REENTRY BLUES

Helen, David and PQ on Soldiers Pass

PQ and I got another chance to visit Arizona last month.  We were going for a week but ended up staying two weeks. Oxygen Arizona in Prescott has always been quite reliable. We call them with PQ’s order when we get to Cottonwood and they deliver on the following Wednesday. This time there was a new person in the office who wrote down the wrong address.  No oxygen on Wednesday!  PQ called and a woman in Cottonwood gave us two tanks to hold us over until the next delivery.  Then we had to wait over the weekend until the following Monday, but delivery was late in the afternoon, so we stayed until Tuesday.

We got back to Taos late on Tuesday but it’s taken all week to get more or less back to normal. As usual, our time in Sedona/Cottonwood was anything but usual. Old friends, dowsers and plant energy healers David Eastoe and his partner Helen Guild from the UK were working in Sedona. This gave us the needed excuse to be there this time of the year.  Then the magic flowed in a subtle stream of friendship, Medicine and landscape.  My always loyal to Taos Native Pueblo husband has fallen in love (somewhat against his will) with this Arizona connection.  We always give and receive healing energy in that place.  It must be the other end of an energy seesaw, Taos being the first end. I can’t explain it but these trips to North Central Arizona are moving toward some kind of clarity, revelation and possibly balance, a state that neither place on its own is noted for. 

PQ  Singing an Honoring Song

However, reentry to Taos is often dramatic. It reminds me of catching a free ranging horse that you haven't ridden for a while. After you catch it, you have to break it all over again.  It will probably kick and bite you in the process. We had a friend check our Taos house while we were gone and she reported that there was a disconnect notice from the electric company on the door.  I looked up the payment record on my laptop and was surprised to discover that I hadn’t paid Kit Carson Elec. Last month.  I quickly got on line and sent them a payment for two months.

When we arrived in Taos, it was about 7:30 and dark.  Sure enough, the motion sensor light on the garage didn’t come on when we drove up.  I knew then Kit Carson Elec. had turned off the juice.  We unloaded and unpacked by flashlight.  I gathered all the candles I could find but most of them were useless and kept going out. Of course, it was cold in the house and the refrigerator and freezer were full of rotten stuff. We did a quicky cleanup, just enough to make the house bearable for the night and then realized that Wal-Mart was still open at 8:00.  We rushed over and purchased two camp lanterns and batteries before the flashlight went dead.  However, I can’t complain too much about luck. The weather wasn’t that bad. If we’d come a day later it would have been 30 degrees colder.  I love my radiant floor heat but the downside is that it takes a full day to raise the temperature to the normal setting. 

The next morning I visited Kit Carson and got everything straightened out.  It seems that since I changed my P.O. Box I hadn’t been receiving their bills.  They don’t allow forwarding to a new address and the Post Office had been returning all the bills. Strangely, I did find the two previous month’s bills in our very overstuffed mailbox the night we returned.  The disconnect notice was dated for the day we left for Arizona.

The proportion of punishment might seem to indicate otherwise, but I believe one can sometimes measure the degree of right-on-ness’ by the resistance one encounters.   Old demons do not give up without a fight, nor should they.  That is what they’re for.  I don’t remember the source of one of my favorite quotes; I think its Sufi, and goes like this:  “The devil is God’s most humble servant.” Although sometimes being whacked on the head indicates being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it often means you are going against the forces that have become accustomed to controlling your life and they don’t give up without a fight. A change in life direction puts one off balance, at least temporarily.  All progress comes with a price otherwise, we wouldn’t value it.

Each time we return to Taos from Arizona, PQ finds it harder to adjust to the altitude of Taos.   Of course, we try to understand why he has this disease in the first place and there have been some good aspects to it such as developing humility and patience, the awareness of mortality and time but we both think it’s deeper than that.  It’s always there.  He is still ambivalent about having a lung transplant, and about whether it would be better to have it in Denver or Tucson if gets to the point of decision. The certainty is that he finds it easier to live normally in Cottonwood’s lower altitude and we are trying to find a way to make living there possible.  When visiting Cottonwood, we still drive by the little house we lived in two years ago, before running out of money and thank it for a wonderful experience.  It’s now for sale and the realtor says someone has made an offer the bank is considering.  Oh well, it was a step in the right direction and we are waiting for the next step to be revealed.