“Hey – there’s a studio for rent!” he exclaimed, whipping out his cell phone to call on it.
I could not be distracted from the green chile. It was spicy, with a full-bodied flavor of... mountain campfires and sun emblazoned blue skies and Spanish harvesting songs. Really, eating this green pepper was a mind-altering experience!
“Becca, let’s finish up! We can meet the landlord at the studio in an hour!” James said.
“Whoa! Hold on, James, I just ordered another cup of green chile. Can you believe the taste? I want to swim in a vat of green chile!” He smiled at me, foreseeing the future when I would insist he scout out chile sources; buy burlap bags of peppers by the kilo; get them roasted over an open fire; help me clean, gut of seeds, cut, and Ziploc-bag them, so that we would, at all times, have a freezer-full for me to knock myself out with in traditional recipes. I would never be without green chile. And that’s exactly how it would come to pass in our New Mexican life.
While I was eating my second helping of the wondrous capsicum, James struck up a conversation with the waitress, and began telling her about our project. She gave us a look that said, Imagine that – more artists in town! After all, she herself was a musician.
As he described the way-stations of Venus and Her Lover, adding Taos to the list, a light bulb went off in my mind. After James had paid the bill, I exclaimed, “James! Do you realize what the four places are where we’ve lived working on Venus and Her Lover?”
“Ah, yeah, Becca. I was living there with you, remember?”
“No, I mean... it makes the four elements! Look at how it plays out: we were in the Caribbean, that’s the water element. Then in Europe, ya know, with all the intellectual input, that’s the air element. Then to Hawai’i, which is fire, obviously...”
“And now New Mexico will make the earth element,” James continued my train of thought. “Four elements – that’s cool!”
“Which makes sense, because here the Native American way has the sacred four...” I paused because my mind was still cranking. “But no! We actually will go one more place: India! And that’s aether, the element of spirit!”
“Of course!” James pounded the table with his hand, rattling the silverware, as if to say, By Jove! I think she’s got it! “Five! The Tantric number!”
“Venus and Her Lover is a five-element work!” I pronounced, sitting back in the booth to let it sink in: how impeccably we were guided! There was a mandala, like a Navajo or Tibetan sandpainting, with the four quadrants, each one a different color, and then there was the center point, number five. The four were the essential elements that made up Earth, and the fifth was the portal to the quintessential, the universal, the One and the All. Perfect.
There was no time to glory in holistic insights. Taos was grabbing ahold of us, and we needed to grab back. On the way to see the studio, we stopped for gas, and I noticed that all the chip bags in the convenience store were puffed up like pillows. The altitude. We were at nearly 7000 feet (2,135 meters). As a matter of fact, the aridity and elevation were already working on me: my brain was in a flutter, and my skin resembled the scales of a lizard. Dried boogers, like cornflakes, peeled out of my nose.
The landlord showed us a spacious studio with high ceilings, north-facing windows, radiant heat in the floor, and a reasonable rent. The large windows were filled with a clear view of Taos Mountain. “I’ll take it,” James said without hesitation.
I sputtered. How could he make such a snap decision? We hadn’t even discussed what that would do to our budget for a house! How could he be so sure?! This was only our first day in Taos!
After setting a meeting for the following day, the landlord left us, and James walked me out of his studio into the parking lot, which opened into a broad field of sagebrush, which opened to the mesa, which stretched westward. Somewhere out there the earth split open, where the big gash of the Rio Grande Gorge defined the landscape, but from our perspective, the mesa was continuous. The horizon line was interrupted by silhouettes of a distant mountain range and sloping and sawed-off cuestas and buttes, backlit by a yellow sky. The sun was a fiery yellow marigold wilting at the end of the day. Sliding down the cloud ribs of its celestial trellis, it leaned ever closer to the Earth, growing more orange with each descending step.
James pointed at the mesa. “When you look out there, doesn’t it look like the ocean? And those are volcanic islands?”
I glared at him. “Do you miss the ocean so much you are hallucinating?”
“Look again, Becca!” he insisted. “Doesn’t it look like the sea?”
Upon second glance, if I did not look for the absence of trees, I saw what he meant. In fact, I now realized, the sandy mesa must have been an ancient inland sea. We were looking across primordial seabed.
At our side, to the north, Taos Mountain and its Southern Rockies family, called the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, blazed with marigold fire. The icy snow-topped crests amplified the colors of the sunset – so that the peaks looked to be covered in dandelion petals and whipped butter, and then peach jam, and then strawberry parfait. About the last description to come to mind would have been “the blood of Christ” (because that is what Sangre de Cristo means), but then I was not a Spanish conquistador nor a 16th-century Catholic priest.
By the time the last crimson streaks were wiped off of Taos Mountain, the sun had already set into the high desert. A chill immediately brushed my shoulders; James noticed and put his arm around me. While we watched, horizontal wisps of clouds powered up their light show. The more the sky faded into deep blue, the fiercer the streaks of yellow and orange and crimson asserted themselves.
By the time we returned to the truck to get our jackets, the first stars were arranging themselves for the night’s performance. They felt so close, it was as if we had front-row seats.
