MORE ON AWAKENING IN TAOS

This year’s Christmas was perfect for a reflective mood. Just a small gathering of close friends at a sweet intimate, casual dinner and the rest of the evening spent listening to music and now and then looking through the window at progressively bigger flakes of snow. The last two hours of Christmas in Santa Fe were white.

For us the approaching New Year will focus on new perceptions of healing. PQ’s illness keeps this topic close to our skin. However, I’m not talking about research breakthroughs or new drugs for Pulmonary Fibrosis. In the Old Testament, prophets often enacted their own prophesies. The state of the Hebrew nation became the prophet’s personal and/or physical affliction that he then interpreted to the people. For everyone now, the indigenous soul is confined within a story told by oppressors.  I don’t mean this only in a generalized form. We are as oppressed as those we oppress.  This includes the way we interact with the natural world including our own bodies. The door of time is opening for a multidimensional experience of healing.  

 

Christmas Morning from the Bedroom Window

This morning PQ and I were talking about some recent insights brought forward by a healer we have been working with for the dissolution of some of our personal trip-ups when the subject flowed over to our involvement in the Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan story. I somehow broke through an old difficulty with expressing my personal calling to participate in this story. I have never fully expressed this because of fear of talking out of my place or for thinking that my ideas are of limited importance since I am not the film’s producer or directly connected to the subjects of this story.

Mabel’s soul healing revelation was the experience of her personal introduction to a way of being human that penetrated deeply into the beating heart of Mother Earth, the natural rhythms of the Universe and an organic unselfconscious spirituality.  This was her medicine and Tony was the conduit of this medicine. Tony may not have consciously understood the importance of their connection either but he had faith in the source of his own guidance. His culture also needed a bridge to communicating with the dominating presence of Western European culture. This was something that both sides needed. Mabel finally after “looking for love in all the wrong places” connected to a meaningful source beyond her habitually narcissistic hunger for significance.

Native people are the subjects of much historical abuse and recently subjects of hoped for healing powers but they have remained passive subjects of outside interest. I personally believe that the “us and them,”  sensitivity must be transcended for cultural healing on all sides to take place.  

PQ singing for Miles' and Gail's Italian friends

Recently while sitting in a room with a group of upper middle class, politically correct, well read, well-intentioned and highly educated people in the home of one of the supporters of Mark Gordon’s film, “Awakening in Taos” I suddenly became aware that they were missing the heart of the project.  In fact, maybe we were all missing it.  I wanted to jump up and say, “Here is the real significance of this project. It is to help you, not as a charitable tax-deductible contribution but as a guide to what you need that you are missing. I want you to understand that this isn’t about you helping the project, it is about the project helping you and you need to do what you are able to do to bring it into your lives and into the world.”

What is unique about this project isn't something historically interesting that happened in New Mexico. This isn’t about an Eastern born cosmopolitan patroness of the arts who happened to be forward thinking and brave enough to marry an Indian man and bring a host of cultural icons to New Mexico. This is about an evolutionary process that is of profound significance for the future of the world and must be given life in the present and you now have the opportunity to awaken as Mabel awakened.

Mabel and Tony long ago passed from this dimension, but the consciousness that flowed into their lives and outward into the world is still looking for bodies to carry it forward. Mark Gordon picked it up and because of this, he found Standing Deer.

 This is a process that must and will continue whether or not we “get it.” But, if we get it, we will greatly increase the creation/healing process of the earth beneath our feet the air we breathe and an infinity of fractal connections radiating out into the universe. We are destined to dance among the stars, and I mean it literally although not necessarily technologically.

To attack or not attack, that is the question.

When I came to Taos, I was looking for the same thing that Mabel was looking for, with a few variances. It was 1992, “coincidentally” the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’ questionable discovery of the Americas.  I had recently become aware of indigenous peoples and of my own indigenous relationship with Mother Earth. It was a revelation and at first, sent me into mourning.  I felt a strange sadness that had nothing to do with my personal problems of which at that time there were many. Yet, this was different. It had no focus in my personal sphere and nothing personal moved it away. I became very interested in indigenous peoples everywhere on the planet and began to study what I could find about their modern circumstances. Although I have always been interested in Anthropology and psychology, this was not the same. Now I saw my own kind and myself as the focus of need rather than as observers and recorders. The sadness was about how far away we have drifted from what it means to participate in the organic forces of creation.

