The week began with a dream. I am walking along by myself in a wood. I am several paces behind a group of hikers. They run off frightened. I see the object of their fear. A massive, silver-gray bear is standing in the middle of the river. It sparkles as if starlight is embedded in its thick fur. There is something prehistoric about it. Either I run up to it or it charges me. Either way we are suddenly face to face. I know that I am in the presence of something very ancient. In the dream I wake up, climb down a hill and join my friends around a swimming pool. Then I wake up for real in the dark, spring morning in La Madera.
My friends Paul, Neil, Rafael, Mike B. And Mike M. took a train from Hartford, Connecticut; the same train I took months earlier. I borrowed Felipe’s truck to pick them up at the Lamy train station. I remember as I was driving along Route 30 and the late afternoon sun gave the sandstone road cuts a persimmon blush that this is my life. Every now and again, if you’re lucky you have moments that remind you with electrical certainty that you are in the full current of your own life. I was somewhat familiar with the area but also a complete newcomer. With my friends I would be both guide and fellow traveler.
I should say, as I tell this part of the story, that this was a profound experience for everyone involved. They all have their own takes on it, and have the images that have stuck with them. I will stick with my recollections. A couple of years ago on a zoom we reminisced about this time. It was helpful to get missing chunks filled in. Also for brevity’s sake I will hew to a single narrative path.
Rafael’s father had died very recently. He was only in his fifties.It was sudden and heartbreaking. He would be a presence with us the entire week. The first night they arrived in La Madera, Felipe did another healing ceremony. The ceremony invited Rafael’s father in. He called on ancestral spirits to guide us.
We had a series of outings planned. The big one was Chaco Canyon. Chaco Canyon is one of the most sacred sites in North America. Once a thriving urban center, it was largely abandoned by 1250 AD. For over 2000 years it was a nexus for ancestral Pueblo cultures. It was a hub on continental trade routes, ceremonial center and political anchor. It now sits in what is called the Four Corners area in Navajo land. It contains the ruins of house complexes, agricultural fields, community cisterns and astronomical markers. It has been the subject of intense archaeological focus since the nineteenth century. The circular village units and apartments mold themselves to the sinuous curvature of the canyon’s walls. Precise brickworks define the remains of walls and buildings. It is high desert. In March, temperatures can be extreme.
This is long before Google. We relied on guide books, hearsay and vague suggestions. We borrowed camping gear from Tracy and Felipe. Someone brought psychedelic mushrooms. The day was clear, crystalline. We didn’t get to the site until mid-afternoon. We took the mushrooms and climbed to the top of the mesa. From there, the fungal intelligence took hold. Some invisible hand guided me. There was a kindness emanating from the ground. I sat against a sun-warmed stone. I looked down on the valley. A voice, not audible, not verbal seemed to narrate the geological history of the whole canyon. Snow began to fall as we descended the cliffs to the campsite. The sky darkened. We all felt lifted to the canyon floor as if in cupped hands. The mushrooms wore off, the full moon came out in a now clear sky. We did our count. It felt like someone was missing. We were all there, but an absence/presence remained in camp. We remembered Rafael’s father. We huddled around our camp fire in the freezing night, content and went to sleep.
I had another dream. I am driving around with my father through a town in flames. Some Native warriors are shooting arrows tipped with shit at us. It is Easter Sunday in the dream. Some government officials made Easter illegal. I am trying to make Easter presents out of clay but due to constant patrols I am unable. In the middle of a field is a row of monolithic structures, each one a black cubicle. I try hiding my clay in the cubicles. I am the only one who doesn’t have any gifts ready. My friends build a cross in one of them and I nail myself to it. A guard in Roman dress comes to arrest and kill me. I rip myself off the cross with broken wooden beams still nailed to my hands. I find a hiding spot with Felipe. Everyone is sleeping on the floor. Felipe is explaining Christian mythology to everyone.
