Floating On A Luminescent Dream

To say Sedona Arizona is beautiful is to do it an injustice. Somehow the words are not deep enough to carry red and gold canyons in their letters. The way the sunset rings through the valley like a harmonic overtone is something you have to stand under to really understand.

Our local guide, Clint Frakes, said, “It is common for people to find themselves on an inner journey while hiking here. It is the land. It pushes you inward.” As if, in taking it all in, the landscape here draws you inside yourself and swallows you whole.

I recently spent 3 days in the Sedona area with my dear friend Jill. I had read about the place, mainly travel articles by those jaded by the “woo-woo” aspect of the town. A rough estimate says that 80 percent of tourists visiting Sedona are searching for something, many of them healing. It is indeed a place of pilgrimage, and it has been for thousands of years. Navajo, Tusayen and Hopi people are just a few of the tribes that regard Sedona as a sacred place. I can see why. We drove in as the lightening storm was driving out. Pillars of red sandstone appeared through the heavy clouds, vibrant from the recent rain. Canyon walls appeared like magic behind those spires. As I watched the landscape come into being, my eyes seeing it revealed in layers for the first time, I had to ask myself what I was searching for.

Jill and I avoided the Silver Shops. We did not try on any turquoise jewelry, nor did we have our palms read or our auras captured on film. What we did do was connect with the land through a three part journey hiking into a few of the seven sacred canyons around Sedona. Even better than the mud facial at the Sedona Day Spa is the joy of ten toes in red clay, joining raccoon and elk footprints in a riverbed.

Our guide was beyond incredible. Clint is a renaissance man, enfolding like a yucca, layers upon layers of education, knowledge and faith. He is one of those rare people who is a true Medicine Man, who knows how to carry his magic and apply his knowledge. I will not make assumptions about the number of people who may be posing in Sedona as healers or seers. I will say only that Clint Frakes is the genuine deal. He guided us not only through secret canyons and through pocket ecosystem forests, he guided us through layers of history, circumnavigating with myth and legend. Pointing out not only the wildlife and plants of the area with their healing qualities, but also our own strengths and hidden abilities. Through these walks in the canyons, through the stories of the ancients who walked these same paths, I have reconnected, found what I was searching for and more.

Clint shared a story of how in the Beginning, there was only the Creator. The Creator was lonely and longing for experience. He created a companion, Grandmother Spider, who set to work immediately in the dark void weaving an intricate web. She wove the ideas of everything she wanted to create. She wove in gorgeous patterns of possibility, and in this way, she wove a dream of the entire world and all the beings in it. But just as a web is invisible and transparent, the world she wove was not physical, it was merely a desire. The Creator gave her some fine dust and she blew a little on part of the web. It stuck to the luminescent threads making the dream visible as physical objects. As she blew dust on the web, all the creatures and living things she has dreamt of came into being. All life is connected by the Web of Life, not isolated but an individual awareness in a separate physical body, sharing the same energy as all other life.

Sedona is surrounded by seven canyons running parallel to one another, and the valley floor between them holds 40,000 archeological sites from pictographs to ruins. The ecosystems shifted as we hiked along, more than Aguave and Cacti, but Ponderosa Pines and Aligator Juniper. To those that pay attention, there are more than 700 different species of plants in this valley. As a healer, Clint harvests and makes medicinal teas of some of the plants and introduced them affectionately as friends, listing their healing attributes.

Clint spoke about Balance. How it is lost, how it is regained, and how his tribe, the Tusayen people believe it is tended. Balance, he said, is based on three main principles: Authenticity, Relationship, and Living From the Heart. The Tusayen believe that it is important to know oneself. To understand who you are, what your gifts are and to share that authentic self with the world.

In regards to living from the heart, we often think of our brain that is the processing center of the body. This week I learned that there are actually over three times more electrical impulses and connections within the heart as there are in the brain. Scientifically speaking, the heart generates the body’s most powerful and most extensive rhythmic electromagnetic field. Robin McCraty, Ph.D. says, “Compared to the electromagnetic field produced by the brain, the electrical component of the heart’s field is about 60 times greater in amplitude, and permeates every cell in the body.” The magnetic field of the heart is measurably 5,000 times stronger than that of the brain. We take in, process and feel a lot more in our hearts than we give credit for.

To live from the heart may be interpreted as seeing with eyes of love, or being guided by our emotions, our intuitions. To the Tusayen, it means starting everything you do from a place of your true essence, not making any action without first connecting to yourself. As in being connected to who you are, you may more deeply connect to the world and remember the invisible threads that unite us all.

Miles into our last hike, we stopped to connect and “drop in” - to sit still and breathe in the essence of the place. I found a solo seat in a dry creek bed, and nested in with my back against the ruby wall. Over the backlit pines that filled the canyon with the scent of vanilla and cardamom loomed a dark crimson sandstone wall. Between this wall and myself, were hundreds of travelers. Tiny spiders that moved high on the wind, connected to silky threads, illuminated when caught by the afternoon sun. A single thread is enough to catch the air tension and allow the spider to float weightless, without an ounce of resistance, as it trusts the wind to take it where it wants to go.

