WEAVING

My sense of moving into harmony with the Weaver continues as I approach the continental midpoint now. The photo above, of a Navajo weaver working on a rug, was hanging by the door to my room when I woke after sleeping at the Laughing Horse Inn in Taos. Funny I didn't notice that before I went to bed, but I laughed with considerable pleasure to notice it in the morning, feeling my silver necklace on my chest.

And remembering as well that this funny little adobe Inn has been around a very long time. D.H. Lawrence slept here, and many others.

Perhaps some energetic thread of these "great dreamers" still lingers here........when I stop I always seem to have good dreams, or lacking that, syncronicities, which seem very much about "dreaming" anyway. A good place to be, to sleep, to wake up to in the rain.

I love the Navajo words for ceremony, healing, ritual and prayer as a "Way". This is different, in my view, from speaking of a holy practice as a "service" or a "liturgy" or a "gospel". A "way" implies movement, like the course of thought and prayer, a way to walk that moves those participating along a path of increasing harmony and intention. "Way" is a journey, a trail, a pathway, a mindstream. Way is an "open system" kind of word that suggests as well the possibility of many choices.

I want to write soon about some of the legends of the Spider Woman I've been reading and thinking about as I wind, in my little pink car, across the ways of the highways and interstates of this enormous land, but I don't think I can a this time. Today I have a lot of miles to cover, and so I'll have to be brief. As I write, I find myself in a Motel 8 in Kansas, it's hot and very windy, and my mind feels rather dull compared to the high imaginative spaces of Taos, New Mexico, and the awesome beauty of the Rockies. It's a bit hard, I confess, to descend literally into the flat lands, the worthy breadbelt of America, from such elevated places. Ok, I'll say it. This land, although green and pleasant, is so very tamed, on such a "human scale". The fey folk, the kachinas, the devas, the elemental and mythic beings, if still here, are not a presence felt. Not the same experience as the wild sanctity of the mountains, the sense of being but one small note in a great Conversation of Gaia.

I can understand why Georgia O'Keefe and D.H. Lawrence loved Taos. There is a quality of light, an imaginative potency, a refinement of energy there that makes even the birds and the flowers seem more vivid, more alive. In fact, I never saw a magpie, that wonderful black and white trickster bird that reminds me of the Clowns of the Hopi, until I came to Taos. And descending, they all disappeared. Maybe they prefer the heights as well.

I've had the idea of making some paper weavings as backdrops for the masks I plan on making that are woven from papers on which prayers, or stories, or both, are written. Weaving them together into shrines, or even vessels in which stories and prayers yet unwritten or conceived.........can rest as yet invisible threads of future possibility.

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.

----Black Elk

Well, time to hit the road. Wrong choice of words. Time to continue on my Blessing Way, and let the Road Bless Me!