My Hopi Dream
I had a dream of walking in a long column of people, along the edge of canyons. For ages and ages. Migrations, moving from home to home, living our imperative, leading to a final home, land claimed for our creator. For long ages we walked, the generations walked.
I read the Book of the Hopi. It was the summer and fall of 1969. I learned a different history of this place. I was a student of Western civilization, and this was not what I had been taught. But it was truer then what I had been taught. It was the story of mankind, it was the memory of our time on Earth, and walking through the desert sky.
I knew the USA to be a transitory story, the younger brothers tale. Fast cars and asphalt, electric wires through the sky, presidents and tv screens, buying things and things and more things, the Jones and Dow Jones, and heros made of money.
But I remembered that other time and place, stone homes in a desert canyon's night. And I knew it to be truer, men living as they should. I had walked those red rock places, heard the Pleiades singing in our night eyes, long columns walking from home to home, living that imperative, remembering a different history, trying to keep the balance, our lives a part of myth. Before younger brother arrived crazy and forgetting.
I visited those stone homes in the canyon walls and mesa tops. I remembered the dream as the memory of my friends and I. Hopi on our journey home.
The generations past, that other world. I was visiting only, in this place called USA.
Passing through this crazieness, protective of my earlier homes, time capsules in the red rock. In that bigger time, that longer story.
The Hopi and the Kogi guard those memories now, while the younger brother crazies through his time. Presidents and tv screens, red rock homes sleeping beneath the Pleiades.
A fleeting thing, this USA. Long columns of people on the canyon rim, going home in that other place. That bigger time, that longer story, this ever proper myth.
