In the Womb of the Yavapai Mother, On the Paths of Undulating Red Rocks: An “Indian’s” Sedona Sojourn -Neela Bhattacharya Saxena

Suddenly in the field of my peripheral vision I see a dark woman stringing many colored beads together. Adorning herself and her daughter with those glistening rocks, she disappears with the little girl just around the corner of a stream beyond the Cathedral Rock.  Who is this exquisite woman, sharp, thin and liquid limbed, so serene and so at home with her motherhood?  She looks so much like the “Indian” woman in the children’s book “How the Stars Fall into the Sky.” It narrates a Navaho legend about a coyote and the first woman who writes the laws in the sky using her jewels.  Native Americans remind people they are not “Indians.” In this vast country myriad different tribes flourished before their near decimation. Navaho, Hopi, Yavapai, Sinagua are the names of diverse ancient Pueblo people of the American Southwest whose invisible presence haunted me while in Sedona where I spent a month under the spell of its rocky redness.

I must be conjuring up this brown woman. I am sitting far north in New York where no visible signs of “Indians” exist. Well, not quite; there is a sign for a school called Pequenakonck Elementary right off the road from my home. Our boys went there when we moved in this neighborhood in 1997, near a place called Peach Lake.  I was too busy commuting to a native place called Pomonok/Long Island and raising my family to have learned at that time that this area was a part of the Mohegans, another native people.  Thanks to the Wiki, I now know that in the 17^th century the lake was called Pehquenakonck. It turned to Peach Pond from an “Indian” word “Pech-Quen”; then it became Peach Lake. How little this Indian knows about the lost people of this land! 

When this Indian arrived here almost 28 years ago as a disoriented new bride, one of my first shocks of recognition came from a man in the local mall who inquired about my identity.  When I said Indian, he asked, which tribe? I was taken aback; it took me a few seconds before I figured out that he did not see me as a ‘fresh off the boat’ immigrant from India but as an inhabitant of this primeval land.  I did learn in school about them whom the British pejoratively called “Red Indians,” but I never actually had connected the dots between the confused misnomer given to the native people of the Americas and my “ethnic” identity. 

This country has helped me dissolve my narrow self in the paradoxical process of asking for my identity because it forced me to speak of my relationship with the Great Cosmic Mother. Attempting to articulate my identity, I wrote about Kali and myriad forms of the Great Goddess of India.  On another sabbatical this year to translate Bengali songs of Kali written by a Muslim poet, I searched for a writer’s retreat. Thanks to my dear friend Jayana Clerk’s kind hospitality I thought I had a perfect spot to work on my academic project, but from the very first day, Sedona engulfed me within its enchanted spaces.

Nestled within its magical blood rocks, Sedona appears suddenly as you take the turn beyond the highway from Phoenix or Flagstaff. These sandstone formations shaped in the Permian period are breathtakingly gorgeous. The play of light and shadow and changing colors on them from red, yellow, orange to an ethereal blue black at dusk are so magnificent that they could make even a most literal person effusively poetic. Named after the wife of the city’s first postmaster, Sedona has now become a favorite haunt of all kinds of seekers, but it was inhabited by humans since the 12^th millennium BCE.  Their rock art reminds people of their continuous presence in the land.  Although I had passed through the city many years ago with my family, and fleetingly enjoyed its delicate aesthetics, I was not prepared for my astounding experiences this time. 

I discovered that the entire town of Sedona was a kind of Kiva, a space of religious ceremonies, where native people never lived because it was too sacred; they inhabited the surrounding areas and came only for their rituals. I was informed that to the Yavapai it was the womb of the First Woman, a maize plant that emerged out of the “Montezuma Well” and created her first offspring.  Jayana brought me to this Well in the next town; it is an exquisite sylvan lake, a continuous source of underground spring water with surrounding cave dwellings. We also saw the Montezuma Castle, a 900 years old multistoried, abandoned “apartment complex.” I learned that these habitations had nothing to do with the Aztec king, Montezuma.  People and their histories get re-“christened” but traces remain to haunt the imagination of unwary travelers.  

Arizona is a state that is most famous for the Grand Canyon but one has to tarry in many little canyons around Sedona and at least see the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert to get an appreciation for this prehistoric landscape.  Canyons are uncanny formations and they never stop mystifying us. According to our geological understanding, the movement of water and wind by sheer force of erosion creates these extraordinary monuments of grace and beauty. The watery ways of Yin seeps into these hard rocks and softens their contours slowly, but inevitably, turning a piece of stone into magnificent art that delights the eye.  

The human eye is an exquisite receiver that can access the profound message of beauty, peace and our at-one-ness with the cosmos.  If only it is undisturbed by our messy mind stuff/brain chatter/chittavritti that are bolstered by excessive investment in anthropocentric and egocentric ideologies. For me the desert of Arizona presented desperately beautiful paradoxes of color and shape that could nudge the mind toward its natural crystal clarity.

Let us meet a character from a culture that understood humans as just another being among many other beings, not the overlord and master of feminine Nature.   Misnamed Kokopelli is a mesmerizing figure whose flute music can easily transport you to other dimensions of reality. It is “a Hopi katsina (‘respected spirit’) associated with fertility and rain.”  It seems that Kokopelli is made up of at least 500 different depictions of a prehistoric flute playing, hump backed figure, found in the petroglyphs of the vast Southwestern US. 

