YOU, in your writing today, reminded me of you!! You have such a deep appreciation for what you described with the Navajo... the gravitational love and pull to the Earth.... I can remember your influence on my own life with the figurative and literal understanding of going barefoot and feeling... The land... God... You already are part of such a wonderful tribe of land lovers... And have encouraged many of us to be the same...
Barry, you made me smile so wide. The barefoot thing--I'm so glad to know that grounding (earthing) reminds you of me. I hadn't really thought of the connection here, but of course it's right there and so apparent! I think you just answered the question I posed better than I did. Love you, friend.
Beautiful, Elizabeth. Your journey through Navajo territory intersected with ours, both literally and figuratively. We will return and spend more time there. Two of our daughter's friends in Durango work for the Indian Health Service in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, and deal with all the issues you describe and more.
John, thank you. Too bad we didn't know we were so proximate to each other. I might've tried to finagle a meet-up. :)
Your daughter's friends are doing critical work, and what a vantage point they must have on everything I was only skimming the surface of. I thought about you specifically when I read that the average resident of the Navajo Nation uses seven gallons of water a day. You understand better than most what that number actually means.
Beautifully written as always, Elizabeth! Next time you go, which I understand may be years… Though I hope not, I can’t strongly encourage you enough to go deeper into the Navajo nation to the Hopi nation that is located within the Navaho lands. There you will find villages called first second and third Mesa. First Mesa has been in existence as a village for hundreds of years.. You can do a guided tour and it is an original village. It is remarkable.
Margaret, I actually learned about the Hopi Nation sitting within the Navajo Nation while researching this piece. Mind-boggling and somehow perfectly emblematic of how little most of us understand about that part of the world. Yes, yes--next time I hope we can stay longer and go deeper rather than glimpsing it all from a two-lane road at speed. Though honestly, even that glimpse was enough to shift something important. I know you understand. Thanks, friend.
I remember doing a workshop for agricultural scientists in Niger. It was 120 fahrenheit outside in Sub-Saharan Africa. During the course of a discussion about teamwork, someone pointed out that certain kinds of cooperation among different species of flower and fauna happen in harsh environments. I wish I could round this out with an amazing example, but it was a long time ago.
The two children from my first marriage were moved 2400 miles away when they were 3 and 5, creating for me a kind of emotional desert. But we survived and kept connected in wonderful ways. Unexpected gifts or letters not on holidays or birthdays was one thing I did. Those twice a year final hugs at the airport were hard hugs, in both meanings.
Love your post - sparse and clear and heartfelt. Thanks.
Stew, "hard hugs in both meanings." I'm a little wrecked. 🥲 That's the whole thing, isn't it?
The cooperation in harsh environments idea stays with me too, even without the specific example. The instinct toward connection under pressure, across species, across distance, across years. Thank you for finding the right words. Hope you are relishing your new familial proximity. Thanks for the careful read, as always.
My wife and I make the same pilgrimage, but to Colorado rather than Arizona. You capture the feelings of that so well. It is a bittersweet trip every time.
It's sad that we citizens of the United States cannot seem to stop abusing our fellow human beings - here and elsewhere.
Darrell, "bittersweet" is exactly right. I didn't find that word while I was writing but you landed on it effortlessly. And yes. The abusing of fellow human beings, here and elsewhere, feels relentless. IS relentless. All the more reason to keep paying attention, keep resisting, and to keep making pilgrimages that help us remember how connected we all are. So appreciate the comment.
Your essay hits home this week (pun intended). I'm reading your words while sitting in my daughter's kitchen in Sweden. I'm so grateful to be here and simultaneously homesick for my own kitchen, for the willow in my front yard that is blossoming while I am away. I won't get to see it this year. My biggest regret is moving away from family and the land that is home to me. My great-grandparents all came to lands bordering the Salish Sea from other places far away, so I don't have deep history there. And yet, that is home, something I feel in my body when I am near those waters. I wish I had good strategies to share about how to stay connected with our children who have moved far away. In my time here, I can more clearly see all that we miss in not having those kind of casual, everyday connections that you write about here. I'm trying to let go of wishing for that, trying to surrender to what is. (I am a work in progress.) There is grieving to do, I know that much.
Rita, thank you so much. The willow blossoming without you is a tender metaphor, I think. And there you are, in Sweden, which is its own kind of miracle and connection, even when it requires that you leave something else behind. Both things, all at once. It seems surrendering to what is might be the hardest work there is, while acknowledging ourslves as works in progress is the most honest thing any of us can do. You don't need strategies. You're already doing the things: showing up, crossing the ocean, sitting in her kitchen. The willow will be there next year. So, I trust, will you. I feel the grief alongside you, and the beauty of resilience.
Wonderful. I could write a matching article about Australia’s aborigines. I’d hardly need to change a word. My photos would be vivid red with endless blue skies, or caves in the escarpment. But the same resistance applies. I’ll never understand why so many white people think they’re superior to others and that the provision of basic human needs is not required because others ‘choose’ to live there. So much ignorance in this world. And so many amazing people of all skin colours. Thanks so much for sharing an amazing experience.
Beth, please write that piece. I mean it. The parallels are not coincidental, they're the same colonial logic applied to different landscapes, and the red dirt and endless sky you're describing sounds like it would mirror this one in ways that would stop people in their tracks. Ignorance and amazing people side by side for all eternity it seems, even though I keep holding out hope for something different. Thank you for connecting from so far away, and for making this feel like a conversation rather than a monologue.
I have always felt such a strong tie to the earth, and to geography. Which places feel like "home." I will pay extra attention to my water use this week. Thank you for reminding me. x
It occurred to me in not so distant past that home could be both where I was from, as in my childhood home, and where I was currently planted. I could be "going home" no matter which place I was headed. Now, with my parents gone, I have fewer reasons to think of going home in that sense, and it's an odd feeling. I think home is wherever we create lasting memories, with Earth as the mothership.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Wendy. I appreciate you. 🥰
Wherever I feel safe and happy, that feels like "home." I know we carry it with us, but it's also attached to our memories. Or preferences (cold, hot, dry, humid). I don't think of where I grew up as home. Home (in my mind) has a golden glow around it. An inherent goodness. It is a loaded word. In the best way.
I'm sorry about your parents. 💔 Where did you grow up?
That makes sense, Wendy. I had the good fortune of having a childhood home that had those qualities. My dad has been gone almost 18 years already, my mom only five. It's okay, as it's meant to be, but still a peculiar realization I have to revisit over and over again. I spent my first six years in Kansas, but the home designation goes to North Carolina.
More than a decade ago when Sienna drove a Subaru with her belongings out to the “left coast,” the opportunity once again arose to do an annual pilgrimage to visit my eldest.
In all the ways I’ve crafted life here on Earth, living as a self-employed artist has been essential in allowing me to own my time. So most years ,I drive Coast to Coast, sleeping in my vehicle, carrying my own water and food, drawing and painting the landscape along the way. I’ve stopped in Trading Posts in the areas you’ve described to buy leather, dyed wool and to ask questions . The land pulls deeply on my creative urges every time, asking me to be still observe , and listen. I feel like a migratory animal, and I acknowledge Sienna’s choice of Place has added to my dimensionality as a human, making me have a larger understanding of this continent. I arrive to her humbled, awed, and a wee bit wiser. On my last trip I visited a baby grand niece in Texas and headed North to explore Choctaw and Chickasaw land. Every place sacred, ever drop of water holy. Thanks Elizabeth
Such a rich, personal, and vivid comment, Sue. A thousand thanks!
I especially appreciate the acknowledgement of how Sienna's placement has brought deepened understanding for you. I have so much still to learn, but I know I've grown a lot emotionally, and my awareness of other cultures has expanded because my kids are living in different parts of the world.
As I've said many times, we are a complex species, one that is painfully self-centered and defensive at times, but we also have profound ways of expressing love, respect, and humility. Your cross-country experiences are a gift!
Elizabeth, as always, bringing much contemplation through your beautiful words.
The unfairness and abuse towards the original settlers throughout the lands (in Canada as much as in the US) is hard to comprehend.
When I was a teen I read the story of Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux warrior and medecine man...it broke my heart and still does. (I had the opportunity, also in my teens, to act in a semi-professional play about the massacre at Wounded Knee, which was my introduction to reading more about how the US government waged war against these people to take over their lands. Things haven't changed much sadly.)
Where would I like to be? Visiting the Navajo Nation.
Thank you Elizabeth for bringing it all back to me.
Honored to know this piece brought back such rich memories, Jeannine, though I'm sorry for the sadness of them. I've spent many moments considering why we are capable of such cruelty. Though I can understand, intellectually, that greed and fear drive many of those actions, it's still incomprehensible on an emotional level.
Do visit the southwest if you can. The Navajo Nation, and within in, the Hopi, are so very close to the Grand Canyon. Two reasons to visit!
