A:Shiwi Equinox - A Zuni Tale of Long Time
I walked the Zuni Reservation, and lived there, for a small drop of time. My hiking partner, a Zuni anthropologist and archeologist, a First People Indiana Jones, took me to see his tribe’s oldest petroglyphs. On the equinox, he said, the sun penetrates the crack between two primordial swirls drawn into the rock. Tibetan Buddhist, meet the story of the A:Shiwi, what the white’s call the Zuni, and what the A:Shiwi call the A:Shiwi. The words that came from this meeting are offered below. Not mine, but ours. Yours, mine, his, ours, A:Shiwi, Buddhist, Whites, all One.
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I walk knowing the gravity of this place, of piñon pine and sage brush, in communion with vastness, each bowing to the other. I am in awe of the thousand year courtship.
I pause to take it in with whatever way I may devise. I am untrained in this. This is the landscape of giants, not men, and so I tread soft, moving outside of most time, as I imagine the rock would, when entering the temple of nature's soul.
Reverence holds out its hand for me to take, and escorts my mind, my heart really, towards a secret ceremonial rite.
"It is the rising of the sun, Daughter, Beloved, we wish to show you."
They explain.
“To see a pine seed, one knows that the fullest expression of the tree is a hidden truth within it.
The sun is also like this. It can be known as a light and warmth bringer, a burning sphere undying in its love of the Earth, in union with this planet, to death do us part.
This is the surface truth, the ground truthing, the one learned first.
Upon your own union with this truth, the second truth is poured into a chalice for you to drink, a suffusing of seeing what the light itself carries within. It does what the dark can only do through negation and shadow. In contrast, the light, it carries with it every gift that may pass into the material world, and more.
The natural world has not forgotten this, receiving all of it, in grateful acceptance. It is you who have forgotten, living so separately from our woody and mossy brethren, opting to grow from artificial light, which lacks the perfection of the sun and his moon.
Your poor and now fragile bodies, taking in that which lacks brightness, it compromises the who of what you are, and creates a manufactured reflection and sad second to what it could be. For this, we weep.
It is this second truth that is the secret key. It is the one that can set you free, can set you on fire, burning away the maladapted dross so that you might realize you are the aspect of the world that fears nothing, and loves everything.
Beloved daughter of the world, take in all of the light, its first truth, and second, until there is nothing but light. This is your fullest expression, catalyzed and energized from within your human heart. Your hidden truth is this.
You are, in fact, a giant among giants, and this vast and epic landscape was made for you. It is your authentic home.
Grow now from the seed planted in your heart into who you truly are.”