THE ADOBE INN

Diane and PQ, 2014

Yesterday we went to lunch with our friend Diane. She moved away from Taos perhaps ten years ago, I’m not sure of the exact time, but date doesn’t matter. It was the end of an era. Diane owned the Adobe Inn and it was without doubt in anyone’s mind a magical place. It is also the place where I met the Suazo family and their eldest son Pba-quen-nee-e (PQ) Blue Spruce Standing Deer in English. I’ve told the story of how I met Diane and her Inn in another Blog. Typically it was very woo woo.

From Left,(Brother) Nathaniel, (Dad) Joe J., PQ and (Mom) Frances

When I woke this morning, the weather was beautiful and spring was full on in Taos, at least for now. Nevertheless, I felt intensely sad and nostalgic. Then I realized that it was homesickness. A barrier of time was separating me like a barbed wire fence from that Taos that I first recognized as my spiritual home and from the many amazing people and experiences that wandered through the enchantment and sometimes dis-enchantment of the Adobe Inn.  

It has occurred to me more than once that the spirit of Mabel Dodge Lujan and her Taos Pueblo husband, Tony was still alive and picked receptive subjects as tools to carry on. The play was bigger than the actors were. Joe J. and Frances Suazo had a direct line to the Big House, as Joe J. was Tony Lujan’s adopted grandson and it was natural to follow a path already trod. 

Nathaniel,PQ, Frances, PQ's son Jerrick, Dad

We are now old folks and both PQ and Diane have experienced some difficult physical challenges in recent years. This could be attributed to growing old and even pay back for a wild youth in PQ’s case, but I don’t think so. Medicine magic isn’t always pleasant, but it may have an awesome distilling agenda of its own. Few of us who hung around the Adobe Inn had the wisdom to know why we were there, and

The Bad Boy (PQ)

even if we thought we knew, our tragi-comic naivety flew up and hit us in the face like the handle of a stepped on rake. In other words, egos got an ass kicking out of the Inn and out of Taos. But, that was seldom the end of the story. Many of us stayed, sometimes because we didn’t have the means to leave and even those who didn’t stay often hovered in the aura of Taos for years, coming back every so often to get another dose. In other words, the Adobe Inn was a portal to the potent medicine of Taos.

Diane and Marti, 2014

The Inn itself was deceptively tucked away on Quesnel Street, and while only a block from the old plaza few people saw it unless their personal karma made reservations for them at the Inn. In some cases, it was the first place in Taos they stayed, an auspicious sign. At the time that my ex-husband and I arrived in Taos, Diane was in love with PQ and a was a virtual member of the Suazo family. PQ himself was living with another girlfriend in California. Yes, he was quite a player in those days, certainly not to be trusted with your heart. He came back from California for a family crisis and the first time we saw each other we knew something irrepressible and life changing had transpired. 

Diane, Dad, Mom and me, Gathering of Nations, '93

Yesterday afternoon we had a great time looking through old photos that Diane pulled out of storage recently.  The memories attached to the images came alluringly back to life. That version of Taos was something needed to bring some life back to this dry, windy seemingly interminable winter drabness that I’ve come to accept as the real thing. Well, perhaps Taos is resting from all the action of the previous 20 plus years.  

I want to thank every one of you who were a part of the Adobe Inn experience even if for a one time stay and even if you were one of the traumatic lessons. The Mountain and its spirit striped us down to the core leaving only bones and memories. But, that’s what life is made of. There is more than one “Ark of the Covenant,” upon which no one should look lest he/she be turned to ashes and that is the nature of the Taos spirit. May the ashes of the Adobe Inn be scattered to a world that needs such enrichment. Ah Men!

MEDICINE FOR THE AGE

Medicine in the Native American sense is such a multifaceted concept. I love it! It goes far beyond the meaning in our Euro-American parlance. It combines physical healing with its source and spiritual mystery. Medicine can be good or bad like magic and it is about a relationship with three participants, healer, subject and the mysterious source  beyond our sensory powers. Unlike the medicine Euro-Americans normally practice, it involves more than fixing something that went wrong in the physical body. Why did something go wrong and what does that indicate about all the dimensions and beings it may involve. Sometimes things go wrong on one level in order to balance or indicate what is wrong on another level.  

Check out The Progress of Awakening in Taos
The Story of Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan,
Standing Deer's Adopted Great Grandparents.

