Sacred Spot Wild River, NM
In the winter of 1972 I was living in an old wooden house on the edge of the Verde River, Clarkdale, Arizona. The town had seen its boom and bust when the copper dried up in the 50’s and the smelter closed down, leaving scores of neatly built 5 room, company owned, brick houses empty. The house I lived in was from another time. It still had its outhouse and every room was adjacent to the kitchen, all six doors, with two leading to the outside.
We had a friend named Georgia who live in Centerville (the geographical center of Arizona), the next town over. Georgia had come to know a Hopi Indian family living on Second Mesa, a hundred mile to the north. She would play for you the scratchy sound of a Hopi Butterfly Dance on a 78 RPM record that probably can now only be found now in the Smithsonian Institute. That February she notified us that the Hopi’s had just called for their Winter Dance to be held. Their star watchers had just noticed that three planet where in alignment. This was to be a special dance. So eight “Back to the Earth” people loaded up into a small school bus and headed north for dinner and a dance. We had been invited by Daniel, a Hopi elder and his family.
We all sat within the adobe house, at a long wooden table set upon a shiny hard packed chicken blood mixed with cow dung floor, while Daniel’s wife feed us corn, beans, greens and pika bread (a fine purple corn flour rolled so thin it is translucent), as Daniel bounced his granddaughter on his knee singing A_B_C_D_E_F_G, first in English and then in Hopi.
Climbing down the roof ladder into a smoked filled Kiva, you became suddenly transported into another world. Kerosene lantern lit dancers chanted around an open fire, their shadows shaking gourd rattles, their faces painted in ochre clay and their legs strapped in juniper sprigs.
That night Daniel’s father-in-law, the oldest member of the clam, died while dancing. The ceremony halted and a new ritual began. His last words where, “I see that I have been on the wrong path.” Outside, though the wind was still, the night was bitterly cold. Stars not seen by modern man filled the heavens from end to end. A close friend of mine and I walked back to the house for warmth. As we entered, Daniel and his wife, alone, had built a small fire right where the table had stood. Over its incense smoke Daniel’s wife squatted and sang a most sorrowful song. We turned and left. This was a private thing.
The following summer my first garden was tilled. Joe Perez, a long time local farmer gave four of us three irrigated acres to farm. We shelled 5 gallons of black eye peas, took 15 pounds a day of zucchini up the mountain to Jerome to sell, grew everything from elephant garlic to mediterranean squash and weeded and weeded and weeded, using absolutely no fertilizer. We camped next to the garden and through those long silent summer nights I thought about the Hopis heart. I wanted that Heart, where objects where not extraneous and nature was not separate to myself; where I extended into a cottonwood tree as an observer while at the same time being its essence, for I had seen that I too, had lost my way.
So we come to now, and you may think how frivolous or mundane to believe that the knowledge of time or the movement of the moon has any importance. Of course we are in a new era where for hundreds of thousands of years human kind never heard their own voice, never saw an image of themselves taken yesterday or never spoke to anyone beyond a yelling distance, yet the constant persistence of duration, watching the slow incremental change in the moon and the stars, the seasons and the shadows and the rain drops soaking into the dry earth, have been lost. If we have learned “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”, this has now been relegated to myth. Are we some primordial soup whose DNA is exactly derived from nature? Though it may take more effort not to speak or think and just to be, it takes no effort to be part of nature. Yet we have become separated from ourselves where even our neighbors have become “other”.
At this point, though most of you have become dis-interested, I will tell you how “Time” came into being. It started with one stick; one stick stuck straight in the ground within a sunny clear spot. On Day One at sunrise, a stone was set at the end of the sticks shadow, and at evening, as the sun set, another stone was set at the end of the sticks shadow. On Day Two, as the sun rose, the first cast of the sticks shadow did not fall upon yesterday’s stone, but had moved. Stone, stick, shadow, sun, and now the heavens had moved. On Day Three a third stone was set at the mid-point shadow between the first two stones. On Day Four all three shadows had moved. As knowledge is like a dry twist in every man, this information had to be taken in and understood. It could be written in symbols. It could be passed on. It could be perfected. Like the steady drip of water or the duration of walking to a distant cliff and back, the shadows sped up or slowed down according to their length. Heat came with the shorter mid-point shadow, cold with the longer. This knowledge you could take with you just by carrying a stick. After years, the shadow knowledge was perfected. New stones where added. A shadow stone to show the perfect time to plant beans and another for gathering wood. Nothing needed to be counted, just observed. And nothing now was random to where even ancient Celtic caves had their entrance facing exactly towards the rising sun at the winter solstice, whose first light fell upon an alter at the cave’s back wall. Obelisk where set-up, Sun Chiefs began capturing time and order came to earth.
The moon was a deeper mystery. Its path took 150 years to capture. This knowledge, this thirst, had to be carried through multiple generations for completion. It was not a simple cross of sun shadow rising and setting. In the end the moon took a nautilus path across the heavens. Though it had no function like that of survival attached to the sun, the study of its path lasted from generation to generation, started by some long dead initiator, plotted and finished by a disciple of the dead who upon completion said, “Ah so, Master.” Then the path had to be reproved and replotted and confirmed again.
Such is Time.
In my next blog I will talk about How to Build a Hoop House with a reflective back wall and why Merlin built a curved stone wall for his herb garden.
- Sacred Spot Wild River, NM
- All photos taken by Leah Gibbons July 2010