A Dream of Dimensional Spirits Dancing
Safe, Sovereign and Free~ Signs from Nature's Spiritual Guidance
It’s August 1985 and I am driving down to northern Arizona from San Francisco in just one day.
I feel lighter and relieved to be traveling alone after dropping my new lover Charandas off with friends he could stay with until he returns to India. We have been together since meeting on the fourth of July, and all the while he has been pressing me to return to India with him for the Kumbh Mela.
He was determined for me to go to India to live with him, daily conversations pursued.
“White Horse, it will be so beautiful. You and Karen will bear my children and help me write my books. We will live together communally. You will love it. You‘ll see.”
My jaw tightened and I held back the urge to scream, Charan, that’s your picture, not mine. I don’t want to struggle and live a hard life in India.
“I don’t think I could do it even if I wanted to.”
His eyes vacant, I knew he wasn’t listening to me.
Although I longed for a true intimate partner, it’s only been a few years since I chose freedom from my eight year relationship during my Saturn return. My heart cringes concerning Charan Das’ India adventure with children in the wild; that feels too risky for me.
Charandas and I slept together in his friend’s extra bedroom for several days while I recovered from a staph infection picked up from the river cleanup at the Rainbow Gathering.
Sitting outside in reverie and stillness of the early morning, I contemplate our earlier intimacy.
When I wake and open my eyes, Charan’s eyes soften; he touches my face with his fingers. Our bodies begin to move in slow motion. Sitting up, I place his legs under mine. We kiss, he slurps my face and we begin to breathe in a spontaneous rhythm. I feel immersed in an overwhelming effulgence that pulls me into a trance. He enters me and our bodies move around in a synchronized circle. We hold still, not moving at all. I feel pure and whole inside my yoni. Sensing erotic energy building between us, fear rises about what might happen next if I merge my whole being completely into his vortex of shadowy unpredictable wildness.
I am also afraid of getting pregnant.
I pull away from him. “I can’t do this,” is all I can manage before leaving the room. I need time to sort out what my next steps are to be without his pervading presence.
After our lovemaking abruptly ends, I choose to leave him. Refusing to speak further with Charandas, I pack quickly and leave his friend’s place.
Before I leave San Francisco, I stop at the Golden Gate Park and walk in the grass, soaking up the beauty of this luscious place. Laying down and looking up into the blue grey sky, I sigh and fall asleep for a little while.
As I am leaving the park, I happen to drive by the neighborhood my friend Gregg lived in when he was still in school. I recall our walks in the park and lovemaking.
Exiting the city and driving down 101, I begin to reflect on the messages I’ve been given by nature and my inner guidance. The clear sign of three bird feathers pointing north toward Indian Country, the forest at the Rainbow Gathering with the teaching tree filling me with fruits of wisdom, and my experience of being a white horse and a water protector. I long for an easier, simpler life more immersed in nature, feeling called to work within another culture, much as I had when working as a teacher in the Black community in Omaha.
After several hours of relaxing into what is possible, I breathe in and declare: “I am on my way to Indian Country!”
Trusting I can follow the openings and signs of nature along the way. I decide this is my place to awaken at my own pace and in my own way.
Considering it would be good to be a counselor on the Hopi Reservation, I again remember my friend Gregg. He and I had been lovers for a couple of years while he was completing his degree at California Institute of Integrated Studies, where I would love to go for a PhD. We’d attended my first sweat lodge together at Heartwood and had continued to write each other and occasionally call. I know he’s currently working as a counselor on the Navajo Indian Reservation. We talk on the phone on my way down, and I sense he still may have feelings for me.
Meeting up at the BIA Housing at Dilcon near the school where he works, Gregg shares he’s dating a Navajo teacher but acts casual about it, and we have a steamy time on his bed before I leave. He says he knows a person at Polacca on First Mesa and he may be able to put in a good word for me.
Instead of an adventure in India, I am more comfortable here in Arizona Indian Country where two separate Indian tribes, Hopi and Navajo have their reservations next to each other. Hopiland is comprised of three mesas sandwiched between Tuba City to Keams Canyon and surrounded by Navajo canyon lands with vast high desert areas for plenty of horses and sheep.
Solace rises in me after attending a social basket dance on Shungopavi Village of the Hopi tribe late August. I feel an abiding inner peace I’ve been seeking. Hopi means peace. This is what I find each day I walk on the mesas, drink the sweet well water and talk with people I meet.
As I drive along the 264 highway, I notice the starkness of the more barren land compared to the lush green hills of northern California. Where are the corn, melons and fields of squash the Hopi are famous for? All I can see is rock, scrub brush and sparsely spaced dwellings of stone, brick or pre-fab siding.
Tumbleweeds blow across the road as I near the Hopi Cultural Center. I stop to go to the bathroom and end up eating at the salad bar in the restaurant with the words Hoop of the World written above the doorway. There are a variety of people eating there that day. One woman stands out: tall, about 5’10” with angular arms and face, her blonde hair wrapped in a bright colored scarf, her eyes as blue as the Arizonan sky. She looks like a transplant from the sixties. Long colorful skirt, tie-dyed t-shirt with beaded earrings, necklace and bracelet to match.
I walk by and smile. She invites me to sit with her male friend and herself.
“This is the best place for sweet well water,” she tells me. “I come every weekend from Ganado and fill my gallon jugs.”
I introduce myself, she says her name is Carrie. She teaches kindergarten at the Public School compound near Hubble Trading Post.
I laugh and say, “How about that, I am looking for a counseling position on Hopi.”
Tom introduces himself and lets me know there aren’t any counselors in Hopi BIA Schools this year. “They’re planning to have them next year in elementary and junior high.”
