“No, just not enough water. But already the beauty here is knocking me out! It’s a really striking kind of beauty. And I get the idea about how precious water is in the Southwest. I guess if you have to care for the water or die, it would teach you humility,” he observed.
“Yeah, and how to do a rain dance,” I added. We looked at one another like a skydiving team about to jump out of the plane, trusting completely that we had packed the parachutes properly and would throw ourselves out at the right moment. It was just a glance we shared, but it made us both smile. I swear, James and I were at our best in the Unknown.
We passed tan hills that were dotted with scrubby juniper bushes and the tortuous trunks of piñon trees – made me think of flecks of coarse black pepper sprinkled on boiled potatoes. A friend in Santa Fe had just told us, “This place will never be beautiful to you if all you see is the absence of trees.” He was right. What I was noticing, however, was the earth: its wind-eroded shapes, size variations, and colors. The colors! It was as if this were a geological garden party and all the world’s races were invited: black volcanic boulders, towering red rock, white sand, brown gravel, grey cliffs, yellow arroyos...
I could already feel the Southwest weaving its spell on me. Since that day at Kilauea Crater, I had surrendered to the magnetic pull of this region. James felt it, too, so we kept up our part of the deal: when we hit the California coast, we changed our art tour van into a camper (pink slip alchemy!) so we could live reasonably while we wandered around the Southwest, asking, “Is this our home? Is that our home?” We knew that Venus and Her Lover wanted to be someplace, and it was our job to find out where. We had spent time in Sedona, Arizona, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because we thought they were candidates, but alas, no. There must be someplace else. So James the Charioteer was now pointing the truck toward Taos, New Mexico, declaring, “I have a hunch it’ll be Taos.”
Desert Harbingers
To his straight-arrow approach, my Taurus bull plodded along, smelling the lavender along the path, and stopping to consult oracles and meditate. In fact, I had launched myself into the Southwest beginning in California, weeks before, when we began our wandering on the American continent. We were there at the time of my 50th birthday. Friend Bob left us his cabin in the hills of the Santa Inez Mountains above Santa Barbara, so we tucked ourselves in among the live oaks and scrub pines as we prepared for our sojourn through the Southwest.
To celebrate my half-century, James planned to take me to the Santa Barbara wharf to eat sushi at sunset, and his family was preparing a birthday party for the evening, but until sunset time, I claimed the day for myself alone. After my morning yoga sadhana, I hiked up the mountain on dusty Rattlesnake Trail, which was surrounded by yellow and purple wildflowers burst into bloom. Following my nose, I left the trail to clamber down toward the sound of water, so welcome on this droughty chaparral-covered mountainside. I reached a stream gurgling over rocks into a rippling pool. Overhanging madrone and manzanita tree branches created a natural cupola, allowing speckles of sun to filter into the water. Verdant ferns and white lilies dressed the stream banks, and above on the slope I saw a patch of poison oak. Perhaps if I had been following a guidebook – “Walk down to the stream, notice the lilies at water’s edge, and look for salamanders” – then I might not have been as struck as I was. Without forewarning, however, it seemed to me that I had left the dusty world behind and entered the magical realm of the Nature devas. Quickly I slipped out of my clothes and into the ice-cold water which jabbed my skin with invigorating pleasure. Then climbing into a patch of sunlight on the rocks to warm myself, I relaxed into the perfect beauty of Nature that held me there.
Then a thought entered my head. There I was: a lone woman, naked and with eyes closed... completely vulnerable. I decided to watch these new thoughts and the fear that engendered them. I imagined a blond American psycho rapist sneaking in the brush, and he was soon joined by swarthy Latino sexually repressed men with knives. After entertaining these fears, I scanned my surroundings. Sure enough, in the distance, up the creek, there stood a blond hiker with his shirt off! Quickly donning my shirt and underwear, I sat myself down to watch his movements, deliberately calming my breathing. Oddly enough, he came no closer.
