My first feeling: It is cold, and windy, and I’m unprepared. My knees pulled up, my feet tucked tightly underneath me, my shoes are wrong for hiking even this short and ruddy trail. Still, in their wrongness, like the spongey hooves of a mountain goat, they grip the thin layer where air, sand and stone form a trinity of mutual bearing. The air smoothes the stone, the sand – by water, fire and earth too – withstands the wind through long enough intervals to make matter, to make stone. Yes, that ever ubiquitous of alchemical concepts, the prima materia. The stone gives matter to village, canyon, state, continent, planet. The stone upon which rest the soles of my inappropriate shoes is matter-writ-large. This place matters; natura naturans, matter mattering, anima animating.
I look around as if for the first time, perched on what they call a “vortex,” which is apparently an earthly place of swirling energy known by the indigenous centuries long before any light-skinned person made a footprint in the pulverized red ground-cover. Yet even being here a short time – mere hours – it’s easy to see how that reality conveniently becomes inconvenient to the largely white population. I see everywhere evidence of the “new age” believing it has somehow discovered these places, that, to my mind, are less about the swirling energy and more about openings and closings, perhaps invitations, perhaps even friendship. I don’t much care about the force of energy, whether it is strong, weak, present, absent, real, a fantasy, or merely a construct to sell quartz crystals. Loving a beautiful crystal as much as the next person, after being in close proximity to the stone for so many years, I’m no longer mesmerized by the more esoteric qualities. They are enchanting and isn’t that enough? And in terms of this caring or tending, I’m not yet sure what I will come to care for in or about this place, other than those things typically concerning me: Who else lives here? (And by “who,” I don’t mean human.) With whom can I speak? What language will we use? Who will teach me about this place, and can I learn? And the more self-concerning: Why am I here? For had someone told me only a month and a half ago that I would be living in northern Arizona, having moved from a place I’ve happily called home for never long enough, I would have laughed outright and called it a projection of their own longing. I didn’t want to leave, but I chose to anyway. While I can point to a more obvious catalyst, I remain unconscious of the deeper meanings behind what has felt like a traumatic uprooting. Still, this is where I am, where I’ve chosen to be. It doesn’t escape me that even writing this blog has somehow been motivated by my arriving here. Mere idea being made in to matter; a different type of making altogether.
A small canopy of green pulls my eye away from the empty-aired canyon before me and I feel a push to explore… if only for a short distance. After all, I’m still wearing the wrong shoes through which to evoke my Inner Goat. So up I rise, moving to the edge of the rounded mound of sandstone. I mean to take a closer look at the Utah Juniper who catches my eye, the one growing below, just one layer of time behind or in front of me. (Time, it’s everywhere here, and also nowhere. Its only semblance of presence is that one can feel on one’s skin warmth or cooling in response to the presence or absence of sunlight. Otherwise, I’m not getting early impressions of a clock’s import.) Yet this silvery skeleton of a tree interrupts my intention, and in an attempt to be polite, I agree.
It’s not as if I’ve not been to this place before, when perhaps this very skeleton-of-a-tree was still green, still growing, although perhaps in the early stages of decline (and before continuing, why do I hesitate to name it outright, even recognizing that you, by now, know exactly where I am?). But it was 1982 then. I was only 14 years old; a different time when I was unconcerned by my own difference, by my own round-pegness-in-a-square-holeness. Then, quartz crystals were magic, and this place held the meaning of the cosmos, or so I longed to believe. I imagined hidden tribes of non-earthly peoples living in Utopic communities of gnosis and inter-dimensionality. Where to have conversations with trees, stones, the elements is de rigueur. I’m 51 now… and I’ve not exactly allowed my difference to serve me. Rationalism having held the better part of valor it seems, I’ve remained torn between two minds, two states of being. Lines from Goethe’s Faust come to mind (translated by Jung, of course):
Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, And each will wrestle for mastery there. The one has passion’s craving crude for love, And hugs a world where sweet the senses rage; The other longs for pastures fair above, Leaving murk for lofty heritage. (Goethe, In Jung, CW 6, para. 368)
Doubt, rationalism, healthy skepticism, and certainly the more grounded, academic… an ever-present call for critical thinking? Or fancy, imagination, trust, a Corbinian mundus imaginalis? I’m still trying to figure out where my gifts meet the needs of the world [laughing]! But I digress… or have I been digressed upon by this skeleton-of-a-tree?!
Apparently, one way to discern a vortex is by the trees, pointedly, the Utah Juniper. In confluence with the force and directionality of the “energy,” the growing wood is caused to spiral around itself, mimicking the axiality of our spiryllic Milky Way. This tree here, though, shows no evidence of turning, no axiality. Instead, it’s been deciding to reach out into open air, stretching beyond my ability to touch its weathered, gleaming bark. No energy? No vortex? Or simply a tree deciding to live its own way? It could have been any tree at all, but I could easily imagine it glinting in the desert moonlight, shining its unique character, defying the other long-dead trees fallen to the canyon floor by gripping the red rock with wrong shoes. Exactly who am I describing here? Shining only when under the cloak of midnight, when no one is around to see it? Yet I am seeing it now, as it is, under the mid-day sun. This tree who seems so undesiring of company is the first significant creature I have met in this new place. Beckoned by a living tree (the tree I mentioned whose green canopy first caught my attention, a tree replete with fresh and dried roses, perhaps given in offering by those who would do such things), it has been instead a tree long-since having shed its more mundane vitality who has spoken to me. It’s not grand, this tree. Not tall, or full, or green, or turning, revealing a mysterious vortex of ancient wisdom. It turns not on itself, but reaches out into the unknown, anchored into the earth and hillside with always an awareness that its rootedness is temporary. The day will surely come when the earth will release this skeleton-of-a-tree, and it will surrender, to tumble downward, end-over-end, perhaps breaking into the canyon below.
On the principle of axiality, artist and poet, George Quasha, has said, “Axis is a space you’re surrendering to.” This then is the where in which I begin, with this tree, here, with this stoney place, and the open space beyond. Unprepared, with these wrong shoes and all, turning… like that stone there.
Sources:
Jung, C. G., CW 6, para. 368.
Quasha, G. (2009). https://vimeo.com/5012108
Henry David Thoreau (1910) suggested, “Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.” (p. 62) Following that wisdom, ignoring the fear of lacking “enoughness” in favor of “muchness,” I begin where I am. This is that place, materially, on Earth (image at right). A place where the sun bleaches all, creeps into the crevasses of cracks and vessels, forcing out the contradiction of light and shadow, ecologically speaking, of course. And, not to invoke an over-used trope, the place is also an alchemical vessel, an alembic of that very contradiction of what is visible and what is translucent, invisible, without material weight and effect. Where airy thoughts seem to hang about, but in actuality, work tirelessly to carve, transform, erode unnecessary layers of history and idle musing. I, for one, find it physically impossible to linger too long in the brilliance of saturated sunlight. I am for the movement in and out of light and shadow.
More, this is a place who sees, figuratively, literally, and materially. I feel, therefore, an inspiration by this place; this place who sees, from whom I cannot seem to hide. For the time being, a kind of suspension of disbelief in itself, I seem to have been offered space in which to breathe outwards this invisible airiness I’ve been holding within myself, to further an initiation into visibility, to return to the community the gifts received from a very, very long pilgrimage road. I’m reminded thus of an observation made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1993), who said: