‘For thirty years, she called to me in a voice unclear. Today, a new pass leads me into the true magic of Shiprock.’
Insignificance:
Why was everything so big and I so small? Why, from the very beginning, was the attraction so strong? The closer I rode to what I thought I wanted the more insignificant I felt and the more important everything around me seemed to become.
Was it those things around me, or was it the missing parts from inside my spirit that grew larger in the vast emptiness of space and wonder? Stepping outside of myself in that Navajo Hogan, a vision that Bearheart had foretold years before, allowed me to take that first step back — back inside a self that was prepared to greet me and call me by my real name.
I see my old self in the false images of things that I once thought mattered … things that clouded my sight and kept me from becoming who I was meant to be.
Today, the great Shiprock monument looms ahead and checking the mileage I know I must be getting close. The old cowboy expression of Riding For Days, But The Mountain Gets No Bigger hits home to me now. She sits alone in a sea of desert, and I feel her presence before seeing her image. It’s easy to understand why the Navajo worshipped here, and no life was complete without a pilgrimage to stand inside her great shadow. No matter how much this mountain road twists and climbs, the eyes of Shiprock stay focused on me.
Small in my footprint, but growing larger in my understanding, I feel more important and part of this place. This is new and replaces the empty awestruck detachment I had always felt when passing through here before. There are no small connections when timeless majesty reaches out to you, small is a term that we use to qualify others — and ourselves.
The Navajo Nation, with its flat arid landscape and towering monuments, is a timeless reminder of how low most of us dwell. Until we feel our true connection, we are indeed small and isolated from the Great Mystery — and any chance at rebirth.
Like much of the West, there is a magic here that is felt only in its presence. To become its visitor again honors me if only for the shortest time. I finally realize that by taking nothing, I am given everything, as the ancient spirit of Shiprock embeds itself deeply inside me. Some things only become real in your understanding of them and their acceptance, and before leaving, I stop the bike to look at the ancient Petroglyph wall that faces East.
The Kachina figures come alive and dance for my amusement, and I strain hard to hear the music and what the chanters are trying to say. In silence, I walk closer and hear a voice speaking: “Who Is Really The Ancient One On This Wall Of Renewal?”
As I watch Mudman move across the rock, I feel everything that I knew before change inside me.
In an epiphanic awareness, I point the bike north toward the high country. I’ve been in the desert for four days, and I can hear the mountains of Colorado calling my name. The desert never says goodbye as you wander higher. Time and temperature will bring you back knowing that her light is always on. Like a faithful mistress, she watches you leave knowing that you must. Her trousseau is richer than before you came, and she is content in the knowledge that your betrothal is secure.
Darkness fell, as I pulled the bike into South Fork Colorado. Neither working town nor ski resort, it is the perfect waystop for a traveler like me. I walk my nightly ritual along her one road, my shadow the only connection between tomorrow and yesterday. In the waning light, I see the figure of Mudman again on the east side of the mountain. As he dances, he pulls the last rays of today’s sun onto my pathway ahead.
Walking back to the lodge the temptation to reach up and touch the stars fills me with the wonder of being so high, and the sky becomes a canopy of new light. Alone beneath the Milky Way, and wrapped in the marvelous insignificance that only a day like this day could inspire, my heart is at rest.
In bed that night, I wonder about the contrast between the desert and mountains. Feeling like a piece of thread — I travel through the eye of their needle — looking for that one stitch that will keep me married to them both. I try to keep them connected in the tatters of my conflicted wandering. If forced to choose between the two, I choose not to. One cannot exist without the other — and neither can I.
I am thankful tonight to be a tiny speck of humanity within creations bounty, blessed to have at least one eye open to more than myself. As my one eye gives thanks, my other eye remembers how short my duration is with the moments fleeting to embrace the little time being offered me.
This morning, I left Canyon de Chelly by a route I had never traveled before. The main canyon road was closed because of mud, and my detour took me high over a pass I had never seen or read about. It was newly paved, and the grade was higher than I thought the bike could make. It was called Wolf’s Tooth Pass, and I’ve not found it on any map or atlas. A good friend, who lives nearby, swears it doesn’t exist. All I can say is that from the top, where Arizona and New Mexico meet, Shiprock called out to me in the distance. And in the importance of her calling — I stopped asking why!
Kurt Philip Behm: August, 1999
