Back in the first months of our courtship almost thirty years ago, I took Alysia to Joshua Tree National Monument in southern California to share with her my love for cross-country roaming. She asked how we would keep from getting lost and I replied “We practice staying found.” We went roaming up an alluvial fan that looked promising. As we ascended higher, we noticed a dry “lakebed” off to the side. We hiked over to it. It lay at the mouth of a side drainage that invited us in. We walked up that side valley, feeling a wonderful energy about the place, and came upon another dry lake bed that had rocks out in the middle seemingly arranged as a spirally arrow pointing to a rock outcrop on the western slope of the side valley. We headed towards it. (“Beauty is not on the map; seek and ye shall find.” – On the Loose) We walked up to the top of the outcrop. The bedrock seemingly formed a rugged series of steps to the top of the outcrop. On the top was an altar.
Let me back up many years to explain what I mean by an altar. I have shared several times the story of how a grey-crowned rosy finch dropping off a ledge high on a cliff changed my life. That encounter began a roaming path that led me to my first life goal: becoming a seasonal naturalist in Denali National Park . I achieved that goal four summers later. During that summer, while hiking along a tundra ridge, I found a caribou antler and used rocks to stand it on the crest in celebration and gratitude for this miracle of life that can allow the attainment of goals. When, back home the following winter, I hiked back up to my rosy finch cliff, I found a deer antler near the top. This finding felt like coming full circle; the path from this cliff out into the world culminating with a ceremony on the ridges of Denali – and then returning to the beginning and finding this antler. So I picked it up to place on the cliff top.
However, as I sat on the cliff edge looking down into the void of that bird’s drop, I noticed a subtle ledge about ten yards below the top that led out to a fin of basalt jutting out into the focal point of the curving cliff. That place seemed the appropriate place for the antler (as well as requiring a focusing of the mind just to make it out there). Very carefully I traversed the ledge to the middle of the cliff face. There, on that fin of bedrock basalt, four slabs had been placed to create a four-sided “box.” I immediately saw it as an altar where things entwined with prayer were offered. I imagined centuries of indigenous people ascending in simple sandals to this place of the rosy finches high above the salmon-flowing Columbia .
Now, years later, on the Joshua Tree rock outcrop was a similar four-sided box and so I immediately saw it as an altar. Alysia and I said prayers there. Later that day, in the next valley over, we came upon a metate with its mano still resting upon it, placed there at the end of a seed harvest, waiting patiently for the next cycle that would bring the gatherers back. Yes, others had dwelt here before. Their metates and altars remained upon the land. That day deepened the sanctity of our love. That outcrop became The Altar. A year later, when Alysia and I chose to marry, we went to The Altar first to take our private wedding vows many weeks before our public vows. Part of my private vow included a vow of lifetime service to Gaia. We returned two years later with our first born to christen her Zephyr at the altar.
And then we moved to northern California and I did not return for a long time. A few years ago, I returned to do an 18-years-after-the-fact christening of our second daughter, Dawn. Because Dawn was not present, I wanted to place something on the altar to represent her. On the slope that the altar faces, an exposed vein of very white quartz covers the ground with rectangular prisms. I selected a white brick of it to place on the altar for her.
I had the opportunity to go back this April. As I drove into the monument, I did my usual thing of stopping somewhere along the road, getting out and just walking out into the desert (no destination in mind) for a couple of miles to let the desert start soaking in. Let the road sound fade, let my ears open to the bird songs (phainopeplas were thick) and then the insect sounds. As I returned, I came over a rise into a view of the desert stretching out before me. The incredibleness of being alive upon this earth hit me once again and spontaneously I exclaimed, “Thank you, God.” But when the words left my lips, they didn’t quite express what I was feeling because God is often thought of as the creator rather than the creation and part of what I was feeling grateful for was the actual magnificent ways of this world. So I said “Thank you, Universe” but that felt too impersonal, too abiotic. I said “Thank you, Life” but that left out the abiotic womb from which the miracle of life emerges. “Thank you, Gaia.” Oh, the this-ness, the incredibleness of being consciously alive on this amazing planet with the opportunity to participate in the making of this world ever more alive and wondrous.
As I hiked out to the Altar the next day (my 61st birthday), I wondered whether the rock outcropping really was a prehistoric altar or just a creation of our imagination. What makes an altar? Where does an altar come from? Part of the magic of the Altar was the special feeling we felt there, but the other part of the magic was the sense of spiritual connection across centuries with people of a totally different culture – and yet we share a feeling of awe surrounding this outcrop. Expressing that connection is part of the purpose of an altar. An altar creates an acknowledged place of shared spiritual focus. At an altar, one is not alone in one’s spiritual yearnings. Others have felt similar feelings and been moved to enhance its focus.
