I am helpless, defenseless, questioned and cornered. For my life; for my rights, for everything human I will fight.  If I can tell you in a format you will hear I will be free to walk as I came, to do as I wish; if not I will go where you take me.  I have no choice but to uphold my belief. 

 

Black Mesa Arizona, tribal homelands since time began the desert chasm opened up, the steady flow of water cutting though rock and lava feeding the starving earth.  Older than history and fragile as shale, the Dineh climbed from the lava flows and volcanic craters existing with nothing, creating fields of squash, corn and beans in the cinders and carefully tending the gardens beside the Little Colorado river.  And so it was for eight hundred years man existed in peace with the Painted Desert, without guns, sheep, horses or steel tools until one by one every tribe was moved to a reservation, a supposed New Land where they could live unnoticed and self sustaining, where they could house their spirituality in acres of foreign desert hills and hunt between fences.  Of course reservation land was just the most remote, most barren plat of ground in the county “It’s unusable anyways, so why not give it to them; kills two birds with one stone.”  Unfortunately the government planners missed the point, the identity within a tribe is in its origin, remove that and it cannot exist as that tribe loses their history, loses their sacred mountains and kivas, loses their hereditary hunting grounds.

Slowly and deliberately all these things were laid to waste to become fuel for the monster.  Great fences around America disrupted the migratory routes for animals, disrupted the hunting patterns of the tribes.  Systematic genocide crept into every village leaving carnage in its wake, slaying and enslaving, separating children to Catholic schools, forcing the tribes to move to the New Lands and get used to it fast, they had no choice but to follow.  Considered a menace they were unnoticed until 1939 when war began and only then was there a call for them to serve, to be honored, to finally be treated as citizens and people.  The Navaho Code-talkers, mumbling foreign gibberish, penetrated through enemy lines and returned victorious, drafted and required to participate.  The ability of the Dineh to function as a tribe became weaker.  The first thing that left was the stories, oral history forgotten; the second was the language itself, viciously beaten out of every child.

   

Mans hunger for fuel led to their homelands, a barren desert built on nothing but high grade coal and uranium, and the relocation of the people began.  In two generations the people became removed and cold, living in cinderblock houses made from compacted mining tailings, waste nuclear runoff flowed into the Little Colorado River and fed every spring.  The leaching through clay and kaliche stained wells and riverbeds black with coal slick.  Every sheepherder died with his flock in the riverbeds within ten years, and the rest have cancer.  It appeared great and wonderful, deceived by the free truck, free house, and guaranteed job the Dineh became tolerant of the desecration of their tribal lands and became the miners, enslaved to a dream that was forced upon them.

Those who did not give up their homes were tortured; laws were established to forbid essential duties.  Within Black Mesa the people became weapons against themselves, to own tools that could split wood for a fire was forbidden.  To own sheep, livestock or vehicles to carry them was forbidden.  To fix, rebuild or construct homes was forbidden.  And once a week the Dineh met together at the courthouse, paid thousands of dollars and took their sheep home with them again, until the Hopi rangers came the next week to confiscate illegal property. 

 

The plunder continued un-approached until a string of calamities in 1978 laid waste to much of the earth, poisoning the land for many generations to come.  First three-mile-island leaked radioactive clouds in a media scramble and corporate cover-up scandal attracting the attention of the civilian population and successfully erasing the events which happened only weeks later in Church Rock, Navaho Nation, New Mexico. 

In their haste to advance mining operations, the corporations left a great mess of partially processed materials and liquid wastes which were consolidated in massive adobe reservoirs many football fields long to the tune of hundreds of millions of gallons.  Trans-Uranic Nuclear Waste sat forgotten in the rapid activities, short term answers to long term problems, until the cryptic adobe walls broke and crumbled under the weight, spewing death, unleashing a flood of radioactive sludge twenty feet thick and hundreds of feet long into the dry Little Colorado River.  With enough force to push its way to the ocean the wave surged through Gallup, New Mexico and branched into the Colorado River, leaving a footprint in the Grand Canyon forever.  All the most toxic heavy metals sunk into the deeper lakes and collected in reservoirs of drinking water behind Hoover Dam and Lake Havasu until finally settling in the coral reefs on the east coast of Baja, California, near Tijuana, Mexico.