What a stunning photo of the daisies in the rock, Elizabeth. I am glad you had a good trip, and I feel that sense of distances and the coordination it takes and the vague awareness that some manage to keep things closer.
This is powerful: "The Diné have always understood family as inseparable from place, from the land itself, from the tribal framework that tells them exactly who they are and who they belong to."
Thanks for the comment, Amy, as always. I've continue to let my mind explore the themes of that part of my trip this week. I've been wondering about when—or whether—it’s okay to just… be… in a life as it seems some of those living on the reservation feel.
I remember watching a touching documentary about a Korean couple living out their later years together. He was nearly 100, I think, and dying. She's distraught but steady. Their home is primitive. There’s no apparent longing for more, despite having to come to terms with their hardships—just the rhythm of their days. I guess I have a soft spot for stories like that (I could name others that have stayed with me) and find myself wondering at what point we allow ourselves to simply be content.
I know rarely feel at peace in the current season of our nation, but here we are with the evolution of my thought-flow. 🤔
The film is called My Love, Don't Cross That River.
Another of your wanders close to my heart and I'm lucky enough to have spent months there, on and off, over the years. The Four Corners Region is quite a magical place and yet, I agree, the Navajo did get the least of the resources it holds. This is beautifully written and more importantly, felt.
Your information on the Supreme Court in 2023 is, I must say, nauseating as are so many other things relating to Native Americans. Did you stop at any of the stick-built jewelry stands along the road? Some of the elder women artisans used to be straight out of a history book themselves in their native dress with such incredible silver, turquoise and natural strength.
When I left my parents behind it was to go to Arizona at age seventeen, to spend a couple of years exploring all the canyons and then return as often as I could when I lived closer.
I loved your comparison with the Bay, unexpected, and most certainly I see the commonalities. Another thought-provoking work my friend. Thank you. ~J
You know the area better than I, Janice. And there is something entirely magnetic about it. We drove past the roadside stalls, though I have some regret about that. It was early season. Those that were open were sparsely populated, and I don't *need* more turquoise jewelry. But it would have been nice to support them.
YOU, in your writing today, reminded me of you!! You have such a deep appreciation for what you described with the Navajo... the gravitational love and pull to the Earth.... I can remember your influence on my own life with the figurative and literal understanding of going barefoot and feeling... The land... God... You already are part of such a wonderful tribe of land lovers... And have encouraged many of us to be the same...
Barry, you made me smile so wide. The barefoot thing--I'm so glad to know that grounding (earthing) reminds you of me. I hadn't really thought of the connection here, but of course it's right there and so apparent! I think you just answered the question I posed better than I did. Love you, friend.
Beautiful, Elizabeth. Your journey through Navajo territory intersected with ours, both literally and figuratively. We will return and spend more time there. Two of our daughter's friends in Durango work for the Indian Health Service in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, and deal with all the issues you describe and more.
John, thank you. Too bad we didn't know we were so proximate to each other. I might've tried to finagle a meet-up. :)
Your daughter's friends are doing critical work, and what a vantage point they must have on everything I was only skimming the surface of. I thought about you specifically when I read that the average resident of the Navajo Nation uses seven gallons of water a day. You understand better than most what that number actually means.
Beautifully written as always, Elizabeth! Next time you go, which I understand may be years… Though I hope not, I can’t strongly encourage you enough to go deeper into the Navajo nation to the Hopi nation that is located within the Navaho lands. There you will find villages called first second and third Mesa. First Mesa has been in existence as a village for hundreds of years.. You can do a guided tour and it is an original village. It is remarkable.
Sense of place is indeed incredibly important!
Margaret, I actually learned about the Hopi Nation sitting within the Navajo Nation while researching this piece. Mind-boggling and somehow perfectly emblematic of how little most of us understand about that part of the world. Yes, yes--next time I hope we can stay longer and go deeper rather than glimpsing it all from a two-lane road at speed. Though honestly, even that glimpse was enough to shift something important. I know you understand. Thanks, friend.
Taproots find water,
eventually, so we hope.
Inconvenient truths.
Marisol, you just said in seventeen syllables what took me a thousand words. "Eventually, so we hope." We sure do. Thank you so much.
I remember doing a workshop for agricultural scientists in Niger. It was 120 fahrenheit outside in Sub-Saharan Africa. During the course of a discussion about teamwork, someone pointed out that certain kinds of cooperation among different species of flower and fauna happen in harsh environments. I wish I could round this out with an amazing example, but it was a long time ago.