Then from the opposite direction, a dark-haired man and his dog scampered up the rocks of the creek, heading straight toward me. Then they just went on by! Greeting them as they passed me, I clearly detected their harmless intentions. Then two more dark-haired men climbed up the creek bed of the canyon, and then another. By now it seemed like a comedy of my fears more than a drama. The men all gathered where the first hiker was. It was then I realized that above me there must be another pool, and they had all come to swim in it.
I began to argue with myself. Why should I have been afraid of these young men? I had correctly perceived the arrival of men, but my fears had gone way overboard, like an army of obsessive-compulsive artists doodling on an M.C. Escher painting, conjuring legions of gravity-defying stairways that led into some dangerous oblivion. What kind of rapist would hike this far into Nature anyway? Was I not a young crone, full of power and authority? Did I not have a right to be here, naked if I so desired? Here I was on my 50th birthday, a perfect opportunity to dive into my power.
There is a Greek myth in which Artemis (virgin goddess of animals and the hunt, Diana to the Romans) was in a glade attended by her forest handmaidens, bathing in a pool. The hunter Aktaion, dressed in deerskin, came upon the intimate scene and hid in the bushes watching the divine young woman. Startled, Artemis splashed him with water, thereby changing him into a stag. With that, his very own hounds tore him to pieces. One subtext of this myth presupposes his rapist intentions, so that Artemis simply dished up his just desserts. It also illustrates the power of the virgin goddess – virgin meaning independent, self-sufficient, and powerful unto herself without a man.
Recalling the myth of Artemis, I acknowledged the courage it took to be naked – physically and psychically – in the outer world, as well as the deference that a goddess demands. Venus and Her Lover was undeniably stripping me of my encumbrances. Shedding my clothes once again, I stood on the rocks, anchoring my strength. Yes, I was willing to come fully into my Wise Woman role... to stand naked to the world, yet swathed in the power to determine my perceptions and act upon them according to my beliefs. Standing there, I felt a chuckle erupt in my belly, which fluttered up and out of my mouth as a loud laugh. Soon I was convulsing with amusement. With a whoop, I jumped into the icy water, thrilling to how every cell of my body felt alive. After my swim, I lay in the sun, feeling perfectly at peace. No further hikers disturbed my solitude.
Later, when I dressed, I continued my hike to see the bigger swimming hole where the guys were. I said hello to them, and then climbed on, quietly enfolding a most precious birthday present in my heart.
I was to receive another one, too. Back at the cabin, I walked into the adjacent cactus garden. What could be more perfect than to meditate on our migration into the Southwest here amid desert cactus? Sitting on a flat boulder next to the pointy star of a large agave, I closed my eyes, observing my breath.
In the vision of my meditation, I found myself striding across the desert, when I came upon a large circle drawn on the ground. The circle was divided into quarters, each with its own color: yellow, black, red, and green. Feeling the presence of Native American spirits, I prostrated myself, to surrender before them and ask their permission to enter their realm. But I was stopped by a booming voice commanding, “No! We don’t need you to bow down. We need you to walk!”
So I began treading the circumference of the circle. I understood that I was being called into action, not reflection. At one of the points of the circle, there standing proudly was a Native American elder. His withered brown face surrounded piercing black eyes, and the feathers sticking in his hair made him seem larger than life. He watched me silently, stern but warm. I knew
it was his voice I had heard in my head.
At another point of the circle stood a bald Tibetan monk in red and yellow robes. His face betrayed a lighthearted bemusement, but his rocklike stature affirmed wisdom patiently gathered over the ages. Also silent, he looked upon me lovingly. As I circumambulated the symbol etched into the desert floor, my perspective rose in a spiral, and now I was an eagle looking down upon my little self placing steps along the earth-inscribed mandala. I felt the Earth as element, with its call for all elements to manifest. Lifted ever more aloft by the warm updrafts under my extended wingspan, I flew toward the mountains. Higher and higher I soared. I understood that I needed to go up to attain a higher perspective. Way above the mountain ranges and plains, I began to glimpse the curvature of Earth.
