to leave it, in pursuit of a way to develop that same relationship to land within my own life and my own culture.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
To cut a long story short, gardening, and eventually community as well, became my spiritual paths (described in much more detail in "Getting to Know Beans About Community,"Vol. 9, No. 1). Music, creative expression, and a reawakened love of whimsy and absurdity soon got thrown into the mix as well (see "A Long Night's Journey into Day," Vol. 8, No. 2). Since my editor is telling me to wrap this up, I'll conclude by describing where those paths have led me today.
In truth, they've led me back to where I started--to that sense of connection I felt as a child. But instead of being part of a congregation that meets once a week, I'm part of an intentional community that meets, lives, and works together every day to uphold and nurture our common values and purposes. Multiple times every day, we sing songs--ones that actually reflect my view of the world and my sentiments. (Admittedly, we could probably use some voice lessons and occasional choir-directing from my father.) We hold seasonal rituals which also celebrate our connections to the land. And we nurture that connection, and our connections with one another, by living with as much ecological consciousness and responsibility as we can, given our circumstances, on these 87 acres and in our lives in general.
As added bonuses, we dress comfortably, not in constrictive clothing; we don't allow smoking indoors or in shared public spaces; and the language of our daily lives and our ritualized gatherings (which include weekly well-being circles as well as business meetings) is, for the most part, one which reflects my values and the connections I myself feel. We deal with "internal politics" by practicing as much honesty as we know how, both within ourselves and with one another--by creating a community which supports open communication, personal growth, and empowerment of all, rather than hiddenness, backbiting, and petty (or large) hierarchies which ultimately disempower everyone. Our "spiritual practice," in whatever ways each of us understands that, consists of how we live our daily lives--not what we do on one day of the week to make up for what we do all the rest of the time. And the idea of "original blessing" comes much closer to our commonly-held worldview than does "original sin."
Anyone developing a Christ complex here is quickly brought back to ground by feedback from others. We're each "imperfect," meaning fallible humans, and we recognize that imperfection itself is perfection. None of us are any holier than the others--as soon as any of us thought so, we'd be divorcing ourselves from the spiritual journey we (with all beings on this planet) have undertaken together.
I'm part of a subculture seeking to relate to the land, to one another, and to ourselves in more compassionate ways, both with more reverence and more humor than we may have found in mainstream society or mainstream religion. Drawing from various cultural strands, or sometimes just from our own inspirations, we are, I realize, trying to put back together the kind of village culture, land-based spirituality, and holistic approach to life that have sustained the Hopi and their ancestors for millennia. I'm once again in a place where the most sacred ceremonies can be interrupted by a clown (or a child) peeing off the rooftop (as happens in some Hopi kachina dances), and where such events only add to the power and relevance of the ceremony. The "sacred" and "profane" are not separate in this world, nor in the world of play--they're the same sacred reality. (It's their separation, in fact, that can take the life--the playfulness--out of religions when they take themselves too seriously. I believe any spiritual approach which cannot laugh at itself is doomed, because Mother Nature is eventually going to call someone to pee off the rooftop, and others will follow suit. None of us is blessed with an infinitely large bladder).
As in childhood, I now play outside whenever I can, though this time the play is channeled into productive work whose perceived value to others is production of vegetables, education of gardening students, and growing of community (I'm co-facilitator of Lost Valley's organic gardening program). In the same way that I as a child listened to the world and spoke to the world through play, made friends through play, developed my body, my intellect, my passions, and my creativity through play--I now do those things through my daily activities in community. Even writing, working on this magazine, and gathering together volunteers to help mail out the next issue, are forms of play, expressions of spirit, activities that connect me to life.
Far from being an escapist route or a spiritual cop-out (as some would judge it--as even I have judged it in my most disconnected moments), play is not always easy. It's full of challenges, pain as well as joy, a million sensations and emotions that accompany surrendering to the forces of life flowing through us. Play can bring on conflict, injury, and heartbreak. But play is what helps children grow, it's what helps adults grow, and it's what we as humans are called to do. Play is healing, compassionate, and the most compelling spiritual path we can take--it's where we learn to cooperate, to joyfully help others, to empathize and care about the whole. When we stop it, we stop the flow of spirit; when we forget it, we forget the sources of our own spirituality. When we can't have fun, all our seriousness may become an unbearable burden. But when we play, we engage with all creation.