On Wednesday night we are invited to the morada for the mass. This is the night of Tenebrae, The Darkness. We helped Felipe bring his food offerings up to the adjacent community center. The morada or chapel is hundreds of years old. It is a small, modest adobe building situated up in the mountains. It serves several villages in the area. When we entered, all the pews were pushed to the side along the wall. The floor was open with a clear path to the altar full of candles, santos and a wooden cross. As visitors we were in the back. For most of the duration of the mass we kneeled. The wide, old pine board floor was worn smooth with use. I watched eighty year old farmers and grandmothers kneel upright and still. We tenderfoots wriggled and slumped like five year olds. Of our group, Neil and Paul, both brothers grew up Irish Catholic in Connecticut, Rafael’s parents left Cuba during the revolution and remained Catholic, Mike M.is Italian. Only Mike B. Was not indoctrinated into the Holy and Apostolic Church. It didn’t matter. We were all outsiders. This was not the weak image stew we were served growing up. This was a manifestation of the story as living mythology. I had to keep asking Rafael to translate. He said it was a very archaic and formal Spanish.
The Penitentes came in carrying a large bulto of Christ. He was blindfolded and bound. They sang their lamentations to Jesus, apologizing for the betrayal and the arrest. This first part of the mass reenacts the capture in the Garden of Gethsemane. After the mass we all retired to the community center. The florescent lit room with the large center table full of frijoles, tortillas, cakes, pork, chile and other delicious food was a stark contrast from the solemnity we had just witnessed. Jokes and ribbing, gossiping and warmth permeated the space. Then it was time to return.
The chapel was now only lit by the many candles crowding the altar. All the pews were arranged in a semi-circle facing the altar. As visitors we sat with the women, children and old folks. The Brothers came in from behind us. They began to sing a low, slow chant. At the end of each cycle, Felipe’s mother blew out one section of candles. The chapel darkened slowly with each round of chants and song. Just as the last candle was blown out, the men begin to yell and scream like banshees. They bang cups, cans and drums. A lone, high flute plaintively snakes through the cacophony. That moment of descent into the darkness was terrifying. Paul grabbed my leg in fear. This is meant to replicate the feeling that Christ felt when he was beset by his own people. Other sounds seemed to be coming from the din. Unexplainable and otherworldly.
Afterwards, back at Felipe’s house we unpacked the experience and the whole week. Felipe said that other, unexplainable sounds are the voices of demons joining the chorus. The flute represents the wailing of Mary and as such is a sonic tether through the cacophony. The boys were getting ready to leave the next day. Everyone began to make ancestral connections. Some psychic animal had been awakened in each one of us, an animal that is still stalking, growing and moving through deep terrain.
After taking them all back to Lamy for the return train trip, I headed down to Albuquerque. I was to meet a friend of Felipe’s who referred to himself as a queer wizard, he also had a background in gestalt psychology. We did a ceremony in his hot tub (I’ve no doubt this was as much for his pleasure of having a 22 year man in a bathing suit). We reentered the dream with the silver Bear. As we relived the dream, I was meant to fight the Bear and get him to tell me what it wants. The Bear in this session became many things–Proteus-like. It seemed I had a lot of work to do.
Felipe had given me some directional stones: stones of various kinds whose colors represent the cardinal directions. I purchased a cheap little leather pouch at the Albuquerque Flea Market to contain them. At a party on Saturday night ( a night if I was observing Holy Week properly is when Jesus is in the underworld preparing his resurrection) I met a friend of a mutual friend. I had my little cheap pouch, probably a cliche of a young white guy in Albuquerque with his talismans and quests. She was insistent on seeing the stones. I didn’t trust her but relented. I instantly had a sense that I just violated something. I didn’t understand about magical privacy then, that state we find in fairy tales and myths in which the person must gestate and figure things out alone. Not everything is for public performance.