The two children from my first marriage were moved 2400 miles away when they were 3 and 5, creating for me a kind of emotional desert. But we survived and kept connected in wonderful ways. Unexpected gifts or letters not on holidays or birthdays was one thing I did. Those twice a year final hugs at the airport were hard hugs, in both meanings.
Love your post - sparse and clear and heartfelt. Thanks.
Stew, "hard hugs in both meanings." I'm a little wrecked. 🥲 That's the whole thing, isn't it?
The cooperation in harsh environments idea stays with me too, even without the specific example. The instinct toward connection under pressure, across species, across distance, across years. Thank you for finding the right words. Hope you are relishing your new familial proximity. Thanks for the careful read, as always.
My wife and I make the same pilgrimage, but to Colorado rather than Arizona. You capture the feelings of that so well. It is a bittersweet trip every time.
It's sad that we citizens of the United States cannot seem to stop abusing our fellow human beings - here and elsewhere.
Darrell, "bittersweet" is exactly right. I didn't find that word while I was writing but you landed on it effortlessly. And yes. The abusing of fellow human beings, here and elsewhere, feels relentless. IS relentless. All the more reason to keep paying attention, keep resisting, and to keep making pilgrimages that help us remember how connected we all are. So appreciate the comment.
Your essay hits home this week (pun intended). I'm reading your words while sitting in my daughter's kitchen in Sweden. I'm so grateful to be here and simultaneously homesick for my own kitchen, for the willow in my front yard that is blossoming while I am away. I won't get to see it this year. My biggest regret is moving away from family and the land that is home to me. My great-grandparents all came to lands bordering the Salish Sea from other places far away, so I don't have deep history there. And yet, that is home, something I feel in my body when I am near those waters. I wish I had good strategies to share about how to stay connected with our children who have moved far away. In my time here, I can more clearly see all that we miss in not having those kind of casual, everyday connections that you write about here. I'm trying to let go of wishing for that, trying to surrender to what is. (I am a work in progress.) There is grieving to do, I know that much.
Rita, thank you so much. The willow blossoming without you is a tender metaphor, I think. And there you are, in Sweden, which is its own kind of miracle and connection, even when it requires that you leave something else behind. Both things, all at once. It seems surrendering to what is might be the hardest work there is, while acknowledging ourslves as works in progress is the most honest thing any of us can do. You don't need strategies. You're already doing the things: showing up, crossing the ocean, sitting in her kitchen. The willow will be there next year. So, I trust, will you. I feel the grief alongside you, and the beauty of resilience.
Wonderful. I could write a matching article about Australia’s aborigines. I’d hardly need to change a word. My photos would be vivid red with endless blue skies, or caves in the escarpment. But the same resistance applies. I’ll never understand why so many white people think they’re superior to others and that the provision of basic human needs is not required because others ‘choose’ to live there. So much ignorance in this world. And so many amazing people of all skin colours. Thanks so much for sharing an amazing experience.
Beth, please write that piece. I mean it. The parallels are not coincidental, they're the same colonial logic applied to different landscapes, and the red dirt and endless sky you're describing sounds like it would mirror this one in ways that would stop people in their tracks. Ignorance and amazing people side by side for all eternity it seems, even though I keep holding out hope for something different. Thank you for connecting from so far away, and for making this feel like a conversation rather than a monologue.
I know a lot about having and nurturing a family over distance, time and time zones. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Elizabeth.
I'm sure you do, Karen. And what a fabulous family you have! I appreciate the comment.
I have always felt such a strong tie to the earth, and to geography. Which places feel like "home." I will pay extra attention to my water use this week. Thank you for reminding me. x
It occurred to me in not so distant past that home could be both where I was from, as in my childhood home, and where I was currently planted. I could be "going home" no matter which place I was headed. Now, with my parents gone, I have fewer reasons to think of going home in that sense, and it's an odd feeling. I think home is wherever we create lasting memories, with Earth as the mothership.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Wendy. I appreciate you. 🥰
Wherever I feel safe and happy, that feels like "home." I know we carry it with us, but it's also attached to our memories. Or preferences (cold, hot, dry, humid). I don't think of where I grew up as home. Home (in my mind) has a golden glow around it. An inherent goodness. It is a loaded word. In the best way.
I'm sorry about your parents. 💔 Where did you grow up?
That makes sense, Wendy. I had the good fortune of having a childhood home that had those qualities. My dad has been gone almost 18 years already, my mom only five. It's okay, as it's meant to be, but still a peculiar realization I have to revisit over and over again. I spent my first six years in Kansas, but the home designation goes to North Carolina.