Seen in retrospect, giggling in church looms as one of my greatest acts of unintended spiritual insight as a child. Now, peeing into the compost pile or behind some weeds in the garden is second nature. I'm thankful.
Chris Roth is author of The Beetless' Gardening Book: An Organic Gardening Songbook/Guidebook (Carrotseed Press, 1997; http://members.aol.com/growseed) and editor of Talking Leaves.
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual
Beth: Chellis, you have always been out of the mainstream, off the main map so to speak. So what's the difference between the Chellis Glendinning who lives in Chimayo and the one who once lived in San Francisco?
Chellis: I've lived my life documenting and critiquing the dominant society but now, now I really am living off the map. I am not living within the dominant society any more. Now I live in a land-based community that has been isolated until about a generation ago. We didn't even get running water until 1979. The phones came in the '70s. The world I live in now is a completely different world than the one I used to live in. This world is based on completely different assumptions about what life is, what death is, what success is, what kindness is, what right is.
Beth: Can you be a bit more explicit?
Chellis: Let me illustrate with a party I went to a while back. It was given by European Americans, very financially successful Anglos. The culture that defined how people were at that party was so different, so alien, to me, a person from Chimayo, that it took me about an hour being there before I could adjust to it.
Beth: Adjust to what?
Chellis: Let me compare it to an event earlier that week. I went to the local dance hall, where I sat with six people crowded around a little round table that was maybe a foot and a half in diameter. We sat very close, in each other's faces. Every time a new person arrived, they were welcomed and everybody stood up. That's the etiquette here; you shake hands, you always shake hands. Everything is run by an etiquette of respect. And people are genuinely caring and enthusiastic, especially about place. Place identification is enormous. So when the band leader said "Let's hear it from all those people from Chimayo," even though we were all engaged in conversation among ourselves, we heard it at the edge of our consciousness and everyone's fist went up. And you know, we all started cheering. You know, here's the contingent from Chimayo. Yeah!
So, when I went to this Anglo party, the first thing I noticed was that people were sitting in lawn chairs about 12 feet away from each other and nobody was speaking much. There was a stiffness, a defensiveness coming off of their bodies that was so profound and so stark.
And there were other differences. Like the heavy place identification at the dance hall was completely absent at the lawn party. At the lawn party, everyone was saying things to me like, "Are you still in Chimayo?" It was as if they expected me to move on. They were all about to fly to India or to England or to Ecuador. They were all people who moved around, and it seemed to me that their home was just a place where their stuff was. Whereas in the Chimayo world, your home is a place where your ancestors live, where you have responsibilities. You have a responsibility to the river, to the asequias (irrigation ditches), to the monte, the mountain. You have a responsibility for your people. It's a completely different experience of life.
Here, at any given moment, my refrigerator has eggs with the feathers still on them because the eggs came out of the chicken today or yesterday. Or I have apple cider that was made from my friend Snowflake Martinez's grandfather's orchard, chile that Snowflake got from trading but that he peeled and roasted himself, and corn that I grew myself. The water isn't piped in from the mountains 300 miles away or recycled through waste treatment. The water is from the rain, or from the river, or from the well.
Beth: So you have become part of a place-based community? Does that imply more than eating local?
Chellis: Yes, it certainly does. You see the importance of place even in the dance hall. There was a band there from Taos. Some of the band members are volunteer firemen in Chimayo. One of them is the guy who helps me at the xerox place in Espaniola. The band members are part of the community; we can even turn on the radio and hear their music. We have at least three stations that play primarily local music. And when we go to the dance hall, there they are and their music speaks from the land and about love of the land or fighting to protect the land or about revolutionary heroes or the whole corrida tradition. So anyway, this band--it's called Los Amigos Unidos--decided one night to start playing some Tejano music, music from Texas. It's Chicano music, you know; it's not like they decided to play New York rap music. They were going to play Tejano music from their cousins over the border. And people became outraged--"Why don't you play our music? What's wrong with our music? Why do you have to go over the border and play their music?"--They were outraged. It was such an emblem, this little event, such an emblem of being place-based.
