Knowing how far to go — and when to turn back, to the best effect — are difficult matters. The wise traveler relies on those who have gone there already and returned. You hope they speak truthfully. Often your life will depend on their directions. Even knowing what to pack and what to omit may be based on their counsel. Mountains and rivers are only the beginning.

When there’s too much to remember, a map begins forming. That or a guidebook. But the map presents more possibilities than the book, with its linear narrative confined to one route at a time — even maps with vast portions blank or missing. Take two points on a map and connect them, this way or that. Add a third. And then a fourth.

I never would have arrived in this desert without maps. The airliner’s navigation charts, of course. And then the highway atlas. Many others, as well, become useful. Those that show back roads. Others, topography. Still others, property divisions — including the Indian reservation and Army artillery range, both declared off-limits. Maps of emotions, economies, explorations. Maps of oceans, weather, the heavens.

Disembark and you go to work filling in details and then connecting points like a spider. What’s around that corner? What’s over that ridge? Where will we stay, and what’s the best way to get there? A single map is only an blueprint. The particulars never quite fit. Especially in two dimensions. A breeze lifts the web. Coyote walks through it.

Each one distorts — some far more than others, and rarely by intention. Who made the map in your hands? And to what purpose? Some were mathematicians of few words. Others were empire builders or real estate developers. Some weave the directions into the stories they tell beside the campfire. Some ignore shadows. Fail to repent, ask forgiveness, extend blessing. Others know survival, as well as play, requires definition and decision. Obligates searching within, as well as around, in fullest candor. Some even deceptively point you away from your destination (why should they reveal their secrets?).

Those who were born and raised here know it in a different way from those who have migrated. Magpie will tell you one thing; a Canada goose, another. Same goes for where they’re positioned. Jackrabbit and dragonfly take separate pathways, as does beaver. You simply log where they cross and hope to find meaning.

I had thought maps were the essence of geography. Now the definitions spill over into history, geology, meteorology, political science, psychology, and much more. Because many misunderstandings afflict each life, there are bound to be collisions. Sometimes you move into a thorn that pierces consciousness, but even that rarely brings clarity. You see there’s endless discord among individuals, clans, tribes, nations, denominations — all to be traversed and mapped in the search for ways out and back safely. In this knowledge, jobs, aspirations, faiths, possessions, social standing are merely reflections of fundamental conflicts between human consumption and the good earth itself. No one can dwell anywhere without disturbing the whole; individuals and collectivities distort and contort to their own ends, some more benignly than others. The lines on the page do not hold their place. Without a divinity as a guide knowing these connecting pathways, then, there’s no return to full measure and health. The breath people exhale, fires they build, grains and flesh they devour are diverted to their chosen applications. “Tell us something better,” I implore. “Teach us the highest way.” Where anyone takes it from here is another matter.

Sadly, whether this transformation’s harmonious and renewing, guiding individuals as merciful stewards and co-creators with the divine, or self-centered and destructive as thieves, is rarely considered. Just observe how communities rationalize, arguing that the welfare of their women and children comes first, even as they bankrupt the farm to support worldwide armies or strip timberlands in a rutting for coal and iron.

You could perceive many aspects of this in these orchards within desert. While the choice of irrigating and producing fruit sustains many more humans than the arid range would, also ponder the long-term impact of the poisons applied through each season. Kill harmful insects and molds, but what else? And how soon before it seeps into the groundwater and household wells? It’s all an interplay of good and evil, which I observed through a giant spider web. As a practice within my spiritual discipline, the Dedicated Laborious Quest, I place maps atop other maps and find they are drawn to different scales. Many of the words require translation, which introduces its own misunderstandings. Some of the maps are even of places far from here, landscapes in memory.