Imperceptibly at first, but gradually increasing in volume, I heard a hum, a tone, that spoke to me of Gaia, the Earth Mother, the sacred dirt, that pulled my consciousness toward the center even while I was gliding into outer space. The more this sound took over my awareness, the less I could perceive, until I had slipped totally into a wordless, invisible, timeless state.
Some time later I emerged from my meditation. It was late afternoon, and James would be arriving soon to sweep me up into birthday celebrations. Climbing down off the boulder, I was aware that every minute was now bringing me closer to our new home in the Southwest of the United States. Where exactly it would be, I did not know, but the guardians there had just been alerted as to our arrival.
Home Revealed
Such a country as this, calls its own
from the four world quarters.
~ Mary Hunter Austin
Our camper was now entering a gorge; to our left a river rushed by. The ruddy walls of rocky mountainsides sloped steeply away from the black ribbon of road and fluid ribbon of sparkling water. Though hardly wide enough to get into the classification of “river,” this was the most important waterway in New Mexico: the Rio Grande. Meaning “Big River” in Spanish, it sprang out of the Colorado Rockies, bisected New Mexico, and then defined the boot of Texas where it demarcated the border with Mexico all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The New Mexican desert, however, had the power to shrivel up big, wet words into puny, dry husks of what they could have been: the Rio Grande was barely more than a stream, and monsoons (what summer rainstorms were called here), while capable of producing magnificent thunderheads and downpours, might just as often drop sheets of rain that evaporated before they hit the ground.
Whereas in the creases of the mountain walls squat piñon valiantly provided dark green accents to the burnt tan earth, down along the river all manner of riparian bushes crowded along the bank, each shouting above the other whose leaves were greener. Along one stretch, thick-trunked cottonwoods lined the shore, civilized sentinels who summoned respect for being the most substantial trees around.
The Rio Grande Gorge was a passageway north. Soon I would recognize it as a gateway, the transition between one world and another, much like the road leading through the tunnel of trees to Rincón had been. This was the road between larger, more provisioned Santa Fe and more remote Taos.
The two-lane road veered away from the river, leaving it to continue cutting its canyon more steeply, and we began climbing out of the gorge. As we rounded the ridge top, James and I both gasped. Before I could sputter out the words, “Stop! Stop!,” he was already pulling the camper onto the side of the road. The view before us hit us right between the eyes, and we both scrambled out of the truck to stand before it.
Below us lay Taos Valley. It was not a valley in the V-shaped sense at all. Instead, the flat, sage-covered mesa was surrounded on three sides by towering mountains, and at the base of them there meandered several streams where trees and a town grew up.
Directly in front of us Taos Mountain commanded our attention, with its broad base and several ridgelines that rose at eye-pleasing angles, culminating in a snowy crown. Behind it another lofty summit – Wheeler Peak, at 13,167 feet (4,013 meters), the tallest in New Mexico – stood as a proud member of the southern Rocky Mountains. The bumpy horizontal profile of the northern skyline tapered down toward the west, where it flattened out. In the foreground the tableland was broken – ripped apart, actually – by the zigzagging Rio Grande Gorge. A rift valley was pulling the mesa in two directions, and the river did its part by eroding the gorge deeper. With its striped layers of tan, sienna, and black rock, the walls of the gorge looked like a mini Grand Canyon. In the distance, little humps squatted on the mesa – a shield volcano here, a butte there – that belied the area as a hotbed of geological activity. And then there was the deep blue sky – the sky, the sky, the sky. So spectacular was the landscape before us, neither James nor I could speak for a few minutes.
Finally, words tumbled out of my mouth, “This is what called us!”
“Taos... Taos is what called us,” James reiterated. “Becca, we’ve made it! We’ve found our home.”
