Mesa Verde - home of the ancestors. Cities of rock and splendor perched in alcoves hollowed below the edge of shear cliffs. We drove out of Ouray up and over Red Mountain, past the played-out mines, and down the other side. Booming along in our whirring Toyota cocoon surrounded by this glittering world created for us. We stopped briefly in Durango - steeped in the history of the railroad, hard by the side of the roaring interstate and then ground up the switchback macadam to the top of the mesa.
Mesa Verde soars over a verdant valley full of irrigated crops, animals, and people. One wonders why the ancestors didn’t live down in the valley until you realize the valley is only habitable because of the vast irrigation technology and energy that keeps the water flowing. The mesa is cut and defiled by numerous canyons eroded by ancient water courses. The ancestors started out living on top of the mesa in simple hogans. Later, they built and moved to alcove cities below the rim. Benevolent rain kept creeks flowing across the top of the mesa to spill over the edge of the cliffs and so erode long serpentine canyons. The canyon bottoms were full of cottonwood, aspen, and oak – elk, deer, and buffalo. As long as the water flowed it was paradise! The cities were built behind the rock lip where the water ran over the edge. The ancestors lived in stone houses behind feathery waterfalls. The evening sun came thru the veil of water and illuminated their multi-hued palaces, courtyards, and kivas. Kuchina and Kokopelli came from their lairs underground to play havoc with the people, to puncture their grandiose view of themselves.
Trees and shrubs grew in the valleys and check dams created fields on the mesa above for oats and corn. They lived there before the Spanish arrived with their horses and guns. They traveled - from Canyon de Chelly to Chaco Canyon they built villages, palaces, granaries, and kivas in almost every canyon and draw. They marked their passing along the trails with pictures carved into the rock - pictures we still see today. They lived in harmony with their surroundings until the water ran dry, the crops failed and the gods deserted them.
I rode my bike around a far and quiet mesa top where only foot traffic or bicycles were allowed. The sun streamed across the mesa, Ship Rock visible in the far distance across the blue-grey desert. I was alone on the track and the riding was easy. Wild oats and the burnt remnants of juniper and pinon grew on the plains above the canyons. I parked the bike and clambered around one of the cliff dwellings - the Sunset house. Sunset House is a small dwelling compared to some of the others but follows the basic format of all cliff houses. There is storage in the far recesses, the rooms are set into the floor and back of the alcove, and the kiva - sometimes more than one - is located toward the front - closest to the water and the cliff. I stood and absorbed the silence and grandeur and imagined the kiva full, smoke rising from the hole in the roof and the village bustling with celebration and wonder. I stood below the silent remains of the palace and imagined the people clothed in fronds woven from century plants, smoke drifting across the alcove, a veil of water falling from above, and the red, blue, and pink walls of the palace.
They lived with sacred spirits - the rocks, trees, animals, rivers, and canyons spoke to them in dreams and visions as they danced. Bear, Cougar, Raven, and Brother Coyote appeared not as representations, not imagined, not illusions - but actual. The spiritual fabric of their surroundings was made real by magical dance. Dark spirits were released from the underworld and sent whirling into the starstruck night with the sparks from the pungent pinon fire. Visions of deer, elk, bears, rivers, massive thunderstorms, floating eagles, and trickster coyotes were danced in elegant steps and fabulous costumes around and around and around the sacred fire. After days of celebration and ecstasy, they fell exhausted to the divine rock and dirt. They danced the moon alight, danced the sunrise, danced the rainfall. The fire faded to smoke and ash, the village fell silent, coyote yipped his approval and owl hooted. Spirits appeased, mischief averted for another season, the village rested while the gauzy veil of water flowed over the edge of the alcove and splashed, whoosh into the canyon below.
I saw the people around me, smelled the smoke, watched the whirling dancers, saw the animals overhead, and heard the songs. It was immense magic - a repudiation of all my world considered sacred and true. The people lived in harmony with their surroundings and worshipped the earth, water, and sky. I knew they were doomed by a drought they could do nothing about. The drought would come and they would leave - walk away from their beloved cliff homes, and follow the water down the canyon to build other pueblos and villages far away. They made every sacrifice, worshipped every god, and appeased every spirit and still, the drought came. Yet, they were humble in the face of capricious nature and survived to still worship to this day in places like Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta.
They walked away from their cliff houses down the canyon with as many personal effects as they could carry on their backs and heads. They looked back at the parched village, the waterfall long dried, the maize and oats on the mesa, dry and dusty and blown away in the desert wind. The miraculous blooming desert now turned harsh, dry, and dreadful. They faced climate change and were forced forever from their paradise. They walked away to start again - we should be so lucky.
The visions of the ancestor's celebration set me alight. I observed something holy, a truth. I knew there was a magic fabric of spirit and energy and vibration enfolding us. We are part of that fabric, entangled in the web of life that surrounds us. We cannot be plucked out of the web and set aside from everything else, alone - we can not be separate from it - we are it! You and me and the trees and bears and coyotes and snakes and sky and clouds and mountains and rivers and snow and rain and grass and air - we are all creations of this magical planet we live on. She - the planet - Earth - creates the conditions that make all life possible. The thin skin of the biosphere is where Earth-mind lives and breathes and creates. Earth is alive, and in love with life and so should we be. The ancestors knew this – they danced to exhaustion to worship her. Surrounded by spirits - some capricious, sure - they lived to a natural rhythm and pace. We arrogant moderns have lost our way, we know no spirits but our own. For us, the wild, the sensual, the other-than-human, is out there somewhere - something and somewhere other to be used, studied, manipulated – in service of an ever-accelerating human economic rhythm and pace. We do not see the wild as the very thing that makes this existence possible. We do not see that the wild is what is – and we are the illusion. Earth - the ancestors knew and we have forgotten - is life in all its majesty and splendor.
Surrounded by sensual magic and spirit, released from care and worry, full of myself, and in the thrall of Kokopelli, I stopped on a summit on the road back to see a squall kicking up dust 80 miles away near spectacular Ship Rock. A blue-grey veil of water fell thick and slanted from the bottom of the cloud as lightning flickered within. I heard again the wild keening cries, and thumping drums and smelled the pungent smoke of a ceremonial fire. Life-giving rain falls on the far desert, and flowers, deer, coyotes, and oats will bloom over there. It was miraculous and true. I threw the truck back down the winding road too fast to the campground. On the way, I asked myself again - What if the ancestors were right?
The answer came accompanied by luscious deep laughter - “We ARE right”.
That night, our sleeping bags dissolved into soft warm buffalo robes and the air mattress transformed into a deep fragrant bed of sweetgrass, the tent spun and resolved into a deerskin teepee. Weird, grotesque shadows danced across its inside surface cast by the bear dancers outside in the orange-y firelight. I reached over to Yogini, pulled her close, and kissed her. One thousand years ago, we made sweet love under a magic moon in the time of the bear high on the mesa where the water flowed clean and clear.
Somehow, we lost our way.