James wanted to drive through town again. “There must be an art supplies store here,” he said. “I gotta get some paints.”
Taking a deep breath of the thin, cold air, I gave one last look at the burnt orange horizon. James’ artist’s block was over. We were home.
MOHAMMED MEETS KUAN YIN AS CRONE
Taos was a power spot, and everyone here knew it.
Whether taoseño for 20 generations or a new arrival, everyone had a story about how the land had laid claim to them... or had forced them to leave.
“This is God’s country. It’s the most beautiful place on Earth,” stated a local Hispanic man whose family had been ranching the mountain meadows and mesa grasslands for centuries. While I could have argued with him (“Well, how many other places have you really seen in the world to be able to compare?”), I understood it was not a quantifiable contest but a statement about his family’s relationship to the land. When you go through many seasons with it, know where the winds come from and how the sunrises awaken it; when you have met the other creatures living there and recognize the calls of the coyotes, prairie dogs, eagles, and the warning of the rattlesnake... when you toil a lifetime bending the irrigation water into the field and sensing when to harvest before the first frost, or understand the lowing of the cattle... in the course of this relationship, the land reveals its secrets to you and you are forever wed to its care. So I could only agree with his assessment: it was the most beautiful place on Earth.
Whereas Spaniards had arrived in Taos Valley in 1540, the Taos Indians, a Pueblo tribe, had been living there for hundreds if not thousands of years, having constructed their adobe pueblo (“town” in Spanish), like some multi-leveled earthen condominium, in the 14th century. At the foot of Taos Mountain, the village straddled the Río Pueblo de Taos, a river that flowed down from Blue Lake. Nestled high in the forested mountains above, Blue Lake was sacred to the Taos Pueblo people, as their creation myth stated: In the Beginning... people, as well as all the spirits that would inhabit trees, animals, rocks, and other “nations,” emerged from the lake.
With the arrival of the whites, the area was opened to Spanish cattlemen, American lumber or mining designs, and the outright expropriation of its surrounding 48,000 acres by the United States government (it became part of Carson National Forest), but the Taos Indians never stopped insisting that the sacred lake was theirs, until in 1970 they finally triumphed when President Nixon signed the land back over to them – a landmark case for Native American land rights. In our early conversations with new friends from the Pueblo, James and I were amazed at how shiny was Nixon’s reputation among them. The return of Blue Lake was why. Annually members of the tribe made a pilgrimage to the lake, and the entire area was strictly off-limits to anyone else.
Sacred land being what it is (and of course the Holy Land can be anywhere), soon after arriving in Taos, I set off on a hike to introduce myself and my family, to make offerings to the land, and to seek its blessings. Commencing my hike with clear intentions, at the base of a ravine I paused at a burbling creek before beginning my ascent through white-barked aspen trees, gnarled oaks, towering ponderosa pines, and fragrant piñon. No more than five minutes into the hike, I was startled by something rushing through the bushes just to my right. Then, directly in front of me on the trail, stood a coyote stopped in its tracks just as I was in mine. The coyote was silvery-grey (reminding me of my own hair), with a slender, golden brown muzzle, alert ears, and black eyes that scrutinized me. Neither one of us moved. For my part, I was mesmerized by the beautiful wild creature before me. At the sound of footsteps, the coyote ran across the path, and a man walking his dog came down the trail. The man and I greeted one another as he passed me, but I was still rooted to the spot, turning over in my mind the implications of the coyote encounter.
In Native American kosmology, animal totems played an important role, and my recollections about Coyote got my attention. Coyote is the archetypal Trickster. Whether pointing out to not be fooled by appearances, or that one’s own foolish behavior could bring disastrous consequences, the spicy bite of Coyote’s message carried nonetheless the zingy flavor of cosmic comedy. In Medicine Cards, Carson and Sans call Coyote “Medicine Dog” and say about his appearance, “…you can be sure some kind of medicine is on its way – and it may or may not be to your liking.”101
Art Inspiration
Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind. Anything less is a dithering while Rome burns, because if the artists – who are self selected to journey into the Other – cannot find the way, then the Way cannot be found.
~ Terence McKenna
Taos was an art town, and artists of all stripes worked in all mediums, including the typical: so there were Hispanic retablo carvers, Indian potters and jewelers, Anglo painters, and hippie musicians. Artistic creativity spilled over into all areas of life, from the green builders and Earthship community to the elaborate fundraisers for the local shelter for abused women. Quite impressed with the high ideals and level of organization attained by a long list of local nonprofits, I promptly added more alphabet to my life by joining IONS (the local Noetic Sciences group), TCA (Taos Center for the Arts), and SOMOS (Society of the Muse of the Southwest, a literary group).
Wanting to contribute something of my own to the community, I whipped up interest in ecstatic dance and started a Trance Liberation Dance in Taos. Dudaka arrived with music CD’s, a sound system, and moral support to help me launch the dance. What a happy reunion! Again we were working together to create community ritual space through music and intention, and soon enough we were dancing our passion together in new soundscapes. Then Dudaka, like Dionysus spreading his ecstatic religion, traveled onward to seed his dances in other towns.