 

The phoenix rose just before dawn beating angry wings, chasing the night into a shadow on the horizon as I watched from beneath a weathered juniper tree.  Never reaching the ground, the roots stretched though ancient lava flows six foot tall and thin as a sheet of plywood, the tree sprouted from raw rock giving shade from the desolate parched desert.  I was walking to clear my mind, to cleanse my body of sick desires.  I was walking away from the highway that had been my lifeline for years always feeding, sheltering and taking me far, far away.  I embarked on a sacred journey, a spiritual quest for life changing knowledge.  A thirst for the living water of the Little Colorado river and a glimpse across, the view of the painted desert stretching green, blue, purple and rainbow sand across the horizon accentuated by the shadows of mesas and weather beaten plateaus.  My only food was garlic cloves and bee pollen, spirulina tablets which I placed under my tongue and sucked on for hours worked well to wet my mouth.  After two days of walking I reached the river, parched by relentless sun it was nothing but a few shallow pools of bright blue water.  I could wash my feet, my hair and my skin from those pools that did nothing for my thirst but taunt and tease.  Knowing it was two more days to my closest hope for refreshment at the next gas station, I gazed at the ancient riverbed walls of thousands of layers of crushed earth and fossils, stooped to pick up an interesting green stone.  It seemed at first to be tightly packed dried clay with many layers compressed together but hard like shale and yellowish.  It had electricity that scared me but I was compelled to put it in my pocket and turn back toward the motionless, lifeless desert.  As the raging sun set in the evening and cool air once again enveloped me, I set down my pack and blankets under an ancient juniper tree and slept, my dog cautiously sniffing around in the darkness.  I woke up to her chasing a coyote in flirting playfulness, jumping on and over an ominous mound of smooth stones surrounding a bleached white cross not twenty feet from my resting place.  I obviously was not the only fool to try hiking across the dead heat sand.

The sight of an old homestead in the distance gave hope to a withering soul, and the thought of water made me continue until at last I came upon a ranch house from the early 1900’s, split rail fences and hand split siding boards.  This was the authentic rustic cabin.  Beside the door was a fridge bleached in the sun, its handle wrapped tightly with rope and tied to stop the wind from whipping it open.  Inside were twenty one gallon jugs of fresh, clean water, a gift from God, a gift of life.  Inside the cabin I found two old beds made up with nicely arranged blankets, pillows and clean sheets.  The kitchen had been ransacked by errant mice and rats for decades, heavily strewn with cereal, grains and mouse shit.  I opened the oven and found the stash of canned goods, all labels chewed off.  I hungrily opened the first two cans and shoved the unknown contents into my mouth.  Beans and bacon, corn giblets never tasted better.  I threw several packs of Winston cigarettes onto the night table between the beds for the next traveler, grabbed my gallon jugs of water and lit out of there.  By evening I had reached my trailer and leaned into it in the darkness.  Finding a few slices of bread, peanut butter and jelly, I fashioned a meal fit for kings and got halfway through the sandwich when I realized the taste in my mouth.  In the hazy moonlight I noticed the clouds of puffy mold growing from the bread.  I gagged and drank that water like a waterfall; little did I know the mold would save my life with its medicinal antioxidant properties.

I woke the next morning and ran my fingers through dreaded hair, pulling twigs and juniper needles from the matted locks, several of the dreads came out in my hands.  I hadn’t tugged very hard, or grabbed them very hard, and there they were in my palm.  It seemed as if my hair was not attached, and I hurried to wrap it up in a hat and hoped to forget.  Within weeks my teeth became green with a tingling sensation and the enamel began flaking and cracking, my arms fell limp to my sides so I could not even play a drum or strum a guitar for more than a few minutes let alone chop wood, invisibly the deadly radioactive isotopes had eaten away at my body, forever changing my life.

I stripped away layers of ancient fears and walked proudly between the gates of rationality with a new vision, a new outlook.  I no longer was immortal in my innocence for now I knew the deadly secret of life; “And this too shall pass”, I heard whispered in my mind.