I smiled, remembering the first time I saw this phenomena, the day before on a different trail when a tiny orange being floated past me and into the great expanse of the Grand Canyon. I thought immediately of Grandmother Spider, as I watched this little spider, moving out into the great unknown moved by a luminescent dream. Watching the drifters, riding the sunlight in their ethereal chariots, I was reminded of how small we really are, and yet how we are able to cross the great expanse of possibility, to go where we want to go when we are willing to trust. And perhaps more importantly, how easy it is to follow our dreams until they manifest into reality. We are all weavers in our own right, creating dreams that glisten in the night and come to be in the morning light.

Taliesin West: Inviting Outside In

Scottsdale Arizona is indeed a desert. It reaches its first 100 degree weather in May. If the pool is not covered, all 6 feet of water will evaporate in one season. The tallest trees here happen to be Saguaro Cacti. Following it’s name, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home is nestled in to the brow of the desert mountains above Scottsdale. The 90 minute Insights Tour was indeed a unique one. This desert gets 8 inches of rain a year and during our tour we were present for 2 of them. Thunder boomed above us, shaking the air between rooms, interrupting the guide’s monologue.

This was my first time within a Frank Lloyd Wright home and I was surprised at how subtle the details were. His architecture is well thought out, but on the interior, it is not glaring. He believed that the first thing people do when they walk into a room is sit down. So many of the best views in the house are seen only from a seated position. The chairs are simple, made of plywood, with strong angles. I had a seat in one that reminded me of a paper airplane and immediately relaxed. This chair was designed with the intention of giving the seated person perfect posture. The arms are sloped away and down, automatically moving my shoulders out and back. Wright once said, “No matter how you look at life, you look right in my chair.“ The windows were angled at the right height so that I could see the saddle of a bare hillside and not the power lines.

Wright believed in bringing the outside in. He was known for designing his buildings to fit into their surroundings, and many of his lights and windows are fashioned after trees, butterflies and mountains. The ceilings in several of the Taliesin West rooms are translucent glass or plastic supported by steel beams allowing an open air feel and an abundance of natural light. The home is built to not need electric lights, all the side windows are angled to allow in the maximum lighting. Even as the dark thunderheads encircled the area, the rooms were well lit. I sat with perfect posture watching the storm above me. As the rain pelted furiously and ran down the angled glass ceiling shifting the light, I sincerely hoped that in this instance the home would not invite the outside in.

I shifted my attention back into the room. Not on, but IN the table before me, sat a plant. Looking closely, I saw that the table was actually centered around the plant. And all the other tables in Taliesin West, from dining to music stands, have triangular holes in them for plants also. Wright saw the most prominent shape in Arizona as the triangle, like the mountains that surround Taliesin West, and the shape is prominent in the architecture here. Even the swimming pool outside is triangular. Strong geometric lines and direct corners span the outside of the house. Asian archways with many red beams, connect in a series of triangles. Walking around the exterior of the house is like walking through an M.C. Escher drawing in red ink. Red was Wright’s favorite color, very significant to this man’s personality and ego.

Wright met his third and last wife in Chicago in 1924. Olgivanna was a noblewoman visiting from Yugoslavia who was half his age. They were seated next to one another by chance at a Ballet. Sneaking glances at her in the dark, he could not help but notice that she wore no makeup. And she, eyeing him curiously was intrigued with his red velvet cape.

No wonder she found him charming, a gentleman of great posture and dry wit whose creativity moved beyond architecture. Wright said that had he not become an architect, he would have been a musician. Beethoven was his favorite, and in the evenings, he would play the piano. He loved interactive toys, books on Asian Architecture, scotch and movies. Wright’s niece, the actress Anne Baxter (Razor’s Edge) sent him the directors cuts so that during the cold desert winters, he could enjoy 10 hour movies by the fireplace and a projector screen that he designed.

Olgivanna and Wright were hardly lonely in Taliesin West. It was just the two of them and thirty students at all times. The accepted students generally needed three things: 30,000 dollars, an aptitude for desert climate and a creative talent in disciplines other than architecture. A student of his was commissioned by his wife to do a bust sculpture of Wright. The poor girl had never sculpted anything other than still life, and he was her first human form. The young nervous girl did a very unique and effective sculpture of Wright, capturing the strength and determination in his facial expression, while still allowing his creativity to shine out through the crystal prism that stands as the statue’s shoulders.

The last ten years of Wright’s life were some of his most inspired. He completed one third of this work between the ages of 81 and 91 and when he died, he had 166 ongoing projects on his bulletin board.

That same student, whose love for sculpture was ignited in her first bust portrait, gave up on architecture and studied under Wright in Taliesin West as a sculptor. She has her own garden near the entrance of the house. In the clearing after the storm, the statues held blue sky and bright thunderheads in their glistening palms. Nearly thirty sculptures total, they are all reaching in different postures, capturing the nature of their surroundings and dancing with it. Inviting outside in.