I go home often, out into the heart of the Diné country, out to the Shonto area to be specific. This is the land that carved features in my character. This land that gave to me lessons on life and how one should speak with her. Recently, I took my love to meet her as well. It is an amazing thing to experience the newness of this land through another’s innocent eyes. The beauty of the land is especially accentuated when I invite guests into my part of the land and life. Such invites, at times, elicit magical effects on people, and that is very special. There is an unbroken quietude that allows you to tap into the stream of otherworldly communication.
It is no wonder that I feel this particular magic here more than anywhere else I have lived. I live mostly in the noisy world now. I’ve lived in Berkeley, which fed my passion for radicalism and tolerance amidst chaotic flow of energy. I’ve lived in Santa Fe, where “Southwest” colors swirled as overpriced art begged to be seen. I’ve lived below the Tetons which lifted my spirit as the looming mountains soared into the heavens. I’ve lived in Manhattan, a different canyon of concrete and glass, and a river of yellow cabs. A different magic. All the places and spaces I’ve occupied gave me stories I’ve found miraculous.
I had a friend I took out onto my land years ago, in another century, to gather a load of limestone for his landscaping. Daryl was a Texan with his accent and in every way a stature of that origin: Stetson, boots and a family man. He was also a painter of mystic southwestern images, and language about it that countered his physical appearance—a good guy.
That day we left Kayenta to a limestone quarry I knew near my home out on the side of a mesa. I negotiated my F-150 through a natural moat of sand dunes, sage flats and through a rugged pinyon and juniper forest out to the quarry. Somewhere in our gathering, he disappeared. When I had the truck half loaded, he returned with a strange expression, like someone who had seen a ghost. That was exactly what happened. “Your grandfather loves you and wants you to know it’s alright,” he told me. Stunned, I asked him how he knew we were very near where my great grandfather used to live and is interred somewhere there. I was in awe as he told me that he appeared out of a thick juniper tree. He described him to true detail, and I believed. Still mulling that over as we drove away, he told me my grandfather is still there on the old hoghaan site that has long been reclaimed by sagebrush and rabbit weed.
Somewhere between the quarry and my hoghaan construction site, he insisted we stop because there is a tree crying in pain. “It has been like that for years,” he said. We stopped and searched among the forest until he came up to a stunted tree, older yet deformed by multiple strands of baling wire someone had bound to it as a sapling years ago. He told me and the stunted tree that the only way to calm it was to cut it down. We did that afternoon and prayed on site. I got goosebumps and ghostbumps as well. This crazy Texan was a freakin’ seer, a sensitive soul so in tune with my land. Daryl had tapped into that magical flow I’ve only seen my elders communicate on.
Later, at my hoghaan site, the very same place I was born and the ground that holds my umbilical cord, he closed his eyes again and I thought him to be thinking hard on something—he had another message for me.
“There is a juniper tree here that misses you,” he said.
“What?” I replied.
“When you were a tiny infant swaddled in the cradleboard, you were propped up against this young tree as your mother went about her chores,” he said.
“What?” I said again.
“He says he misses his grandson and that it is always there if you ever need comfort and are in doubt, sit among its thickness and embrace,” he replied.
We found that very thick tree and I greeted it, “Ya’ateeh’ Shi’ cheii’” (Hello, my grandfather). I later placed an altar, a sacred image there among its thick branches. It is still there. My friend Daryl passed into the spirit realm some years later. I never forgot that afternoon’s spirit communication. My own life was too cluttered at the time to catch any phrases from the land, but that afternoon gave me new eyes on my land, as something deeper than a place I call home. It was and still is the place of rejuvenation and love from the land.
The wild wooded area now greets other selected visitors and calls them kin. I am greeted this time of year with aromas of blossoming cliff roses and young pinecones promising crops of pinyon. It is the land where I smell rain days away and a curtain of dust miles off in the distance as a dry wind sweeps the valley floor below me. It is the place where silence roars and the night’s constellation overlaps in clarity, where movements in the night’s cover does not mean harm, just spirits keeping vigil over its son. It is a place of medicine as all varieties of botanical species are used in our maintenance of health and sustenance—a natural pharmacy. But that is another column.
This place where my father’s ceremonies were strong and mysteries are constant, we let them be. The grounds that hold the bodies of my elders and relations in eternal rest. The land now is quiet. Quieter sounds of sheep bells and laughter of children. In our family’s diaspora, the land is settled back into the womb it always was.
This is the land I know well.