I look around me and everyone else in the room is Native American. Some Navajo, some Hopi and some I have no idea, the features they share are the long beautiful black hair, strong and heavy around open black eyes, with moon or square shaped faces. It is quiet here.
A deepening silence within me pervades the outer sounds of eating, coughing and laughing. I feel peaceful here at the top of the world at 7000 feet altitude, this place feels like home.
Other than a small storage space in Dad and Esther’s garage, all I possess is packed in the back trunk of my VW. Carrie offers that I come back to Ganado with her and see what openings are there. She tells me we will pass Keams Canyon where the Hopi Education office is located. I stop on the way to her place and find out there are no counseling openings in elementary as my new friend mentioned was the case.
As I follow Carrie to Ganado, the terrain becomes hilly as the altitude climbs. More and more sage and cedar bushes, sheep, goats and horses populate either side of the black top road.
The Public School Compound is built next to the Ganado Post Office and a small Christian College, Ganado College, which has a great salad bar for lunch and dinner we can partake in even if we’re not attending College there.
Carrie comments that Ganado in Navajo means Red Rocks.
We walk the entire compound. “I usually shop at Window Rock’s grocery and sometimes go into Gallup, New Mexico for beads once a month,” my new friend shares.
Her dark red stone floor apartment is cozy and room enough for two. She invites me to stay with her until I decide what I am going to do. Carrie puts on a cassette tape of reggae music, we dance, swaying to the beat. After I make my bed on the floor with a futon mattress, pillows and some blankets, she offers me an apple with some peanut butter and some rice cakes. We drink some chamomile tea before bed.
I fall asleep fast and dream deeply. Hearing drumming and singing with silence all around a huge pinon wood fire under the inky black sky full of twinkling stars, I see a group of tall, transparent, wispy feminine dancers with long skirts and dangling turquoise earrings. They solemnly surround the people and move in a wider circle around the Navajo community ceremony.
In the dream, I view this amazing scene from a few feet outside the dancer’s circle of movement in sync with Mother Earth. One could call it a remote viewing of some kind, but in my heart, I feel the Beings sense my dreamtime presence.
When I wake, I mention my dream to Carrie about the ghost-like, translucent figures around a ceremonial fire.
“Navajo are very private about their native dances,” Carrie responds. “I’ve been invited only to a social dance by Annie Begay, a sheepherder and weaver who’s coming to her door after payday this Friday. She weaves these wool rugs you see in my place.”
On Friday afternoon, I open the door when I hear Annie knock. She stands five feet, her raven black hair pulled back and braided up into a bun, a turquoise and silver squash blossom necklace over her black multi-colored ribbon blouse with a maroon full ankle length skirt. Annie has a garbage bag full of her hand-dyed sheep wool rugs and asks if I’d like to buy a rug.
I pause, breathing in her round moon face full of beauty and wisdom. I ask to see if she has a smaller sized rug that costs less than fifty dollars. She opens up many black, red and white Navajo cubical geometric patterned rugs, two by three feet long. She pulls one out from the bottom of the pile.
My breath catches in my throat. It is the Spirit dancers1 in my dream time. Woven into the rug are three of them with corn in between! Annie tells me they’re called Yei be Chei dancers and that white people cannot attend any of the Navajo outdoor ceremonies.
Even though this Navajo community won’t allow me to attend their dances or healing ceremonies such as sand paintings, I feel in my heart that the spirit dancers are welcoming me to this sacred red land. I know that somehow I belong here.
For me, Nature has remained my primary spiritual guide, and I trust this is a sign I am in the right place at the right time, trusting the flow of the dance of life that unfolds before me.
That weekend we went to Canyon de Chelly for the first time. There’s a parking lot at the edge of the Canyon with about a two mile trail down to the fertile land where the gardens grow, hogans or summer camps reside with their sheep. We walk down to the river and cross over to get a closer look of the White House ruins.
It is a sunny day and the Grandmother who lives in the summer Hogan near the end of the trail to the ruins is out herding her sheep.
We walk and stand in reverent silence. Carrie and I pause, a gesture of honor and respect. We nod and smile at one another, with our eyes in soulful recognition.
“Yá'át'ééh,” she smiled and nodded her head, she welcomed me to this sacred ground and I felt at home like never before.
The grandmother welcoming me confirmed in my heart, the choice to stay in Ganado, Arizona at this time. This was also the beginning of my authentic spiritual heart opening naturally, automatically aligned and grounded with Mother Earth and in the Beauty Way of Nature.
The Beauty Way of Nature is a basic spiritual principle that many native people have as a conscious way to heal, renew and restore one’s balanced place with nature. When challenging circumstances occur in our lives, we may not be able to change them, and what we do have power over is how we heal and integrate and return to beauty and harmony with the heart of creation.
This Beauty Way prayer or song expresses this integrative healing practice. It’s my understanding that each of the lines are repeated four times to address four directions in space and time including the four dimensions of our human bodies: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions.
In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again
seven-foot-tall interdimensional beings that the different tribal people know 8 “My friend Benjamin Barney, who lives up near the Lukachukai Mountains—he’s an amazing Diné man. He told me about two Navajo women, two sisters, who had been out herding sheep up in the Lukachukai Mountains, and this seven-foot-tall Yeibichei, which is like a star being, came out of the trees and told them that only those human beings who follow the old ways will survive”. excerpt from L. M. Silko’s interview with NYT
I love reading about your deepening journey Grace. The appearance of feathers gave me little shivers. The way you bring the spiritual headiness of the desert southwest into your story is like wrapping myself in one of those old blankets or rugs and breathing in the chaparral, the washed wool, the smoke from countless fires on the dark starry nights. This could be a book or a movie!