More than a decade ago when Sienna drove a Subaru with her belongings out to the “left coast,” the opportunity once again arose to do an annual pilgrimage to visit my eldest.
In all the ways I’ve crafted life here on Earth, living as a self-employed artist has been essential in allowing me to own my time. So most years ,I drive Coast to Coast, sleeping in my vehicle, carrying my own water and food, drawing and painting the landscape along the way. I’ve stopped in Trading Posts in the areas you’ve described to buy leather, dyed wool and to ask questions . The land pulls deeply on my creative urges every time, asking me to be still observe , and listen. I feel like a migratory animal, and I acknowledge Sienna’s choice of Place has added to my dimensionality as a human, making me have a larger understanding of this continent. I arrive to her humbled, awed, and a wee bit wiser. On my last trip I visited a baby grand niece in Texas and headed North to explore Choctaw and Chickasaw land. Every place sacred, ever drop of water holy. Thanks Elizabeth
Such a rich, personal, and vivid comment, Sue. A thousand thanks!
I especially appreciate the acknowledgement of how Sienna's placement has brought deepened understanding for you. I have so much still to learn, but I know I've grown a lot emotionally, and my awareness of other cultures has expanded because my kids are living in different parts of the world.
As I've said many times, we are a complex species, one that is painfully self-centered and defensive at times, but we also have profound ways of expressing love, respect, and humility. Your cross-country experiences are a gift!
Elizabeth, as always, bringing much contemplation through your beautiful words.
The unfairness and abuse towards the original settlers throughout the lands (in Canada as much as in the US) is hard to comprehend.
When I was a teen I read the story of Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux warrior and medecine man...it broke my heart and still does. (I had the opportunity, also in my teens, to act in a semi-professional play about the massacre at Wounded Knee, which was my introduction to reading more about how the US government waged war against these people to take over their lands. Things haven't changed much sadly.)
Where would I like to be? Visiting the Navajo Nation.
Thank you Elizabeth for bringing it all back to me.
Honored to know this piece brought back such rich memories, Jeannine, though I'm sorry for the sadness of them. I've spent many moments considering why we are capable of such cruelty. Though I can understand, intellectually, that greed and fear drive many of those actions, it's still incomprehensible on an emotional level.
Do visit the southwest if you can. The Navajo Nation, and within in, the Hopi, are so very close to the Grand Canyon. Two reasons to visit!
Thank you for reading and understanding.
What a stunning photo of the daisies in the rock, Elizabeth. I am glad you had a good trip, and I feel that sense of distances and the coordination it takes and the vague awareness that some manage to keep things closer.
This is powerful: "The Diné have always understood family as inseparable from place, from the land itself, from the tribal framework that tells them exactly who they are and who they belong to."
Thanks for the comment, Amy, as always. I've continue to let my mind explore the themes of that part of my trip this week. I've been wondering about when—or whether—it’s okay to just… be… in a life as it seems some of those living on the reservation feel.
I remember watching a touching documentary about a Korean couple living out their later years together. He was nearly 100, I think, and dying. She's distraught but steady. Their home is primitive. There’s no apparent longing for more, despite having to come to terms with their hardships—just the rhythm of their days. I guess I have a soft spot for stories like that (I could name others that have stayed with me) and find myself wondering at what point we allow ourselves to simply be content.
I know rarely feel at peace in the current season of our nation, but here we are with the evolution of my thought-flow. 🤔
The film is called My Love, Don't Cross That River.
Another of your wanders close to my heart and I'm lucky enough to have spent months there, on and off, over the years. The Four Corners Region is quite a magical place and yet, I agree, the Navajo did get the least of the resources it holds. This is beautifully written and more importantly, felt.
Your information on the Supreme Court in 2023 is, I must say, nauseating as are so many other things relating to Native Americans. Did you stop at any of the stick-built jewelry stands along the road? Some of the elder women artisans used to be straight out of a history book themselves in their native dress with such incredible silver, turquoise and natural strength.
When I left my parents behind it was to go to Arizona at age seventeen, to spend a couple of years exploring all the canyons and then return as often as I could when I lived closer.
I loved your comparison with the Bay, unexpected, and most certainly I see the commonalities. Another thought-provoking work my friend. Thank you. ~J
You know the area better than I, Janice. And there is something entirely magnetic about it. We drove past the roadside stalls, though I have some regret about that. It was early season. Those that were open were sparsely populated, and I don't *need* more turquoise jewelry. But it would have been nice to support them.
Grateful for your connections there, and here.