Beth: But you aren't "from" this place originally. How did you come to understand this place?
Chellis: There are a million ways that I learn about place every day: the things that people say, the way that people express themselves, the differences that come out in a hundred ways in a hundred conversations every day.
Beth: For example...?
Chellis: I don't know if this is the best example but I remember when I first arrived, I went to the dump, an important place here, and I introduced myself to the hefe, the chief of the trash. The next time I went to see him with some garbage, he says to me, "What, you're not working today? Why?" And I said, " Well, you know, I'm a writer and I just finished a book and so I'm taking a little time off. " And he said, "Well, I wrote a book once." And I said, "Really, tell me about it." And he said, "Well, this woman, she came to the dump and she said to me, 'Benito, you're not doing anything. Why don't you write a book?' And so I took a paper and a pencil and I wrote for two days. I wrote two pages and then I didn't have any more ideas." And then he added, "And then the piñon season came and I was on my hands and knees, picking the piñon nuts off the ground and I got a lot of piñon nuts and I put them in these plastic bags and I set up a card table and I put the bags on it and with all the people coming to the dump, I sold all the bags and I made a lot of money. And then I went back and I looked at my two pages and I said, 'To hell with it.'"
And that's the story, the difference. Do you want to write a book that people in other places are going to read or do you want to take advantage of the piñon nuts right here?
Beth: So there's a time dimension to this culture?
Chellis: Yes, time and place. Because the piñon nuts, man, they don't come every year, you know.
Beth: So, you are part of this community now?
Chellis: I think in time that I become a more profoundly accepted part of the community... Let me go back to the lawn party again; people there would ask me what it was like to live here, as if I were alien, an expatriate. As if I really truly identified with them, as if I were just making a little foray into a strange and alien land and I would come back soon. That's not how it is. I live in this culture and my politics are the politics of this place. I stand, first and foremost, with the people here. It's not like I am coming in, like I did years ago, when I worked with native peoples on uranium mining issues. I came in and I left and they were like an adjunct to my life. Now I am inside the culture and everything else is an adjunct to my life.
Beth: So you're within the map of this community?
Chellis: I think that over time I have become familiar in the village, a terrain on the map. I've proven myself to be a good vescina, a good neighbor, and I have participated in the collective activity of the community. You can find me hanging out at the store, walking the badlands, or riding horses in the monte.
Beth: Were you always inside the culture, from the time you arrived?
Chellis: Very early on, I understood that the politics of this place are the politics of sovereignty: the politics of preserving culture, the politics of land and sustainability.
Every day we face a struggle against imperialism, domination, racism, and dysfunctional relations--whatever you want to call the bulldozer that is just mowing over land-based communities that still exist, mowing them over in the interests of a single, monocultural, monoeconomic, corporate technological system.
From inside this land-based world, I see the beauty of it, the preciousness of it, the importance for humanity and for life on earth. That's why I feel so passionately about it, why I feel the need to stand up for it. Do you want me to get specific?
Beth: Please.
Chellis: Well, of course we're fighting corporations. We fought off one that wanted to do copper mining here. By the way, the fight was won by Indian people coming to the public hearing and telling them that if you put your copper mine in our traditional lands, where our potters get their clay, we're going to war with you.
Now that's my kind of politics because it's bare bones, just totally stripped down. It's about imperialism versus sustainability.
We also beat off a lumber company, a multinational from England that was clearcutting the forest.
Beth: But you do have a WalMart.
Chellis: Yes, we have WalMart now.
Beth: Do you think your community will survive? Or will they be absorbed into someone else's universe, someone else's map?
Chellis: What's happening is that the Map has arrived and it's called Highway 285. I don't know who they think is coming here but they are building this incredible highway. The scale of it is like you find in Los Angeles. There you are in the desert where, just about three weeks ago, was this little road and, about a half a generation ago, was just a dirt road. And now, there's this huge highway. And it's coming here. It came right into Espaniola and became the main drag of Espaniola and then they put in the WalMart. So, it's coming. You can see it coming up the road. You can see the new cell phone tower in the village. Who do they think is going to be talking on those cell phones? We don't need those things with the way of life we have here but it's coming.
