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.

My cultivated exercise of substance and spirit, my Dedicated Laborious Quest, is an interplay of natures — my own character and communities and varied ecosystems as they ultimately feed into our universe. As they harmonize, intuition leaps and skips; intellect dances with the heart. Emotions and each individual’s senses potentially humanize a fertile terrain rather than snagging within wildness. Wilderness, meanwhile, represents another order. In its sacred opportunities, the field of endeavor itself, whatever its name or specific form, becomes secondary to the abundance being disclosed around and within each practitioner. Indeed, many who participate and even excel in some activity where the D.L.Q. begins to appear — be it a gymnasium or playing field, a studio or stage, a laboratory or workshop — remain oblivious to the gateway my spiritual brothers and sisters and I have entered. When I meet a celebrated mountaineer who perceives icy heights, it turns out, the way a trucker regards a highway, I’m disappointed he failed to become a mystic seeking cosmic oneness. Accomplishment that’s solely technical remains devoid of unity. No, I’ve already learned that birds along the way are not just birds; my Teacher’s gardens nourish more than a stomach. In a circle of heavenly order as well as disintegrating debris, Kokopelli and I prepare a clearing and settle for the night. Observe planetary and lunar motions. Greet the sunrise. All natural phenomena give birth in an opening, should you find it. Likewise, locating a personal opening, an enclosed space within a universe, can bring recovery, renewal, healing, and salvation. To sit at the center of one’s birthright repeats an ancient journey made only on foot. There have always been charlatans who gain large followings by pandering to appetites for instant gratification, these days offering the comforts of jetliner or Interstate automobile. In reality, the aspirant must abandon even camel or mule along the way — eventually jettison everything, including his own backpack and affection for the very form he practices. In time, even his intentions. Step by rocky step follows a pathway that regresses through that origin. Perhaps the aspirant’s teacher has been there; perhaps he’s lost. At last, with his very life is at stake, if he turns back, he bears a haunted look in his eyes forever. I’ve come far, answering a call in the night, goaded by some deep wound and an overwhelming loneliness. In this exploration, dreams and mythologies correspond to trail markers. Once you discern how paradox differs from contradiction, you embrace its place in the teaching. To climb a higher ridge requires first descending to a valley.

Kokopelli, of course, knows all this and much.

He knows you may have taken any of a number of pathways to the holy garden. One may have played high school football — likely on the offensive line. One may have been an Eagle Scout, backpacking through winter forest. One may have built theater sets or lighting. Analyzed interstellar noise or constructed parquet flooring. One may have repeated violin scales, like me, or cared for younger siblings. The stories Kokopelli’s heard are endless. The common thread through all is this: the commonplace is never good enough. The spider’s thread climbs higher.

It’s no accident I came to dwell in desert, the timeless opening for religious surrender and ecstasy. By good fortune I also encounter great mountains, summer snowfields, crystalline air, unrelenting winds, a circle of fascinating comrades, and a new fullness of myself, no matter how briefly. From those heights, my art and intellect extract an essence, an inspiration to share with brothers and sisters who remain in suburbs and cities, often by necessity or by the duties of urban economy and civic obligation. My goal as poet, priest, artist, philosopher, naturalist, explorer, teacher, or prince — whatever that call — is somehow to preserve a sense of this supernatural potential and cosmic harmony.

Kokopelli says we can do all this when we play a dance. “They can feel it, and that’s enough,” he explains.

To be authentic, such an extended sojourn must somehow reflect other facets of existence as well: violence, savage revolt, a wide ranging lack of dignity or purposeful employment — at least, a recognition that socially valuable work seldom offers adequate compensation. In this preparation, the pilgrim may be propelled backward through history as well as forward into science fiction and interplanetary speculation. How curious that desert is so often perceived as a place of escape: gazing into its vast inhospitable space, you’ll detect nowhere to hide. Such terrain strips and confronts. No other environment, excepting surfaces of large water, is as mirrored with brilliant sunlight. All reflections turn back on the very thing you might most desperately seek to escape: yourself, especially.

If you hide behind a boulder, it evaporates. If you raise your hand to block glare, a Greyhound bus hisses past in a cloud of dust and thunder. If wearied by this torment, you retreat to the house, you’ll find that boulder waiting in the bedroom. A note on the kitchen table will divulge your beloved has taken that bus to the seacoast. You cannot sleep in her absence.

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