 

 Fragrant with the season we trod up the road to Gibson’s, B.C. fully equipped with our backpacks, our dogs and a huge bag of chocolate we had dumpster dove on our way out of Vancouver.  The islands of old growth trees cropped from the uneven surf in an unrelenting show of force to remain unmoved through continuous persecution, slowly giving its shores to the ocean.  In anxiety we ventured close to the house and knocked at the door with hesitation.  It was opened by a man as old as the town, kind and grateful he showed us to the converted school bus we were to inhabit and we gasped in excitement.  Wow, a real home with a landlord that wasn’t a creepy old man, we were in heaven at the foot of the mighty Mt. Elphinstone, surrounded with tall brush and flowers.  Simple and securely we spent those few months in bliss as I prepared for my journey into the beast, and finally the legal system beckoned me to Victoria.  After taking several weeks to retrofit the sixteen foot canoe with an extra foot of waterproofed canvas over the frame I felt it would make the journey.  This was no ordinary canoe now, with a removable keel in the centre of the floor, a sturdy rudder and a twelve foot mast with sail we were ready for the waves, and we were ready for adventure.  If I were to give myself up to the evil courts to do as they wish with me, I sure as hell wouldn’t take a ferry over to Vancouver Island.  I won’t go that easy, and if I was meant to make it through only God would let me succeed.  So on a clear windy day we set into the ocean and set sail, within minutes our rudder snapped in the current.  Two people, two dogs, two packs and a bunch of donuts set off for an ancestral journey, and knowing full well what we were in for undertaking thirty-five miles of heavy ocean, we didn’t even have lifejackets.

By the time we could see the shoreline erasing in the fog, our sail broke and split.  There was nothing we could do, the current was pushing us into the Georgia strait with an unbeatable strength and the most we could do was paddle fast, strong and deliberately.  The swells increased and churned the water under us splashing into our canoe, and we saw the source of the waves.  In the distance a hundred foot Canadian Army Destroyer was barreling towards us seemingly unaware of our existence.  Looking at the map we noticed that we were in the very centre of a restricted area used for remote undersea ammunition storage, as they got closer we could see them peering through binoculars and we motioned at the Zodiac cutter they towed behind.  Please help.  But to no avail, we were in it deep now.  It took sixteen hours of endless rowing, and as the sun set on the horizon we saw the rocky bluffs nearing towards us.  We had made it and with no time to spare the nearest dock became our landing, in the backyard of a quaint house inhabited by an elderly and very scared lady who invited us in to warm up.  We were greeted by the local police within minutes and barely having a chance to dry off or drink our tea we were ushered into a cruise to the city limits.

 

As the Tao light and darkness become one, the yin and the yang resonating within each other, inseparable.  Within light, darkness lives; within darkness, light lives.  There is no end; the spiral exists eternally, driving life and death.  In those silent waking moments of birth we are consumed with a hunger for that which is not known; in the hunger we find satisfaction and fullness.  Still empty we yearn for something greater; without knowing its source we seek, grabbing and clinging to all in our path.  Knowing our weakness, the peaceful breast provides sanctuary.  We are fed the history and consequence of our ancestors’ decisions, without motive or individuality the entire story is told.  To embrace the one and forget the other is as misleading as to embrace the other and forget the one.  In unison they exist in constant duality, turmoil or fulfillment, choose your path.

Crafted of birth in haste and worry to live questioning existence, the mask is formed, covering all senses.  Infant touch clouded, sight mistaken.  Foreign and unforgiving reality becomes normal; the path is shielded in a cloak of protection.   In uncertain terrain the mind is free. 

 

The near silence of gentle waves lapping at the sand, coming ever closer.  The invisible glimmer of moonlight through woven branches and leaves.  The journey into sleep came swiftly.  Through closed eyes all light converged into darkness, condensing to oscillating hues, a retinal memory.  To a balanced point of blue light in combustion.  I was standing on a hill, dwarfed by a mountain landscaped and crowned with a large institutional campus, and it was snowing.  I wrapped the blanket tightly around my wife to shield our baby from the persistent wind, and looked toward the emptiness beyond.  In one hand I held a chime in the form of a birdcage constructed of four deer ribs and bound together with leather, the other hand stirred inside the cage with another rib.  Clockwise one and a half times, backwards one half, and forward one time.  A simple pattern to unlock an ancient door.  There appeared a red tailed hawk within the cage, instantly entrapped and combusted.  The shrill voice grabbed at my soul, enveloping me in blue light, and we flew with wings of wisdom in majestic circles, climbing high above the school on the mountain, soaring into the light.