Beth: Do people feel invaded?
Chellis: Yes, very much so but it is happening so quickly. Decades ago, the elders said that they didn't want the big chain stores because they would do something bad to the culture. But now, there's a fascination with it, particularly among the young people who like Nike shoes and New York rap music... The audio section, the CD and tape section, of WalMart doesn't have local music in it... I wonder if Merlin's, the little local discotheca and tape store, is going to survive or not.
It's coming so fast, this global economy. I mean, this horrendous cell phone tower just arrived. It was such a demonstration of the lack of democracy of technology. Who asked the village, who said, "Would you like one and where would you like us to put it?" It just came one day. It was just there with a big, eight-foot cyclone fence around it so no one can do like they did back in the old days.
Beth: The old days?
Chellis: Like when the first ATM machine came in, the vatos, the guys from the village, just shot it up with rifles. And the bank got the picture and said effectively, "Whoops, we didn't realize that this village was off the map. We thought this was America already." And they left and they never brought the ATM machine back... But now, this stuff is happening so quickly and there seems to be a lack of resistance. I find myself wondering what happened to the machismo, what happened to that automatic distrust of anything that comes in from the outside, that automatic distrust of technological things.
Beth: But you drive a car. That's technological. I remember your saying it was a dream come true.
Chellis: Oh, you mean my Honda!
Beth: Tell me about it.
Chellis: It's a '77 Civic. It took me about two seconds to want to buy it. It was in mint condition. It only had 60,000 miles on it. It was truly worthy of being painted in the lowrider tradition. Chimayo is the center of lowriders and the center of lowrider painting. In fact there is a legend that people from Chimayo went to Los Angeles years ago and there they invented the lowrider.
Beth: And what is a lowrider?
Chellis: It's an old car, usually an old American car that has been lowered so that the body is almost scraping on the earth. One of the qualities of a lowrider is not just that it's low but that an artist has painted the car and perhaps painted a mural on it. The most popular figure for murals is Nuestro Señora de Guadalupe. Religious scenes are very big. Elvis is also popular. So are flames comes off of the front wheels. Lowrider painting is really superb and everything is done by hand.
So anyway, it was my dream always to have a beautifully painted car and so I took my Honda to Lolo Medina, one of the best lowrider painters in Chimayo. And I asked him to paint Subcommandante Marcos on the hood of my car. Lolo is the guy who's famous for the twelve-stations-of-the-cross Lincoln Continental and he also did the Elvis car.
It took Lolo six months to prepare himself to paint my car. Then he did it in airbrush in two days. So now, my beautiful yellow car has this magnificent portrait of Subcommandante Marcos with bandeleros over his chest. He's got green eyes and he has his mask on and a greenish yellow halo around him. And the montes of Chiapas are in the background.
Beth: I'm lost. Why does Chellis Glendinning have Subcommandante Marcos on her car?
Chellis: The answer brings us back to a point I made earlier. Subcommandante Marcos, the spokesperson for the Zapatistas, is a figure that stands for the struggle between the larger forces of imperialism--the expanding technological society, greed, ruining the Earth and ruining communities for profit, the whole system--and land-based communities that have ancestral ties to the land, that know how to live sustainably on the land, and that have the spirituality and connectedness and sanity. Subcommandante Marcos has become emblematic of that struggle, that struggle that I have the honor to be part of here in Chimayo.
Beth: Yours is a struggle against ruining the earth for greed. And yet, people who challenge the tenets of land-based cultures, environmentalists who object to cutting trees or hunting whales or elk, would also be against ruining the earth for greed. So what's the difference; how do you understand the difference?
Chellis: I come from the environmental movement and I understand the perspective of putting forth policies that would create wilderness parks where people basically can't go unless they're just hiking through or taking photographs, where there's no use of the land. The holders of this perspective have witnessed the lungs and the nervous system and the blood flow of the earth being impaired and destroyed everywhere. And in response, they have offered the idea of saving a certain percentage of the land from technological society, saving it not only for its own sake but also for the sake of humanity. There is no doubt but that theirs is an interesting politic. And an important politic. However, the struggle of land-based people to survive in a sustainable way outside of the dominant system is an equally important struggle. And I think that both struggles are essentially about the survival of life on earth. Further, I think that a conversation needs to take place to find a way to sustain both land-based cultures and wild places. That is a conversation that will require respect on all sides.
