SEDONA WILDERNESS

October 6, 2004

Sedona Arizona called our number, and we came running. To be more accurate, my brother called from Sedona, and we went driving. It was a treat to be invited to a desert oasis as beautiful as this town.

The drive to Sedona is like none other. Approaching from the East as we did, we drove through hours of desert and Indian Reservations. Hardly an animal was visible for hundreds of miles, then around a bend we’d come upon a herd of dozens of antelope. Their fur is desert-colored, so it would be easy to miss every one of them. I suspect we passed unknowing by more of them than we saw. The music from the Navajo radio stations was pleasant to my ears, rhythmic and harmonious and somewhat hypnotic. Buttes and mesas made a perfect backdrop for the music… or perhaps the music was the perfect soundtrack for the scenery. I loved the massive mesas with smoothly curved rock edges that looked as if gigantic standing people with featureless faces were crowded together to form the pillar on which the flat top rested. I called those mesas the The Ancestors. (I wish I knew how to upload photos to show you what I mean!) The feeling that comes from those rocks is ancient. It’s easy to understand how generations upon generations of people have had mystical experiences at the feet of those mesas.

My favorite formations were the bigger-than-life red rocks, soaring as high as the equivalent of a fifteen-story building, with three-story-tall, two-city-block-long caves in the front. In several places, Navajo businesspeople had set up stores just outside those caves. I have stopped at such places just so I could be near the mouth of the cave, breathing the breath of the Earth that wafts out.

The visit with my brother, and with my mom who flew out to join us, was a satisfying thing. Family connections are good to reinforce, and also good to keep at a distance. Mom and I both talk too much, so it’s good that we’re not near one another. It would wear us out. We enjoyed a few days of eating and sightseeing and eating and gabbing and eating. My brother rightly called our visit The Eating Club.

A highlight was when a friend took us on a hike through the wilderness outside Sedona. David, who runs www.nhne.com, is a living cornucopia of interesting projects, ideas, people and places. We had no idea what our hike would lead to, but knowing it was an adventure was good enough. As David drove us to the trailhead, we shared our recent dreams. Gary had just dreamed about seeing a rattlesnake, which had no rattles and was not dangerous. Our interpretations of that dream were pretty lame, but we tried. Then we arrived at a park trailhead in what appeared to be a plateau surrounded by massive rock formations. We hiked as swiftly as I have ever hiked for maybe an hour through wild terrain far from the regular path system.

As we approached the foot of one of these red-rock cliffs of The Ancestors, I felt the living essence of the rocks in that area. The aura was thick with a sense of centuries of life. You could say it felt like the presence of The Ancestors whose history was absorbed into those rocks. Before walking up to the rock face, I took a respectful moment to align my thoughts and my presence with that of the area.

I would have sworn I heard the words “Come In” whispered in my ear. Nobody was standing near me, and anyway I didn’t see a way to go “in” to a giant rock. So I shuffled carefully along the narrow trail and peeked around the next edge. To my utter shock, there opened up a cavernous ancient cliff dwelling!

We picked our way past walls through the rubble of ceiling-rocks which fall off in sheets periodically. I was trying to identify the nature of the cave painting ahead of me, when I was startled by the sight of a rattlesnake lying on the clay floor. I’d never seen one outside a zoo before, so I yelled “rattlesnake!” and jumped away. The guys came running, with their cameras. Then I remembered Gary’s dream. This snake lay there without moving, without rattling or coiling. David says he’s never heard of a rattler that didn’t coil and rattle as a warning. Its rattles seemed slightly deformed; they were very small and narrow. We marveled over the way Gary’s dream perfectly mirrored reality. It felt good to be able to interact with a snake in a neighborly way, without snake and humans both running in fear.

The petroglyphs were a wonder to see. This cave was so extremely remote that there was nothing to keep us back from the actual ruins and paintings. Of course, we were as careful as could be. It felt as if we were tiptoeing through somebody’s home, only they weren’t home and it had fallen into disrepair. I wondered if the residents might still be living in another dimension of this place, side by side but unable to perceive us. If time is not linear but holographic and simultaneous (as I suspect it is) then that scenario might well be true. That would explain the profound sense of history being alive. I wondered if their shaman might be having a prickly sense of the presence of someone from another dimension walking through his space unseen. He might be tempted to call out for assistance from the benevolent spirits of the future who were visiting him. We sent love and good wishes out into the cave, just in case. If that old shaman had asked us for a vision of what his future would bring, we’d have been hard pressed to think of a positive way to describe it. Maybe I could have told him that it would involve embracing change and joining with other cultures.

An additional leg of the hike took us another half-hour farther back into the wilderness. David led us to an even more remote and high-up cliff dwelling. It had fewer buildings and rock art, but the view was incomparable. We could see over the top of the desert for miles in all directions but one. Lunch in that cave tasted better for all the effort that went into hiking and scaling the cliff.

Heading back, we got lost for a time. It was actually fun to bushwhack through the scrub and thorns to find our way to the trail again. None of the three of us got worried, I’m happy to say. That would have cut down on the fun quotient. My legs received plenty of cac-u-puncture from the long cactus thorns we passed. At one point I felt something funny in my arm and looked to see two long thorns protruding from my wrist and forearm. It didn’t hurt much. Maybe it cured some ailment within me, as acupuncture might have. A butterfly fluttered around us as we searched for our trail, and followed us all the way back to the car. It was a perfect ending for the day’s expedition.

More southwest adventures will be revealed in the next installment of this story. See you back on the blog in another couple of days!
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