On Easter Sunday, Tracy, her visiting brother Eric and I joined our friend Joe for an Easter brunch. It was lovely on this sunny spring day to be with friends. John Moriarty, the Irish poet-philosopher speaks about the importance of the dark night and the storms . It is a proximity to holiness that is so close you can’t see it anymore. You can only sense darkness. He says you must awake on Easter Sunday to the ordinary beauty of the Earth. Jesus is also Persephone and the Bear Mother who emerge from a season in the underworld to inaugurate the spring. It was a lovely day with champagne and eggs and baked goods.
When I returned to La Madera, I had a lot of work to make up since my friends had taken up my week. I began to feel queasy. Something was not right. Soon I was vomiting and had diarrhea. I had to run to the outhouse behind the house and use a bucket for the puke. Some darkness had entered into me. I couldn’t hold anything down. Felipe was out of town and I was alone in the house. I was too weak to stoke the fires and keep the house warm. For some reason, I remembered the incident on Saturday night with the stones and the woman at the party. Soon, Felipe’s mother and Uncle Albert took me over to their house. I was feverish. Sweating. As I lay incomprehensible on the couch, wrapped in a blanket I had a vision. I say vision, one could dismiss this all as delirium. It was of a different order from a dream.
I am being carried on a stretcher up a winding mountain path. At the top of the path there is a circle of red stones. The sky is red and fiery. I am placed in the center of the circle. I am visited by Grandfathers. They are immeasurably old. They begin to heal me.
The next night Tracy came up to help me process clay. I was feeling much better but very weak. I have a dream that I am a ghost and nobody could see me, so I keep doing mischievous things. I then get lonely and meet up with other ghosts. We wait in a park over a swamp to be called into the portal of light. I’m never called. The spirit world is not ready for me.
I will make an attempt later the next week to recreate some kind of vision with the little bit of mushrooms I have. It will be a spectacular failure. It is motivated by a spiritual greed. Instead of letting that Holy Week experience ferment inside me, I try to grasp for more. Luckily I don’t kill myself with my foolishness. The land rebuffed my bungled advances. It leaves me unsatisfied. I’ve thought many times in the past few years whether this can count as an initiatory experience. Culturally, we are desperate to have the prophetic; the mountaintop lightning strike. Initiation and the prophetic only work if it is the context of a healthy culture. The experience in the morada was a mythology that I was born into. Albeit, the performance of it was alien to my own upbringing, but the mythological images were all there. One thing that I did recognize is that beneath the institutional veneer of the religion I grew up with, is a deep, earthbound image world.
I don’t know if it was an initiation per se. It was a plunge into mythological depths, depths into which I was given questions to puzzle over for decades. It was a first phase of fermentation. The chthonic beings and animals unleashed in me have been biding their time since. I have been sensing it is time for their emergence. I was an uncooked fool then (now I’m a middle aged fool). Something else that Moriarty speaks about is the breathing hole of the seal. He says that we need those breathing holes now to access the depths through the crust of a materialistic and static culture. When I tell this story, I find that breathing hole. It is not a return to Catholicism or church I seek, but the raw material that animates the mythic image world, and so our own interface with the living earth.
I was not easy to get along with then and neither was Felipe. He could be manipulative and mean. He could also be insightful, kind and empowering. Sometimes within the same sentence. I was what you might call a particular flavor; a bucking, wild horse with no sense of its own power. Felipe helped me to see that power but he also undermined it. As summer was coming on, it was mutually agreed that I should go to Alaska. That was my next impulsive, hare brained idea. I would hitchhike to Alaska and make money on a fishing boat and pay off my student loans from my unfinished degree. I went to “Alaska”. I had no specific destination. Eventually I returned to Albuquerque and Tracy, broke and 10 pounds lighter. I went back to school and realized I was an excellent student, graduating summa cum laude. Finally we left New Mexico all together. I didn’t see Felipe again for twenty years. I will conclude the essay with that coda next week.