November 17 - Singing Up The Sun

     When I was in New Mexico for the celebration of the Winter Solstice holy days, I stayed in a little outpost along the Ancient Way. This is the old trail from Acoma to Zuni pueblo. The hamlet was no more than a coffee shop, a gallery and a campground with cabins plunked down at the base of a rock outcropping in the middle of a place where the earth whispers audibly. When the stars came forth in the late winter afternoon, it looked like one of the Navajo silversmiths had left a trail of silver dust behind after finishing his days work. 

     My husband went out to Zuni with me last summer, and met the people who lived at the base of Inscription Rock. He marveled at how small it was and how isolated. From my stories of The Ancient Way Cafe, he'd taken the impression that I'd stayed in a town. But this was just a brave little stand of people, dogs and wooden buildings set down in the shelter of the rocks surrounded by open country. (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Radical Faeries from the nearby sanctuary who worked there, but went home to Zuni Mountain Sanctuary to sleep.)

     I woke each morning just before the dawn and trekked out back in the wilderness surrounding Inscription Rock. In the darkness was a great stillness. Before the dawn there was a rustling, a breath of movement, the small murmurings which allow us to hear the stillness of an all night vigil. The first coyote raised his voice in the darkness and the others joined in. Others joined in and their singing grew stronger—strong enough to lift the sun in to the sky. As the light began to change, the ravens woke up and took to the sky with a great hew and cry, but it was the coyotes who sang the sun up each morning. Most mornings a splash of pale light washed the face of the sky as the sun woke up and rose to rule the day. But there was one morning when the sun ignited the mountains in a blaze of gold against the deep red dawn.

     This was the land where the conquistadors believed they saw cities of gold. The earth and rocks here have a rich yellow cast, as do the earthen bricks the pueblos are built from. The pueblo peoples fashioned window panes for their adobe dwellings from thin, nearly transparent sheets of micaceous rock. When the setting sun hit these windows they mirrored the golden glow. Where the indigenous peoples saw holiness, the conquistadors saw fortune. Not all that long ago, the Ancient Way was littered with debris from invading soldiers. On isolated stretches of conquistador roads, people still stumble over one of their swords, or a bit of tack from the horses, or even a helmet.

    But the coyotes still sing up the sun as they always have and the seasonal rituals of this land survived even the conquistadors.
© 2009 Claudia Chapman