Hopi Rug, Bowl, & Kachina crafted by the Hopi Nation. Permission of Jean Gardner.
One summer near the Hopi Nation in Northern Arizona I worked with other teenage girls on a ranch. We learned what the cowhands spent their days doing – riding herd, lassoing cattle, branding them, hunting bears. The ranch owner, a woman, was an honorary member of the matrilineal Hopi Nation. These ‘Children of the Earth’ invited us to witness their secret harvest rituals on First Mesa.
We slept on cots under the stars. We watched young Braves race up the cliffsides, carrying rattle snakes in their bare hands. One night, as darkness set in, standing in the sky on the mesa ridge, I watched the ‘rising’ full Moon come into view in the East. I was speechless. The Moon was orange. Turning round to the West, I saw the Sun across the endless expanse of silent desert, disappearing below the horizon. Moon and Sun were twins. The Sun’s searing light had colored the Moon orange. I felt embraced. They were cradling the Earth between them, with me in her arms.
Another night I was unexpectedly awakened and taken in the back of a pick-up truck to a ritual healing fire in a lonely Hogan on near-by Navajo land. I still hear the chanted, rhythmic sounds of the medicine man, smell the smoke and feel the heat of concern rising from the closely seated tribal members. Near me was an ancient native woman with long extended earlobes. Much later I learned that Buddhists believe long earlobes symbolize “a conscious rejection of the material world in favor of spiritual enlightenment.” But at the time of the healing fire, I knew nothing about long earlobes, Buddha, or the shamanic ritual I was experiencing. A Navajo Blessing Way Ceremony to restore equilibrium to individual and cosmos alike? … to transform illness into health by balancing the instinctual with the reasoned, the intuitive with the studied, the indeterminate with the measurable, the generative with the decomposing.
Years later, smoke from another ritual fire again stirred every cell of my being. I was sitting in an afternoon sweat lodge. Earlier that day, I had been buried alive along the Appalachian Trail on Turtle Island in
a leaf shelter built as part of survival exercises. Trackers, for whom living in wilderness is a way of life, were teaching me to walk quietly over twigs and dried leaves so I would not disturb the creatures living there. They showed me how to move slowly through the forest so its elemental spirits could recognize my presence. They taught me how to make fire by rubbing together two sticks I carved into a ‘fire bow’ until a spark burst forth. That night they left me, blindfolded and alone in the dark forest, to find my way to their campfire. How? I followed distant drumbeats, — what the Trackers called the heartbeats of the Earth.
We also built a shelter out of branches, leaves, and other detritus naturally occurring in the forest.
Then after covering ourselves with mud, twigs, and other plant material as camouflage, the Trackers showed us how to hide, unseen, in the nooks and crannies among trees and boulders near the shelter. But they chose to bury me instead in the wall of the debris shelter. Lying covered with leaves, immersed in the smells, tastes, feels and sounds present in the stillness, I eased into the welcoming softness of the arms of the Earth. I felt my body begin to attune to slight stirrings of other life forms. A small toad hopped about in our shared niche, insects buzzed, leaves spoke to each other in crinkly tones. I smelled decaying leaves — a long-forgotten yet heart-opening fragrance from many childhood years of forest wanderings. Now my tight muscles relaxed, bones yawned, my neck elongated. I began to breathe more deeply. An unfamiliar exuberance surged through me. I was buried not in a pile of dead leaves but permeated by life.
Jean Gardner©2021