Although Awakening in Taos is the Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan story, Tony represents the transformative essence of the story.  I am so happy that Mark has decided to put Tony’s voice in the film with subtitles. When viewed only from an American/English perspective, Tony has nothing to say even though he was Mabel’s direct source for the balancing truths that inspired her. That balance is an awakening available to everyone.  That’s why the story is important.

Many years ago, PQ’s father told him that his medicine was for the world rather than just his Pueblo people and yet some of his Pueblo people resent that spark he shares with everyone. It occurs to me that healing is about making whole, and is also the way to “holy”. There is nothing exclusive about wholeness.

MOVING FORWARD

I sense something new moving in through the outer edges of my aura. It is definitely an expanding energy or more accurately the details of an expanding picture that isn’t yet transferable to words. I trust that it will eventually take on an identifiable form.

PQ in Heart of Sedona Coffee Shop

It was with relief and gratitude that we arrived in Cottonwood on Tuesday, November 25, our first visit for over a year and yet as soon as we arrived it was as if we had never been away and time had stopped to wait for us. Yes, some businesses have changed, landscaping changes altered a few pieces of real estate but the feeling is timeless for us. PQ immediately notices that it is easier to breathe but I believe there is more to this than the lower altitude. It is a nurturing, healing environment away from the challenges in Taos. It’s not that we don’t love Taos and its unique beauty, but it is not a relaxing energy. It rearranges your head, stirs problems to the surface and brings infections to a head. In Cottonwood, we can relax and reassemble ourselves. 

PQ’s son Corey stayed at our Taos house and took care of the cats while we were gone, so everything came together to make this micro vacation work. His dog Mini, a pit bull, lab and maybe something else mix somehow worked out an arrangement with the cats so that they mostly ignored each other.

Our place of healing is Cottonwood and that space between Cottonwood and Sedona. Taos is a place of challenge and testing. It reveals and holds whatever needs rebalancing, and although we love it and honor it as our place of origin, our life is out of balance without what we receive in Cottonwood. There is an active polarity between the two places that I can’t explain but palpably experience. 

Sedona Rain lasted all the way to Taos.

Of course, on a practical level it is almost 4,000 feet lower in altitude than Taos, which makes it more comfortable for PQ. He is still having difficulty re-acclimating to Taos since we returned, spending a lot of time between couch and bed. He has a commission waiting but each time he begins work on it he gets severe stomach cramps. His doctor says this is due to not taking in enough oxygen to engage in both activity and digestion. 

I confess that I’ve been standing on the bank of the river of time hoping for a solution to drift by. There are a number of considerations such as coordinating a trip and place to stay in Denver to consult with the Lung doctors about the new trial drug Pirfenidone, organizing the practical steps to move to Arizona, finding a place to move to, and simultaneously finding someone to rent our house in Taos. We need to be able to return to this house in Taos from time to time, so the ideal would be a housesitting arrangement with us leaving most of our furniture here and our names on the utility accounts. Past moves have always been exceedingly stressful life challenging procedures that I felt fortunate to survive. I really don’t want more drama and trauma right now. However, intuition says that I may not have a choice. Perhaps I need some insight about why all my previous moves have been so depleting in money and energy.

George,happy to have the computer back home.

Now that we are back in Taos, it is clear that we must get off the fence about the decision to live most of our time in Arizona and do whatever is necessary to make it happen. It is another opportunity to be up front with what I believe and what is most important in my life at this time, which is PQ’s health. This isn’t PQ’s issue. He is sometimes too impulsive.  I on the other hand can put off a decision for a long time but still act too impulsively hoping that fate and luck will fill in any gaps in the plan.The process continues.