Beth: So we're still talking about maps. Such a conversation would require speakers who could approach each other's places with humility, with the understanding that they are carrying different maps and that there is no master map.
Chellis: Yes, you've got it. Bingo!... As we sometimes say in the valley, Bingo! (laughs)
Beth Burrows is director of the Edmonds Institute, a small public interest group concerned with environment and technology.
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual
Although I myself confess to the title of "cleric," I recognize in these definitions--even the rather odd third item--the dualism so prevalent in our society, which suggests that "spirituality" is something separate from the material world around us. My life-experience, as well as my work in the realm of "spirituality," has taught me quite otherwise. It has taught me, for one thing, that everybody has a "spirituality," and, secondly, that the "church" often has little to do with it.
If I were asked to define "spirituality," I would do it through metaphor, since the very word itself contains a metaphor: "spirituality" derives from the Latin word spiritus which means "life." Spirituality, then, has to do with what gives life to our lives. What gives you energy? What provides meaning to life? What is the framework that helps you make decisions? Spirituality is the connecting thread in the tapestry, the glue that holds together the collage, the breath that brings an inert body to life. If you were a "spirituality detective," your best clues to people's "spiritualities" would be gathered by watching behavior. How do people use their time? How do they decide ethical issues? What excites them?
These clues can provide some surprising answers, ranging from money, power, and fame to compassion, creativity, and connection. The people concerned may not even be aware of their true "spiritualities", since we human beings are complicated creatures. Wealthy TV evangelists in a luxurious stage-setting preach the message that to follow Jesus (who actually held the poor and the outcast in highest esteem) will bring them worldly success. C.E.O.s who would insist that their family comes first spend little time at home. Politicians who label themselves "compassionate" propose policies that destroy the well-being of women and the environment. We are all flawed when it comes to self-knowledge.
Our spiritualities are motivated by our vision of who we are as individual human beings, and who we are in relation to what is beyond us, both the earthly "beyond", and the divine. The great world religions give us some help in thinking about these things, but even if we are disciples of a particular faith, our spirituality itself is formed in dialogue with it.
I, for example, was raised in the Episcopal Church from the time I was taken to Sunday School at the age of five. But even before that, I was influenced by parents who gave their children abundant love and extended that love to the natural world. I found great joy in being outdoors, climbing trees, and exploring the meadows and woodlands that were close at hand. As I grew older, I also found increasing satisfaction in the arts: in playing the piano, dancing, drawing, and writing. In my twenties, I began reading the mystics both of Christianity and of other religions. I recognized in them soul-friends who, like me, saw the "beyondness" in everything. Our two children, as I watched them grow (and later, the young children I taught), reminded me of the freshness of childhood and the necessity of continuing to see the world and its creatures with wonder.
In my forties, I was already beginning to struggle intellectually with the institutional church, which seemed to me to be stuck in an outmoded theology which did not include the larger world. So it was a tremendous surprise when, at the very center of my being, I discerned a "pull" to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church. In the midst of my frustration with the church, I was presented with two paths: one took me out of institutional religion entirely, and one led me both into its heart and also to its farthest boundaries, in order to become an agent of change.
It is a divine irony--or perhaps divine justice--that one so initially critical of Christian spirituality is now identified, through my books and retreat work, with Christian spirituality! In this threshold time for the human race and the planet, I continue to hope that my work both within the church and outside it will contribute something to people's understanding of themselves and the world.
Paradoxically, the Christian spiritual tradition contains within itself not only what I consider to be misconceptions about human nature and the natural environment, but also a theology which can dispel those misconceptions. In my work, I have tried to express--in language that church people will understand but which can also be relevant to all seekers--a way of looking at the world that will contribute to the planet's future health: in other words, a "sustainable spirituality." Hebrew and Christian scriptures alike provide ways to speak about what is, in the end, inexpressible.