As I neared the side drainage that held the Altar, I realized it was irrelevant whether the altar really was a prehistoric altar. It had become an altar for us through wedding vows and christenings. If part of an altar’s function is to be carried forward and nourished by the past’s spiritual aspirations, well then, from a different point of view, we are the future’s past. Not only do we receive the aspirations of the past; we send ours out into the future. If we make it into an altar, then a thousand years from now, it will be encountered by others as an ancient altar. The Altar gives me the chance to give form to the yearnings I feel in a way that can connect with and nourish those in the future. Dawn’s white rock upon the outcrop (I assumed that it, like mano on metate, would still be lying there.) had been a first step. Though not sure what I would do with them, I stopped at the quartz vein and filled my daypack with other slabs of white quartz.
At the Altar, I sat and pondered what to do with them. I didn’t want to create a pile of white rocks; that would have looked like a gleaming “Someone’s been here” cairn that would have pulled the eye away from the more subtle altar. But I did want to use them to strengthen some future seeker’s certainty that people had enhanced this outcrop for some reason, enhanced it in a way that led their eyes to the ancient rock box on the top. In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander puts a lot of emphasis on entrances, marking them more clearly so that one passes from one space into another with more awareness. What Alysia and I had experienced as a transitioning entrance that first time was the stair-forming jutting pieces of bedrock we ascended. So I placed the white slabs into the cracks between the steps to call attention to the bedrock as steps.
Then I did my prayers. As I did so, a raven pair came flying from across the valley and circled close overhead four or five times and then landed ten yards away for the rest of my prayers. Perhaps they thought I had food and were checking me out. But ravens, like altars, inhabit a space between worlds. Once I was leading a tour through a cliff dwelling set within a giant sandstone arch. The town, lying in the arch’s summer shade, faces out onto a beautiful forest of aspen and cottonwood. The 450-foot high arch acts like a giant ear, gathering sound, so that one can hear the towhees scratching in the fallen leaves one hundred yards away. Though I had a large-sized tour, the people had become sensitive to the serenity of the place and were settling towards a lovely silence that would bring the tour to a perfect ending. The silence settled upon us – but then – in a too-loud, slightly whiny voice, someone said “It must have been boring living here without any stereos or TV.” The spirit of the group within that place started to drain. How could I restore it? If I responded to the question, it would lead us back into talking. If I shut him down, that would impose an uncomfortable silence. How could I respond to that question? And then Raven appeared.
There was a whooshing sound. We looked out and saw a raven flying up the canyon towards the arch. Ravens fly with powerful but slow wingbeats. Each flap whooshes. So we heard its flaps, amplified by the arch, as the raven flew into the arch 300 feet above us. With great whooshes, it circled above our upturned faces three times. Then it flew straight up to the ceiling of the arch. It stretched upwards with its talons, clutched a flake of sandstone, and hung there, upside down, gazing down at us. And we gazed up at it, silently. After about ten seconds, it let go with one foot and dangled by the other, still gazing down at us. After another period of time, it let go and dropped into a glide out of the arch, leaving behind a once-again quiet group. That raven answered that man’s question so impeccably that I understand why so many tribes hold Raven in high respect. So when the Joshua Tree ravens circled overhead and landed ten yards from the Altar, I was open to experiencing this as an affirmation of the “altarness” of the place and my intent.
I left with the following benediction. “May the energy of this place and of these times become invested in this altar so that others who roam this way on their quest for wiser wisdom and spirited imagination be uplifted and moved forward on their quest so that some of their energy also becomes invested within this place.”
I’ll close with something Gary Snyder said.
“I said, ‘Look, we’re going to be here at least a thousand years and we want to have a forest that we can continue to work with as the basis of our economy for at least a thousand years. That’s a very conservative suggestion.’ A couple of the county supervisors looked at me with wide and surprised eyes and said, ‘What do you mean, we’re going to be here a thousand years?’ And that is the problem, that there is a quality of the mind in this culture and in this country that cannot yet grasp the point that we are here. And it may be that we go on trips, to space colonies even. But we’re also going to be here. And our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will be here, and that soil and those deer and those trees can be here for them, too. That is, for me, the pearly gates that I want to construct a path to, down the spirit road, and leave little piles of tobacco along the way for them to start out with at least, so they’ll get there. I don’t care if that’s in a supernatural or a natural world — it’s all one to me. But to make that possibility — to make it just a possibility seems to me no more than a minimal human obligation. It’s not a big political deal. It’s not even a big spiritual deal. But it is part of the fun of being alive in your own time to sweep a little bit of the path for the little ones who need a little sense of where to go.“
(Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986)
Leave a Reply