Peering westward I spied another distant mountain range, the rugged remains of a massive volcano that had blown its top. It was the Jemez Caldera, just beyond the town of Los Alamos. From my environmental activism, I knew all about Los Alamos. The Manhattan Project, which concentrated the world’s greatest scientific minds in the New Mexico desert to develop the atomic bomb, not only helped the United States end World War II, it left it the supreme superpower by 1945. That project marked the installation of the American secret government – unrecognized then for the threat it posed to democracy – that now had the country by the nose with its military-industrial complex based on war profiteering. Just in the greater Albuquerque area alone were stashed nearly 2000 nuclear bombs, contributing to the American stockpile of 24,000 nuclear weapons. The Dominator Culture at its finest, American military might emboldened its leaders to accuse others of being “rogue states” and to dictate who could and who could not possess weapons of mass destruction. Los Alamos had one of the most highly educated populations in the country, scientists who were serving a master they somehow justified. But Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, came to grasp the implications of putting science in service of the military. Upon detonation of the first atomic bomb, right here in New Mexico in 1945, he was reported to have quoted from the Bhagavad Gita:
“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
After World War II, Oppenheimer would work to try to contain nuclear proliferation, but it was too late – Pandora’s Jar had been opened – and he was soon marginalized from the halls of power.
Los Alamos epitomized much of what had always made it difficult for us to live in the United States. And now we were going to be next door to the birthplace of the Nuclear Age, the American throne of Shiva, where creative genius devoted itself to planetary destruction?!? When we climbed back into our truck and coasted down from the mountain rim, I felt us sliding toward our new home. So it was true – we really were going to live in the United States, our country of origin, during a very dark time in its history. Somehow Hawai’i had not felt American at all, but here we were solidly on the mainland. My fears rose up... of having a draft-age son in a militaristic country, of not being able to hold our tongues in the face of tyranny... but Venus and Her Lover most definitely wanted to be here. We were entering the belly of the beast – like Jonah in the gut of the whale – where we could tend to our inner process and gestate something new that would eventually be born out of the belly.
Approaching town, Taos Mountain loomed larger and larger. “Um – do you notice the snow on top of that mountain?” I asked.
“Well, yeah! Isn’t it beautiful? Snow-capped mountains, can you believe it?” James enthused.
“It’s June. James, it’s June.”
“Yeah, I know it’s June. What’s your point?” he asked.
“Snow. June. The two don’t go together. How cold must it be here for there to be snow in June?” I was already picking at potential thorns in the rose garden of Taos.
“Becca, look, the snow is way up there on top of that mountain! It’s not snowing down here! It’s warm! It’s summer! Hey – relax!” James told me.
“You know I don’t like being cold. How cold must it get here?” I asked.
“Hey – this is New Mexico! How bad can it be?” James challenged.
We passed a billboard for Taos Ski Valley that depicted tall pine trees, Swiss-style chalets, and snow, snow, snow. I was already getting the inkling that the winters were fierce. I took a deep breath, letting the reality sink in that we were very, very far away from Hawai’i.
James was already on to the next topic. “The light! Do you see the light here? It’s so... full... it’s so clear... clear as crystal...” For an artist, light is paramount. And northern New Mexico definitely had an indescribable quality to its light and shadows.
As we entered town, the adobe architecture gladdened my eyes. The buildings shaped different shades of tan, brown, rust, and cream into soft-edged structures, with rough-hewn wooden beams (vigas) providing straight lines. The adobe houses reminded me of sandcastles my young son and I used to make on the beach, using our hands to smooth the sand into rounded, fanciful forms. We passed the handsome windows of art gallery after art gallery. Taos was an art town! Bordering the brick-paved central plaza were businesses selling cowboy boots and lassos, in addition to Indian turquoise and silver jewelry, drums, feathers, and dream-catchers. “Look! Cowboys and Indians!” I exclaimed. It was true, and within two weeks of arriving, we would attend both a rodeo and a pow-wow.
We stopped for supper, and I ordered zucchini enchiladas smothered in green chile sauce. While we ate, James scoured the want ads of The Taos News for places to rent.
Venus and Her Lover Page 11