For example, in the earliest Hebrew creation story, God is pictured as a sculptor, taking earth (adamah), making a human form, and breathing ruach (the divine breath) into it. The result is adam--literally "earthling!" We ourselves are earth, animated by the divine life-breath. This creature, the human being, is a unity, a "bodyspirit." Lest this go to our heads, the metaphor reminds us that we a part of the earth, not "apart from" it, and that God looked upon all creation, not just ourselves, as "good." The experience of our bodies and the experience of our spirits is one experience, as most of us know, and can never be separated.
In these early Hebrew stories, God gives the human being "dominion over" nature. Because God did not speak the language of the King James Bible, environmentally concerned translators have been swift to offer substitutes for that annoying concept--stewardship, shepherding, caring for. We need, however, to accept the fact that the early nomadic storytellers were, for the most part, unable to conceive of the damage that our "dominion" would ultimately cause. The story of Adam and Eve and the apple can help us here, as surely the "original sin" in question is our innate self-centeredness and consequent refusal to be obedient to the patterns of creation.
The rest of the Bible is the continuing story of the tension between human self-centeredness and obedience to what was understood as the voice of God. The latter varies according to its historical context. Sometimes, chillingly, it has to do with the Hebrew tribes' refusal to kill every man, woman, and child in a city they have captured. Sometimes it has to do with disobeying the ritual laws of purity, many of which seem ridiculous to the modern mind. We can better relate to the prophets, angry at political corruption and social cruelty, who continue to remind the people that obedience has to do with the heart "in tune with" the divine will for justice and the well-being of human society.
With Jesus, an even stronger voice is heard on behalf of justice and love. His life seemed to his followers to be an expression of God's healing love, so that Christians have seen him ever since as an embodiment (or "Incarnation") of God. This belief, at its best, provides a convincing rationale for the idea that God cares about the world--and that we should, as well.
Jesus' subsequent followers, from Crusaders to Inquisitors to the misnamed "Religious Right," have often misinterpreted what caring about the world meant, but, for those who consider his message thoughtfully, the challenge to embody our own spirituality in action is undeniable.
The great spiritual teachers of all eras have always insisted that our spirituality can never be merely a private experience, but that it inevitably affects how we live in the world. If that is so, it is obvious that our present environmental crisis may be mislabeled. As we do the detective work on the "spiritualities" behind those life-styles and decisions that damage our planet, we will realize that it is ideas--and hearts--that need to be changed, before behavior can change. It is not, first of all, an environmental crisis: it is a spiritual one.
Nancy Roth has been an Episcopal priest for almost twenty years, a writer since first grade, and a lover of the environment since she was a toddler.
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual
"Civilization is quickly using up the earth's remaining supplies of fossil carbon, while turning our planet into toast," founder Chris Roth explained in a solar-powered radio address on Earth Day 2001. "By acquiring a bunch of recordable compact discs instead of burning another gallon of gasoline (one gallon of gas is equivalent to many CD-Rs), I can intercept that carbon before it enters the atmosphere, and make myself and many other people happy through music. I can stay at home and be inspired to play and sing songs myself. I can learn to appreciate the sun, which powers my home music system--not to mention powering my own self and my own musicality. I can steward a treasure trove of harmonic inspiration, and remind myself about what is most important in life, which is expressed nowhere more profoundly than in music."
By synchronicity and good fortune, Roth recently acquired an extensive collection of Beatles bootleg CD-Rs, being disposed of by a collector "for a song." He then discovered an extensive CD-R trading network operating in the best good-will barter tradition over the internet, and with the help of a friend with a CD-R burner, was able to trade for an extensive collection of Bob Dylan bootlegs. He now has many years' worth of listening pleasure at his fingertips. Though actually, he often just chooses to listen to the birds.
"By the way," he adds, "I don't believe in duplicating copyrighted material (the commercial releases)--I'll only copy bootlegs, which isn't illegal and liberates them from monopolization and sale by bootleggers, who shouldn't be making money off these stolen goods anyway.
