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