I awaken with indigo skin. Sparrows hop about on my mattress. I vaguely recall a plunging star followed by blindness. In that sleep, a voice spoke in primary colors and related a saga oozing blood between brown feathers. I followed her in a procession toward the origin. She pointed out a killer whale, a shaman’s folded robes, a raven’s halo, a falcon spitting fog, a cluster of warthogs, a gathering of peacocks and white llamas, the roots of a great-grandfather’s moustache. As we ascended from a swampy trail of frogs, birds, cobwebs, sunning turtles, and lizards, we skirted the foot of a smoldering volcano. Off in the other direction in emerald water, an island burned. She, however, had other plans. Wild goats ran from our approach. Soon we braved auto glare, road owls, iron bridges. Spinning me back to my Midwestern sources, she demonstrated how thin the thread of perception remains. Spider-thin, in fact. She showed me I’m one animal at one time and in one location, but when those factors change, I become another. Only the soul is constant. When she held a mirror before me, there was no reflection. When I asked her name, she smiled coyly. “You’ll find it written in the desert.”

Each time you acknowledge the distractions that keep you from dancing freely, turn back toward the melody and the rhythm. Turning, I knew, was repenting. Turning and returning, in the music I danced and played. My partner there has always been faithful.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

To step into desert far enough you no longer see cars or houses brings a break with convention. Returning from one exploration with Kokopelli, I view the town as a mound of pea pods. Next, it becomes peanuts (which aren’t raised in these parts). Eventually, as packages of Grape-Nut Flakes — each building containing bodies, nothing more. Entire cities appear as collections of books identical to a room of cardboard boxes. Every abode duplicates a television set. I know this isn’t how people should be living. This isn’t freedom. This isn’t personality. We have our work cut out, don’t we? If Kokopelli hadn’t come this way earlier, I might have feared for my sanity. Instead, I know the brain’s a weird instrument and let it go at that.

Imagine undertaking a trip where there are no road signs, no maps, no pages of text. You have no way of knowing how far to the next town, gas station, restaurant, motel, or campground. Ask people and hope they know. With utter sincerity, half of them give bogus information. The other half lie. Without a guide, all the books you’ve read can’t possibly help find the marker, YOU ARE HERE. Your teacher embodies map, compass, path, and highway. If you have the genuine article, it’s better than an Interstate speedway. If it’s false, watch out. I wished my own were closer. I was running on memories. As my Teacher said, “When you think I-I-I, you’re a smoky fire blowing every which way. No I, no me, no my attachment means there’s no smoke, just a good hot flame burning clearly.” For me, this meant breaking out of my own shell. Would I have wings or claws? I hadn’t considered the spider.

At least I have Kokopelli, on occasion. Most of the time.

In this desert, I seek to unearth the hidden meanings of place. I return to a chart of Aboriginal names and translations, and substituted these for the Geological Survey’s designations. The mountain once known as Komo Kulshan is STEEP. That’s how it is when GOING FOR CLIMAX in the spiritual quest. You must keep asking, “What can I do WHERE I AM?” The answer? “Take another step dancing with your beloved.”

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

Throughout history, people have turned to pilgrimages, monastic retreats, or fasting as pauses in their daily customs — opportunities to reflect fully on immortal objectives before returning to everyday demands. Modern versions include vacations, travel, and outdoor pursuits such as camping — typically without the dimension of worship. Whatever the form, people return home with renewed appreciation. Maybe my wife’s trip on the bus held an element of this; perhaps it was just an escape.

The desert is similar. It’s made me recognize fundamental, even primitive, life requirements clearly, as though chiseled by flint instruments. Like the multitude of crickets chirping in the garden, much we take for granted — rain, clouds, family, especially — now magnify in consciousness. I could lay out some generalized principles and then form a big picture.

Tell me, then, Kokopelli insists. So I do.

Begin, for instance, with a line found on few maps, one that nevertheless defines the United States as much as the Appalachian mountains, Mississippi River, or Mason-Dixon Line do: to its west, less than thirty inches of rain falls in an average year. Because they require at least thirty inches of rainfall a year, leafy trees never extended across the Great Plains or Far West, except along streams or in pockets settlers planted and irrigate. The line drops across the map like a spider’s exploratory filament, a perpendicular sheen from a ceiling. The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas are cleaved. Further west, forests return near mountains, which generate their own weather patterns. Snowfall and rain, in part, explain the conifers of Western forest. Explain, too, the smell of open air, crackle of fire, proliferation of wrinkles in neighbors’ cheeks and foreheads. More lines can be drawn, leading to some web: the treeless expanse, for instance, between the Rockies and the Cascade or Sierra Nevada ranges.

Within the treeless expanse are other circles, other webs. Take center-pivot irrigation, patented in 1952, and count how many mile-wide green circles it’s spun across the Western landscape, each one requiring the electrical power of a city of ten thousand and a reliable source of water, generally fossilized or snowmelt. Back east I had rarely considered such matters. A drought meant no rain in several weeks. Dew was dependable. I knew about farmers, not cowboys. Grass was thick and green rather than sparse and dun. Summer air heavy with humidity made the sky milky rather than this piercing blue. On the westward journey, I barely noticed how loam is a table tilting to sky until we ran up against the forbidding wall of the Rocky Mountains. Now I measure summer nights that plunge fifty degrees, yet desert thermometer readings don’t compare with the comfort and discomfort known elsewhere. Thirty or sixty days without clouds oppress me as much as continuous rain would. I need new prayers. New magic, too.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.