"I like the authenticity that can be heard on bootlegs, and that is sometimes lost in the final polished product issued by the record label. I like hearing how the songs were put together, and how much fun as well as genius went into making the music that--in its more familiar forms--will last for generations. I like the spontaneity, the whimsy, the power of raw inspiration, the missteps, the intensity and the casualness that I find on these recordings. They remind me that we are all geniuses--that the Beatles or Dylan may be particularly gifted, but that the most important thing they ever did was to let their muses flow. Our muses too can flow whenever we let them--we merely need to unstop the dams holding back our creativity."
Like many other MLACC members, Roth still spends more time listening to frogs, songbirds, raindrops, the flow of the creek, and the wind in the trees than he does to recorded music. But by exchanging car use for strategic carbon sequestering in his solar-powered compact disc library, he is able to bring the authentic voice of nature and experience more closely into his indoor living space as well. "The scripture I like to read is written not in the pages of books, but in all living creatures, in the lines of songs, in the melodies and harmonies of the sacred world, as channeled through every one of its constituent members, from Bob Dylan to a hummingbird to the tiniest actinomycete, to that quiet inner voice that says, 'It's time to end this story here.'"
The Rev. Zimmerman Freed can be reached at [email protected]
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual
I don't remember. I just remember dipping my hands into the New Mexico soil and finding the ceramic fragments of a people who had lived hundreds of years ago in what was now my neighborhood. I remember thinking about those people, wondering what they saw and felt. And I remember carrying the clay pieces to the rise above the arroyo and arranging them into a jigsaw circle in the dirt.
I did this every afternoon. I became quite adept at eyeing the grey-colored sherds among the quartz and lava on the desert floor, and the circle soon grew to ten inches across. As it did, I realized I had a vision, a goal. My goal was to cover the entire rise, eight feet in diameter, in a mandala of clay.
But the danger of the activity was soon to be revealed. I had been dating an Apache man. The Apache arrived in the area a little before the Spanish, nomadic marauders to the storage bins of the more sedentary Pueblo peoples. But I think he was speaking for all Natives when he displayed apoplectic horror at the realization that I had been moving sherds around in the badlands.
"You don't know what you're doing," he balked. "I've spent most of my medicine reassembling the lives of people who disrespected the Ancestors." He was fingering the buckskin bag he wore on a leather thong around his neck. "You're going to have to go out there and ask permission. Take some tobacco. Offer it up. I hate to think what will become of you if you don't ask. And do what they say."
My instructions were that abrupt. And that vague.
I stuffed a soft pack of American Spirit cigarettes into the threadbare pocket of my jeans, jammed on my cowboy boots, and headed out behind the house. It was a half mile journey to the place where the sherds circled the rise. I let myself out through Coríz's rusted barb-wire gate and walked most of the way along the arroyo. The sky was big and blue September above me. My boots sank into the sand like saucers making their way through sopaipilla dough, and I will tell you outright: I was quivering in anticipation of the meeting that was about to take place.
At the rise the wind was whipping fiercely. I spotted a few sherds sticking out of the dirt, and a long reddish snakeskin streaming like a carcass from a hole. I mounted the rise and crouched to the grass, my hair flapping in the wind. The vista was huge. I could see the pink barrancas of the badlands to the south, and Jemez to the west, the noble Rockies in the distance northward, and the Sangre de Cristos to the east.
I pulled out the cigarettes, unpeeled the paper of one thin stick, and as the herb flew into the wind, words I had not previously known erupted from my lips.
"People of the Valley," I heard myself say. "People of the Valley." It was the same sure voice I had heard years earlier when my mother lay in a coma, needles piercing her limp limbs, tubes circling her hair, digital machines beeping indecipherable medical reports, and the doctor whispering, "We must hope she does not hold on much longer." That was September too, and I found myself holding her hand for the last time--and that voice, that same voice: "Go into the Light, Mom." It came from my belly. "Those you have loved up close and those you have admired from afar are waiting for you: your parents Clara and Edward Daoust, brother Buddy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, C.S. Lewis, A.A. Milne. Go into the Light. The ones you have loved and admired are waiting. Go into the Light."
