Westward American Road Diary: Four Corners and Utah, Part 1

The Four Corners monument: where the four states of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah meet. We paid our $3, took our photos of us standing on all four states at once and left, but before we did....

At last!

I finally got to try Navajo fry bread, here on a Navajo Taco (vegetarian chili beans, lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cheese and picante sauce), $8, which Steve and I shared even though I think it was only after 10 A.M.! Read more about it from What's Cooking America.

Off to Utah. Live elevated is right. We experienced much elevation, of body and mind.

Monument Valley.


Three Sisters to the left, which you'll hear in the Native American tradition of beans, corn and squash growing together.


Revering the grandmother. We live in a society of anti-aging, failing to understand the beauty of the wisdom that comes with growing older. I wish we valued knowledge the way we do vanity.

I've neglected my Retro Matinee Movie column lately, but I should have done one before I left on a John Wayne film. I haven't seen any John Wayne films at all, for shame!

Natural Bridges National Monument. Steve and I were here just as the park was closing and we saw hardly a soul. It was these quiet moments of nature and beauty and calm that I so crave lately and keep returning to in my mind. Modern society's always plugged in world is not for me.

A raven sits on the railing, and I thought of Colin in Ben Gadd's Raven's End. If I was a raven, this is as fine a place as any to settle.

"Time and distance surround the place here.
Step up, step up, step up.
The sky is open armed.
When the light is mine, I felt gravity pull." - R.E.M.'s Feeling Gravity's Pull

After minestrone soup, a veggie burger and frozen lemonade, it was marionberry pie a la mode, $5, at Old Thyme restaurant in Kanab, Utah, then off to bed.

National Arches Park. We finally wised up here and bought an $80 a year national parks pass which grants you access that covered both of us. I've just fallen in love with the national parks. Have you been to any, and are there ones you'd like to see?

Hiking up to the Delicate Arch. You gain 500 feet of elevation in a mile and half, but the views are stunning.

On this trip, I was definitely feeling the effect of a job where I'm sitting all day, and then sitting two and half hours roundtrip commuting, and when I come home too drained to do much but sit and watch a library DVD and go to bed.

I wish I had as much energy as this jack rabbit, who was scurrying into the distance. I feel like scurrying into the distance too.

And another magical day slumbers into evening in Utah.

Share Art: "The Show" from Raven's End, by Ben Gadd

Sharing a passage from Ben Gadd's Raven's End, a novel following a flock of ravens each season in the Rocky Mountains. I learned of this book as its words were featured in the documentary, A Life Ascending. It reminds me to be in awe of nature, be humbled by its elements, and that many life forms, not just we humans, delight in "gifts" of the season. Look upward at the sky and admire the birds in flight. Think of the "show" the trees are putting on. I shall always think of the changing of the leaves as "The Show."

"Across the Bow Valley, a large grove of aspen had come into its fall color. Since every tree in the grove was joined at the roots to every other tree, they all got the word at once - "Do it! Now!" - and they did. They let the chlorophyll in their leaves go from green to colorless, and the yellow carotene, present all the while in the leaves but masked by the green, emerged from hiding. Every aspen in the grove went gloriously gold.

Yes, the Show was on. And it grew better by the day. The evergreens contributed by darkening their needles to afford maximum contrast against the aspen patches, which spattered the foothills with yellow. On the forest floor too, the Show erupted. This was wild-rose country, and countless thousands of rose bushes went from summer green to autumn red. Every rose leaf, half the length of a raven's bill, blushed brighter by the hour.

In flight, the birds could look down to the dots of red, each advertising the rose hips - the fruit of the roses - weighing down the plants. Those rose hips were red and swollen with seeds, good for a bird. Good for Colin and Zack and Molly as the bright-blue days of fall drifted on. They feasted on rose hips and raspberries and gooseberries and all the other gifts of that prickly tribe."

Delighting in cranberry sauce just as birds and bears delight in their findings.

"Black bears ran from one bountiful shrub to the next, eating urgently. They ripped at the fruit-laden boughs with their claws and stuffed the berries in their mouths, leaves and all, chewing only a few times and swallowing hard, driven by a powerful hunger. Each bear had to grow very fat if it was to survive the winter-long sleep that was soon to come.

Overhead, the great migration began. Millions of birds-ducks, geese, robins, sparrows, warblers - followed the eastern edge of the Rockies on their way south. The eagles cruised over the rough gray ridges of the front ranges, while the hawks preferred the rolling green-and-yellow swells of the foothills. Some migrants journeyed west instead of south, across the mountains to the Pacific coast, where they could winter by the sea."

Learn more about Ben Gadd's Raven's End

Respect: People, Animals, and the Earth, Our True Mother

Wisdom learned, wisdom to pass on from Celia Rees' Sorceress, her sequel to Witch Child. The former, what happens to Mary after fleeing the colonists. I'm so grateful the prior reader bought the book as a physical copy and not an eBook, or this story would never have entered my life.


"We cannot win this war. I see a land with no place for us in it. I have looked for an end to the white men coming, but see none. They will make this land their own, and there will be no room for us," White Eagle tells Mary. I often reflect how people fleeing persecution persecuted an entire population that was living here. When I hear the song, "This land is your land, this land is my land" I think of it differently. I don't think this land was "made" for you and me.

"Both groups believed in dreams and portents," Mary says. "The scalplock moon shone down on all alike, and they would have looked back with equal disquiet. A time of trial approached, and both would look to great spirit for guidance and blessing. Be it God or Manitou, what did the naming of him matter?"

Agnes had an aunt, "Aunt M." who was the passer on of knowledge. Isn't it so that often there is the wise older or elderly person who passes the torch of wisdom on to the next generation? Singer Tori Amos recalled memories of her grandfather, who was Eastern Cherokee. "He would tell me stories about his ancestors escaping the Trail of Tears and their walk and their spiritual beliefs. And they felt that they were caretakers for our true mother and it was instilled in me but I guess I didn't think about it in this way until I became a mother myself and I always hear him saying in my ear 'I've put a chip underneath your skin and you will remember.'" In Ben Gadd's Raven End told from the perspective of a raven, the young raven Colin becomes the apprentice of wise old Greta to be the keeper and passer on of the old ways.

In Sorceress, it is Agnes's Aunt M. who "was not averse to adopting and adapting the practices of the older people. The ways to wisdom are many. She did not see one religion, one nation, or one people as having the monopoly on the truth. Her own path had led her to different teachers from different traditions." Looking at those who embrace a hate-filled, one path-only world, I remember these words. I want more than one teacher in life, and to be exposed to different cultures, don't you?

A door in Tangier, Morocco.

Agnes observes the custom of the native people leaving gifts by the stream (white pebbles, quartz crystals, a bead or two), "Offerings to the Mother, for water springs from her and flows free and pure to give us life. People had thought that from the beginning of time."

I think of what we leave now. Remnants of our disposable society: plastic water bottles, bags, and cups and more I've picked up during the Hackensack Riverkeeper cleanups I volunteered at. Waste which could have been avoided if people made different choices. I reflect on how we are so reckless with the water that bears the names of Indian peoples and languages, like the Hackensack River.

To the great hunter Jaybird, "all life was sacred. He would stand in solemn prayer before the creature whose life he had taken, saying "We are sorry to kill you, little brother, but our need is great. We do honor to your courage and speed to your strength."

I don't challenge people's right or desire to consume meat and animal products. I don't eat meat but do have some animal by products in my diet. My issue is with the great exploitation that comes with a population that wants to consume them in such excess and at the cheapest prices available and an entitlement attitude that we can treat animals in any manner we please and show no respect for their lives. Things are "cheap" for a reason: because of factory like conditions where animals are treated like machines.

Why can't animals live a natural life? Why can't we consume a little less? There's is a life too. I stand with Jaybird: All life is sacred.

There are prayers said before meals thanking God for the blessings about to be received, but what about the acknowledgment for those here in Earth who made the meal possible? For each meal...

For the farmers who so nurtured and toiled
For the animals who sacrificed life
For the land whose soil bore its bounty
For the water, giver of life
For the spirit above
I give thanks and gratitude.

In this New York Times article, A Northwest Journey by Canoe to Reconnect With the Old Ways, it spoke of "a deliberate effort to recapture cultural, linguistic and intertribal connections they said they had nearly lost as Indian ways of life were overwhelmed, first by European settlers and more recently by substance abuse and suicide."

I think many of us long to recapture and maintain a way of life that has been threatened. I want to connect with what matters most, and I want to be a caretaker, not a taker, of the land, its animals and its people.

A Letter on Learning

"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it." Book of Hebrews, as quoted in Keith Donohue's Angels of Destruction.

Dear readers,

Since I can't have those "Here's what I learned in class today" moments at the dinner table, I've decided to tell you what I learned this week in daily life.

I have so much to learn. This week, I met an 83-year-old man named Robert, who by lucky chance (for me) was seated next to me at the Banff film festival (think National Geographic, come to life on screen), which I attend each year with my sweetheart. Robert was telling me about this book: Slave: My True Story, by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis, a true story about a 12-year-old sold into slavery in 1993. He said it's one of the best he's ever read. I love readers. I once saw a man walking to work in front of me with a brown bagged lunch and a library book and thought - how great, he's frugal because he's bringing his own food, and he's smart and budget minded reading a library book! Anyway, Robert is a retired reference librarian, and I agreed with his sentiment that another lifetime is needed to finish everything one wants to read.

What are you reading? I'm in the middle of Celia Rees' Witch Child, about a 14 year old girl who may or may not be a witch fleeing England in 1659 for America. I thought about how witches were an easy source of blame, and how witches take many forms. I also thought about the displacement of people fleeing tyranny caused the displacement of others whose lands they occupied. It was Tori Amos (who has a Cherokee bloodline) who sang in a Cherokee edition of Home on the Range, "Jackson made deals, a thief down to his heels. Hello long trail of tears. The white man came, this land is my land this is your land they sang."

I've just ordered Ben Gadd's Raven's End directly from the author after seeing his stunning words featured in A Life Ascending, which follows mountain guide Ruedi Beglinger and his family in British Columbia. They said there's a belief if people who die who love the mountains, they come back as a raven to live there.

Here' a preview of that film.

"I believe that mountains have energy in them which get passed onto us as we travel in it. I believe mountains are fully alive," Ruedi says.

Isn't he so right? Do you get positive energy from nature?

I have so much to see. When a film was on showing footage of the Grand Canyon, my sweetheart, Steve, to the right, whispered, "I was there." He had gone with his brother in the B.C.-age (before Catherine). Robert, to my left, said, "I was there with my daughter." (He biked from New York to California after retirement. I get winded walking up a flight of steps). I thought - I need to see these things. Other than a childhood trip to Hawaii and California (I've been to the latter to San Diego on business as well), I haven't left the East Coast in my 35 years.

Robert might not have been an angel, but I'm so glad I spoke to him. Speaking to each other - something we don't do enough. Everyone's face down in their gadgets checking e-mail or Facebook status, missing it all (yes, as soon as the intermission began, poof, out came the gadgets).

I'm coming to peace with the fact that my time machine idea isn't so realistic, and I was inspired by Michael Stipe's reading of a poem, Blue, in R.E.M.'s Collapse Into Now.

"I am made by my times, I am a creation of now, shaken with the cracks and crevices. I'm not giving up easily. I don't have much, but what I have gold.

This is my time and I am thrilled to be alive.
Living, blessed, I understand this.
Twentieth century, collapse into now."

I am thrilled to be alive. I hope you are too, and you are filling your life with experiences that make it richer, and people that make you better, even if you only sit next to them for a fleeting moment.

That's what I learned in life this week. While learn wouldn't fit into my favorite four letter words, perhaps I can add, "Know."

Warmly,
Catherine