Now and then, awareness penetrates the thick layer of beliefs that dull our subtle senses and even our four physical senses. While our dominant socio economic system attempts to control everything and especially nature it may be that a greater problem is that we have too much control, or worse yet, we are unaware of the influences our thought habits have against life itself including our own. We are equally unaware of what pushes our thoughts here or there. When I speak of thoughts, I am aware that thoughts on the whole are the offspring of emotions.  Any sorcerer could tell you that it is emotion that drives us.

Could it be that nature’s topsy-turvy upheavals and even strange animal behavior reflect our psychopathic materialistic stance toward our home planet on more than the physical level?

I have been especially aware during the past few weeks that many of my supposedly idle thoughts materialize very quickly. Only by the nature of a particular situation is there a clue of whether we are dealing with the chicken or the egg . As a seemingly trivial example, I recently recalled that my childhood cat Bows loved to lay at the top of the green chair where I read and meditate each morning. The next day Shadow my current cat jumped on top of the same chair for the first time and it has been her favorite position ever since. This was one small example, a coincidence perhaps except it has happened over and over often in mundane ways such as running into someone the day after I thought of them for the first time in years, or even events on a more cosmic level such as natural disasters and political events that crossed into my awareness very shortly before they went on the news. Of course, some things that I wish would materialize have not done so. But, perhaps this is because there is external or even internal opposition against them materializing, in other words, a clash of thoughts.

Thoughts seem to have a dimension and exchange of their own. Not everything that happens has a thought as its cause, that isn’t what I’m trying to grasp.  Certainly, a war of cosmic forces is not a new idea. But, now it is officially and scientifically impossible supposedly because the idea originated from a time of ignorance, i.e., before science. Have you noticed that the word science now has the same effect that the word God once had? Both indicate something irrefutable.  Perhaps only the name has changed. 

Objective science may not actually be objective. How can we not move the water we swim in? This is certainly not a new thought and physics now recognizes that waves and particles are both accurate portrayals of the same phenomena. This recognition has not trickled down to economics, industry or politics. This is loose reasoning and I’ll have to give it more thought but the gist is how can we prevent or fix problems when we are making those problems with the very actions with which we are supposedly fixing them. However, we have scapegoats to take our minds off of that possibility. Think of the prison system. We apparently need crime to keep it functioning. Nobody questions the amount of tax money it takes to support more and more criminals as they move onto graduate school (penitentiary). An effective criminal education undoubtedly costs the public more than a socially sanctioned education, but they don’t mind because it makes them feel that somebody is doing something to fix the problem of crime. 

It’s amazing how easily hypnotized we humans can be by costumes and lingo. No wonder that British solicitors still wear 18^th century wigs in court. If you’re going to put on the dog, do it as effectively as possible. Then there is the continuous need for war. Is it only about oil?  Earthlings played war long before oil dependence. It really doesn’t matter because there is always something it could be about.  Sometimes it appears that war is the only game on earth, that and media. Yet remember that the Romans used the games to keep the public occupied and dumb. I have long sensed that Rome never fell it just morphed. Anyhow, as long as we believe that there are only three dimensions, and everything is how it seems to be within the laws of perception we have been seduced to live by, very little will change. Well, that’s not exactly what I mean. It won’t change by our hand. However, there are higher powers or perhaps they are lower and more basic, as is the earth we stand on. Since we are fighting against our own home, if we win the war, we will lose everything. 

Then there are those who believe the answer to the mess we’ve made on earth is extra planetary settlement. I can understand that. Sometimes when I feel that my house is a mess and everything needs to be cleaned and rearranged I just want to move. The serious question for those of us who are poor, and there are more of us all the time, will we be slaves forced to work all our short squalid lives on providing food and goods on an increasingly  toxic planet for the billionaires who managed to escape. How long can that last?

Drug addiction, mass shootings, suicide bombers, terrorist attacks, world hunger, obesity, global climate change, monster storms, nuclear plant accidents, fossil fuel shortage, air pollution, juvenile crime, the world is advancing nicely, right? It’s obvious why some folks would like to get off, but I suspect they would take their housekeeping practices with them.

Before all this, there were the indigenous people who had a pretty good life before “civilization” hit them. Their houses were smaller, they didn’t have TV or computers and since they were human they didn’t always get along with their neighbors, but their mistakes got back to them quickly before too much damage was done.  Medicine was not only about healing individuals of their particular illnesses but also aimed to penetrate to the core problem through however many dimensions were necessary to reach it. Sometimes it involved the Medicine Man (or woman) working on the whole community and even bringing in animals or plants that may have been wronged. It was a cosmic approach on a tribal level. Now we take an insular approach to global problems.  The Earth used to be a good mother who nurtured and taught us. Maybe we modern humans are rebellious adolescents now, but I hope our mother and we survive our delinquency.