My mother died two days later, lightly slipping to another place, and after that I also moved to another place: New Mexico. To my surprise, the voice spoke again. I was trekking through the juniper-studded foothills when its words unexpectedly intervened. "Chellis," it challenged. "Before you arrived here, when you lived in the city, what were the two most important things in life?" The voice seemed not only to be asking the question but answering it as well. "The two most important things in life?" it recited, using my throat and my lips. "Why, political movements and cafe society." Then the question changed. "What are the two most important things now?" "Land," I answered quickly, without knowing where my thoughts were coming from. "Land and music."
Here was the voice again. "People of the Valley," I was saying. "I want to tell you what I am doing here." The voice was as certain as ever. "I want to receive your wisdom. I am willing to do whatever you tell me. I will stop moving the sherds right now if you say so. I will put them all back if you want. Or I could go on...." At this moment the wind blew my hair crazy from one shoulder to the other and back again. "I am here to honor your part in Creation," I said. "I am here to try to make Healing. You see, everything is in pieces: each one of us, whole peoples are in shatters, and the world itself." I clutched at the soft pack in my pocket. "We need to put the pieces back together. We need your Remembrance to do this. I am putting the pieces of your pots together so I can learn what is real and right. So I can make Healing for the World." A dried-out tumbleweed bounced by. "Please, People of the Valley," I pleaded. "Tell me. Let me know in a sign, with a voice, in a dream. I will do what you say."
I walked back to the house.
The days that followed were a ghostly limbo. I drifted to the general store. I picked up my mail at the post office. And I avoided the badlands, all the while wondering, worrying: what if nothing happens....
Then the dream came. It was on the fourth night after the offering. I embarked from the house toward the rise. Everything was dark, sepia like an old photograph, and out of the front tips of my boots shot bright, lime-colored lights that illuminated the way. I could see everything, more detail than I normally was aware of. Every grain of sand. Every quartz pebble. Every stem of cota. Stalk of grass. Yucca blade. Snakeskin. Every riverlet in the arroyo. Lucid sepia lit up in lime. I could see it as I never had before.
And then I came upon the hill. It was, as always, surrounded by sherds scattered in the earth--with a few newly arranged in a circle on the top. Suddenly the light at the tip of my boots shot toward the rise and, against its body, congealed into a perfectly intact Pueblo pot!
I rolled out of bed startled. On the nightstand lay a brand new book on the subject of Pueblo pottery. The thing was: I hadn't looked at it yet. I cracked the book, and it fell open. There on page 113 lay a pot shaped exactly like the one I had just witnessed--Cuyamungue Black-on-tan, A.D. 1475-1600, Anasazi Vegetal-Paint Tradition--manufactured in this very place.
At first my Apache friend seemed bewildered by these events. He stared at the horizon for a long moment, and then he turned to me and said, "You are to continue making the circle of sherds."
I brought even more passion to the task. I found plain braided pieces, pieces washed in white, pieces adorned with black stripes and black zigzags and black diamonds. One day I plunged my fingers into an erosion and pulled out the spout of a water pitcher.
All the while the circle on top of the rise was swelling--two feet across, three, four, five. I came upon a set of horseshoes in the sand, rusted red like a sorrel horse, and I placed them at the corners of the rise facing south, west, north, east. All the while the Hispano people of my village were planting and fishing and hunting--and fighting to keep their lands against the onslaught of corporations and the federal government. All the while they were playing harmonica, plucking guitar, and praying to Nuestra Señora de Guadelupe. All the while the Indians nearby were drumming feathers and fur, dancing with gourds in their hands. And miraculously, as my mother always wanted for me, I was coming into this life--planting corn myself, riding bareback, digging the ditch, learning the broken treaties.
Six feet across, seven, eight--sherds reuniting, their clay bodies merging people with earth, inviting the Remembrance of the Ancestors. One day the following September, the circle was complete. And I had quietly, no fanfare, arranged myself into a jigsaw neighbor and joined the people of the Río Grande Valley in prayer for the Healing of the World.
Chellis Glendinning is the author of Off the Map (An Expedition Deep into Imperialism, the Global Economy, and Other Earthly Whereabouts), winner of the National Federation of Press Women 2000 Book Award; My Name Is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization; and other books. She lives in Chimayo, New Mexico.
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual