Chapter 8

Consuela told Zoe it was time she returned to Chaco Canyon. Whether Lucy or Reggie came along was no matter, but Zoe must go. They had been there many years ago, Consuela said, didn’t Zoe remember? Zoe closed her eyes, imagined back a few thousand years. And when she began to speak of it, she rocked back and forth as she droned out her story:
This is a landscape with no moon, a sky full of dull sunlight and lazy turkey vultures, miles across scrubby desert. On the road to Chaco there is everything far as the eye can see: Navajos sitting on old Chevys, faded houses like bones on bleached earth, hungry dogs and goats roaming sandy arroyos, a woman in a red scarf hanging blue and white laundry to dry in the late summer sun. This is the end before the beginning–then the purple rise of mesas, the Anasazi wind, the scattering of pueblos, the ancient city.
Returning is the other side of leaving. This is what is true–of night, of death, of the movement of wind and breath, of the heart turning over in its bed of dreams.
The medicine woman in me knows all this, as I descend into Casa Rinconada, Great Kiva, on a full moon September day. I will wait in the kiva all day for the moon to rise in this century and think, “this is where my body lives, this familiar ground, though my spirit rises in the wind and would take me, if I hadn’t promised to wait for what is true.”
Three of us rest our backs against the cool kiva walls, facing east. We wait for the ancient potion to fill our bodies, dissolve us into stone, shimmering grass, till we become who we were before–a trinity of shamans sharing the mandala of knowledge, gazing far ahead into this moment.
Sun and medicine infuse our bodies with heat. We travel a circuit few survive to remember, past our own deaths, past the edge of what is familiar, into the vortex of fear and open space. Into this place we take a two-sided healing wand, a crystal dorje and a knapsack full of bananas, water, almonds and Hostess cupcakes. We take everything we know.
“Moment to moment,” whispers one friend, who has seen his own blood on the kiva floor and will not give into it. I say to him: When we emerge to the other side, we will know what is true.
A raven skims the edge of the kiva, rests her body in flight and her wings glisten. I say to my companion in flight, who becomes the brujo, In another lifetime I was a young girl in a lonely West Texas town. I stood in the dust forever waiting for this raven.
The kiva sings from its great mouth, the wild dogs sing in the west and lightning shatters the edge of the world. In my heart, restless in its pink dreams, a raven folds her head into her wings and sleeps. On the cusp between two worlds three travelers watch a tourist in a green shirt and baseball cap take 23 pictures of the kiva, inside and out. His wife, the Talking Woman, follows him moment to moment through the endless afternoon.
Later we will eat lentil soup and chocolate birthday cake under a red moonrise. Our lungs will be weary with breathing and our ears will buzz. Lightheaded as angels, we will drum to the moon, and rattle and dance. We will
float through the long night on what cannot be called sleep, listening to the voices of the Old Ones, who will continue to tell us what is true.