In a book that my husband picked up during his wanderings in this area called Kokopelli: The Magic, Mirth, and Mischief of an Ancient Symbol, Dennis Slifer explains that the spiral seen in the heart of many rock figures may represent the “breath of life.” For this Indian, the mischief making flute player could very well be an echo of Krishna, and the geometry of the spiral is a symbol of deep yogic turning within, brought about by the movement of ‘prana’, the breath of life.   

This turning, in a flash of recognition, reveals - ‘thou art that’--that tree, that roadrunner, that serpent, that sky, those stars and that profound emptiness. As I watched the blood moon on the night of the lunar eclipse when the star studded sky of Sedona was aglow with an ethereal sense of union, I wondered if I heard Krishna Kokopelli’s flute or Katchina Kali’s wild laughter, just under the elegant silhouette of the Bell Rock. 

When in the process of deep meditation, a frightening abyss yawns and the hissing serpent of your consciousness expands its hood beyond the firmament of your being, you re-cognize the Great Mother and understand her tremendous love that my kind of Indians call “Maya.” To protect you from the great emptiness of her womb until you are ready, she engulfs you in her playful Maya or lila, that is often called an illusion. My guru Khepababa explicates Maya, this most misinterpreted word.  He says “Maa-Yaa is Spontaneity - Sahaja. Maa-The Void. Yaa - She Who Is.” 

Alan Watts, who truly understood Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist yogic ways, leads us to the Latin root of the word illusion- ludus, play! The Great Mother in her countless forms, plays! Along with her beloved Shiva, she dances the cosmic dance of creation and annihilation in the same moment. But alas, her human children often forget to play and lose the spontaneity of the child whose play, like her Great Mother’s, has no purpose.  

It must have been that Maya spun out by the Yavapai Mother that made me run out practically every morning toward the Bell Rock and the Courthouse Butte in the Village of Oak Creek. Or was it that crazy vortex people speak of? One morning I spent three and a half hours circumambulating that entire space, lost to time with no sense of myself.  Drawn desperately into a reality that defies logic, I found myself communing with what appeared to be an extremely ancient Mother Spirit that envelops the entire landscape.  

I recollected a recently departed woman whom I was lucky to meet when I reached Sedona.  Laura, a magnificent and youthful 90 year old African American community leader, who had saved many drifting lives, had just died peacefully. Since I was preoccupied with Nazrul Islam’s songs of Kali, I thought I must be dreaming of my Dark Goddess in this land of stunning cacti, run away desert quail and magnificent ravens that seem to accompany me every day. 

I discovered India and her goddesses had seeped into Sedona quite effortlessly along with Buddhist practices.  Why else would people want to hear me talk about Freedom and the Feminine in India’s Tantric traditions? There were all kinds of goddess worshipping people there. I met an exuberant Mary, an embodiment of the forest spirit of Artemis. Enthused by my talk, Avani, an Ayurvedic practitioner, invited me to speak at a puja gathering.  However, I was not prepared to meet Vajrayoginis in Sedona! 

At the home replete with innumerable Hindu and Buddhist deities of a Greek tantric practitioner Zeffi Shaktimayi Devi, I met a whole host of wonderful people including Shraddha, who invited us to her extraordinarily nourishing yoga center. Later in the darkness of the new moon night at Walker’s home, we circled the labyrinth of the Virgin Mary modeled after the Chartres Cathedral. Jayana told me that to some practitioners of Indian spiritual traditions, Sedona is Siddha Vana or the forest of the enlightened beings! 

Thinking about India, I see another dusky woman traveling with her family on a train somewhere in South India.  Ready to tuck her kids in for the night, she saw these white pillow cases provided by the railways. She could not stand the lack of color. She knew in her inner most being- man does not live by a clean white pillow alone. She must have internalized the beauty of Sri Lakshmi, the goddess of peace and true prosperity.  She took out her sewing case and embroidered a little green parrot on it.  Her son gazed at that beautiful bird and slept peacefully.  That son, who joyfully remembers this, is known today worldwide as Jaggi Vasudeva, Sadhguru of Isha Foundation who is transforming the environmental, economic, educational and spiritual landscape of India. 

Little Jaggi’s mother inhabited the Sri principle, a profoundly beautiful aspect of sometime terrifying Great Mother I know as Kali.  As I took my breaks from translation and hung out with Jayana whom I have known for over 20 years as a colleague, I genuinely connected with her. Her home is full of precious artifacts from around the world and yet radiates profound simplicity; it epitomizes Sri, the beauty of Tripurasundari, the Goddess of Saundaryalahari, waves of abundant beauty.

As a pioneering woman from India who went to England in 1960 and came here for her Ph.D. at Columbia University in the seventies, Jayana raised her own sisters after her parents’ death and takes care of her large extended family.  She followed her heart into Sedona in the 90s, abruptly leaving her teaching job in Baruch College in New York City baffling her friends and family.  A world traveler, today she is a novelist, poet, a teacher of global harmony and a sadhika with the joy and laughter of a child. She was getting ready for her three week trip to Italy as I was ending my Sedona sojourn. 

Jayana Behn played the real Yavapai Mother of the Verde Valley for me since the Mother Principle everywhere nourishes the being, the spirit, without which all the luxuries of the world are utterly meaningless. Watching a documentary film Watermark just before I left, Jayana and I heard the plea for a greater awareness of the impending desertification of the area and looming environmental disaster. Returning home I was happy to catch up with a dark man on Television, an astrophysicist shaman named Neil deGrasse Tyson telling the tale of the “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.” We need to listen to scientists like him reminding us that we are the planet, made of star dust and responsible for our world if we want to keep the Verde Valley of our planet truly verdant.