Too many details and the sheet becomes a scribble. Maybe that’s why here, at an extremity of the continental United States, I now comprehend the American Midwest of my childhood and early adult years as something other than a uniformly Protestant corn belt. Even overlooking ecological differences between woodlands and prairies, or between the Great Lakes and the Missouri or Ohio river valleys, I reconsider its varied ethnic traditions and the hidden cost of the melting-pot focus. Speaking with other exiles like myself, I become aware of unique distinctions some of our ancestors resolutely upheld, at the cost of their own lives, if necessary. There were strains of Scandinavian Lutherans in the Dakotas, Russian Mennonites in Kansas, and Scottish Presbyterians in Iowa, whose distinct cultures were eroding like the topsoil itself. You would hear, too, why so many had fled. Some, desperately hoping to forget forever their terrors or shame, buried the evidence as best they could. Others, however, defiantly kept it aloft as a reminder of their liberation and a warning.

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

Ours was not the journey of Ulysses. There had been no dramatic battle. No obvious defeat or shipwreck, either. We weren’t accompanied by our own troops. I intended to make my home here, at the edge of wilderness, and venture into its realms, rather than circle back toward some faraway but faithful woman or goddess.

With the exception of my spouse, who also traveled with me, I was fleeing my own people and hoping that strangers would be better, or at least different. Crucially, I would continue to enter the back country to be reminded of some mystery, as if on this edge of the continent some faithful remnant was making a final stand in defense of Old Ways handed down through practice from antiquity. Still, you could look at the ground and be disgusted here, too, to find white fibrous butts, the thimbles of broken cylinders left behind wherever man goes, along with the larger, inescapable debris. Look up and see contrails of airliners and military aircraft. You could scoff that in vapor-lighted cities, where cancer is the predominate cause of dying, few inhabitants are aware of the flickering stars or the planets in their orbits; the populace is ignorant of the very lunar phases you will so closely follow here. Taunt them, arguing that Jesus is the only bum welcome on their streets and parking lots, and accepted in their midst only because he’s conveniently dead. Maybe he’s not all that welcome, either, if you look closer. Meanwhile, vandals spray-paint his name on forest boulders alongside highways, as though a word alone can distribute clear-cut salvation. Ponder the contempt for both creation and creator. The Old Orders dismiss superficial religion. There’s fasting, and then there’s starvation. The soul knows a hunger, one that comes at the beginning of prayer. Some practitioners know this opens a furrow their horses help plow. For now, I would venture into high places to be reminded of the ancient interplay of dualities. Not just good and bad, but the overlapping harmonies as well. Make my rounds, however quickly at first, acknowledging the slower nomadic practice.

When I packed for this move, I preferred boxes over baskets. Something squared, for paper and recordings, especially. Typewriter. Electronics. We weren’t transporting dried berries or salmon. Blankets cushioned furniture and china. The cardboard presented fewer overlapping harmonies. Learn to weave baskets and I might learn something of the Cross. Especially in its curving.

Handle with care, all the same. Let go of one, something shatters. Or the other, something bounces. Baskets stack differently than boxes. See which one fits a squared room better. Which one, a hogan, wickiup, tipi, or kiva.

Step outside. Turn to the four directions. Then name them.

MALE / SUN
FEMALE / MOON.

Turn again.

AIR / FIRE
EARTH / WATER.

Once more.

SPIRIT / LIGHT
FLESH / SHADOW.

Draw out their colors according to tradition or your own intuition.

Soon the divisions break down, into Yin/Yang swirling.

This is where prayer begins its dancing, even without Kokopelli’s piping.

In such turning I was brought to the edge of my intellect. Facing the expanse toward the horizon, my knowledge of geography, geology, botany, zoology, astronomy, and survival itself proved defective. The edge and depth of my emotions, too. Return to my religious texts and I’d find a different story. Not the one taught to children, but more sinister dimensions. Walk far enough away from the village or highway into open fear, admitting this experience might break me. This Dedicated Laborious Quest draws on all my ability — mental, physical, and psychic — until I’m forced to pull strength from some kernel of infinity within myself. As you pull, roots come forth. Draw them from the emptiness within the basket. The emptiness waiting on the horizon’s circle, as well. More roots, reaching out like cosmic rays through the sky, are visible only to the spider — these beads on a rickety filament.

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

A hundred miles inland from the nearest port, we encountered a three-legged tree. Until looking closer after being told the house beside it was built a century earlier by a retired sea captain, you’d have no clue a whale jaw had been leaned against the young trunk, where they grew together.

Irrigated, of course, this being desert.

The question remained. Who was farther from true home?

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