Going Up Sacred Raven's Mound at Night

Going Up Sacred Raven’s Mound at Night

The walk up  the “sacred raven’s mound” saddle was familiar, except this time it was dark and there was heavy smoke in the air, flakes of ash wafting in the flashlight beam and I had a shovel in one grip and a communicating device in the other.  The fire must be nearby and I want to help.   There was noise up on the west ridge and I could see their eyes glinting and hear their hooves against the stones and the earth; the sound small hooves make; there was a group of deer above me.  It was fear inspiring; dreamlike.

I  spent some time up here  years ago meandering with my 8 year old daughter on Sundays and we would “mine” precious green stones from the high quality red clay bank.  It was a special thing to do as we assuaged our hearts.  I had, back then, been poaching dead firewood along the trail, and lugging it to where the truck waited.  This was before the drought of 2000, the beetle kill, an amazingly well thinned forest and the gain of hundreds of dead piñons , replacing huge cottonwoods  that I quartered and burned over the previous 20 years .  It was a gnarly old trunk with a pointed branch that, I found out, was like a tusk or an antler and I tripped and fell on it, ripping my jeans and it poked hard at my inner thigh, hurting  a long time afterwards.  I remember my first experience hunting in those days and I got me a big bull elk with a massive rack and we cut it apart in the dark and were carrying the enormously heavy head and antlers to the truck (it took the three of us) and one of us got sort of gored by the horns and he groaned in pain, like me and the piñon.  I learned that the way these elements are made; the tree and the antlers; made to easily catch something, grab what it needed somehow like a devil’s claw does .  I use the “rack” to dry clothes on in the greenhouse and I toss them casually in its direction and they get hung ( I wondered if this drying “rack” was ‘insulting’  and then I realized it was a great tool; wrested of course, from the natural world as we sought to eat).

The saddle and hill, which looks like a huge head rising out of the earth;  has long ‘arms’  on both sides.  I named it ‘sacred raven’s mound’ as I finally saw the ‘arms’ as wings and the ‘head’ as the skull of a raven.  It’s a very special look-out , invoked, I thought, by the suggestive powers of a raven (the only animal that actually fashions/creates tools, it seems; like bending a wire to create a hook; not just poking sticks like an ape might).  I peered down upon what I knew to be a huge basin, the glint of railroad tracks disappearing around a low hill.  I looked for the glow of a wildfire and saw nothing.  The ash was from distant Arizona, so I leaned on the shovel, caught my breath and walked back down, past the crag on the left that was a sentinel overlooking the gorge and the snaking streambed five hundred feet below somewhere.  I knew there was more to this boulder, as I had discovered its ‘star crossed lover’, frozen for all time as another granite being; one with a natural arched opening at its base (something I had never seen in granite before)  she being across the gorge and up a steep gulch.  I had climbed ‘er once as I sought solitude from being a step-parent and got up there in the early morning,  then discovered that I was frozen in fear as I tried to descend; easier to climb than come down from, I learned.   I feel there is a great myth to tell about these giant stones and have thought about it many times.  But there was something missing and then I saw, a few weeks ago; a solitary stone propped naturally, like its “parents”; like the perfect child, almost a standing baby, but not in sight of the mother, but on the slope overlooking the waterfalls and the pools way down below….just standing there innocently lost and lost for so long that light green lichen, which always looks youthful somehow, was all over it.  These characters were also silent observers as the ash from two hundred miles away wafted by their ‘nostrils’ too, all of them, except for me, really……indifferent and stoic.  They, in fact, ‘saw’ everything; warm days and bitter nights; knee deep in snow and crowned with the stars.  Not curious, themselves, but just part of the mystery involving… what to do.  I thought…….. “I am obsessed with nature, with the flower, with the root. It is all linked to my situation as a… (person)… exiled from…( my)… primordial.” *

The leaves shimmer against the blue-grey sky, in the breeze, being near the end of the twig, which is near the end of the branch; the leaf is branched with veins which mirror the branching and the swaying tree is rooted by underground branches and the system is magnificent in its ability to communicate with both the earth and the sky; creating itself and sustaining itself through a communication and chemistry with air, water, light and nutrients.  It is responding and working with and in the sky; with the wind, the warmth, the dryness.  It is antennae sending and receiving messages from anything that will listen:  ‘look at me and see more and more and more’, like a fractal in the forest, alchemists, a Druid prayer sent out into the multiverse, saying; “…there is a lot going on here, so take a good look and think about what I am doing”; something like that…….so……just want to say……..“may the forest; be with you”.....

* - Aimé Césaire