Our first week in Taos we fell in with a group of locals, who included us in their weekly gatherings at the Adobe Bar in the historic Taos Inn, where we listened to live music, knocked down a few drinks, and argued about everything from the Iraq War to who served the best green chile in town. It reminded me of, say, the Parisian café milieu during Gertrude Stein’s time, or the intergalactic bar scene from the Star Wars movie, except in cowboy boots.
There was something in northern New Mexico – the rugged mountains, expansive mesa, crisp air, quality of light, mix of cultures – something that inspired people. In-spire reminded me of spirit in, and taoseños expressed their spirituality whole-heartedly. The Catholics (who first arrived with the conquistadores) had processions, the Protestants held discussion groups, the Native American Church met in tipis and did peyote and pipe ceremonies, and the Jews (who first arrived escaping the Spanish Inquisition) even had their own Torah. The Buddhists offered sitting meditations and chanting, the Hindus ran an ashram and observed holidays from a world away, the Jehovah’s Witnesses sought converts, and the Sikhs (yes, in turbans) taught White Tantra meditation. In addition to the above mainstream religions, New Age centers offered classes and retreats in yoga, Sufi dancing, meditation, and a full menu of spiritual expression. The Nature enthusiasts – the hikers, rock climbers, skiers, balloonists, river rafters, fly-fishers, horseback riders, mountain bikers, hunters, birders, and stargazers (all with their respective organizations) – pursued their passions with religious fervor. It felt to me like the land put the spirit of ritual, myth, and devotion into its inhabitants.
DH Lawrence, the British writer, who lived in Taos in the 1920’s, said,
I had no permanent feeling of religion till I came to New Mexico and penetrated into the old human race experience there. It is curious that it should be in America, of all places, that a European should really experience religion, after touching the old Mediterranean and the East.
Never shall I forget the deep singing of the men at the drum, swelling and sinking, the deepest sound I have heard in all my life, deeper than thunder, deeper than the sound of the Pacific Ocean, deeper than the roar of a deep waterfall: the wonderful deep sound of men calling to the unspeakable depths...”102
From an Integral viewpoint, Taos is a good example of the postmodern green meme, which promotes harmonious interconnections among cultures, traditions, humans, animals, and ecosystems. In this pluralistic community, where tolerance had evolved to acceptance and even mutual participation, James, Alex, and I were to have our strongest encounter with a Muslim.
Under the Tyrant
After renting the art studio, we moved into a townhouse right in town. Adam, the Hispanic manager of the complex had agreed to our conditions, guaranteeing us the quietest apartment, a two-year lease so that I could work uninterruptedly, and a place to park the camper. James and I set about erecting bookshelves, unpacking and organizing our possessions into compact spaces, and filling the patio with potted plants, so that in the morning I could step into my mini-garden, a green oasis in a desert land. Alex arrived by late summer and endeavored to make his way as a newcomer in an American high school, his dream.
Adam disappeared – it turned out he embezzled the apartment complex’s funds – so the owners showed up – smartly dressed businessmen who had the look of Arabs, and their sidekick: a mountain of a man named Mohammed. His skin was very dark, beetle brown, though under his close-set eyes were rings that were darker still. His full cheeks were pitted and scarred, as if life had etched its torments directly onto his skin, and he kept his lips pursed in an expression of suspicion. He was tall and large, with hardly any neck. James eyed him with the comment, “Look – they brought their bouncer.” Mohammed looked and walked like a big black bear.
He broke the locks on Adam’s apartment, which was right across from ours, and moved in along with his big black Rottweiler (that bore a striking resemblance to him). Since he was gone a lot – presumably tracking down the quisling – Mohammed asked us to keep an eye on the place. So we received the rent from other tenants, directed tradesmen who were doing repairs, watered the courtyard bushes, and I even agreed to type up notices for the apartment complex, since it was obvious that Mohammed’s bear paw hands could not really write intelligibly. The Arab landlord
s were from Albuquerque, and James and I got the impression that once the Adam imbroglio was solved, they would call their dogs back – both the human and the canine – and James and I could become apartment managers, thereby reducing our rent.
Mohammed was a character, and James cultivated a friendship with him because “you’d rather have a mean dog be your friend instead of your enemy.” He drank at night, as well as doing other drugs, so we got in the habit of not answering the door if drunken Mohammed was pounding on it. By the end of the summer, he was having me type up notices that threatened to evict tenants for odd reasons – having overnight visitors or pets, pouring hot oil down the sink (how would he know?) – and when we heard Mohammed ranting about Taos’ hot real estate market and how much money he could make selling condos, we understood that Mohammed was not going anywhere. He had convinced the distant owners that once the tenants were gone and he renovated the townhouses, they would all get rich selling them off as condominiums. When James painstakingly advised Mohammed to be careful about how he was treating the tenants, then he would settle down for few days. He reassured us that our apartment would be the last to be renovated at the end of our lease.
One by one the tenants moved out in response to Mohammed’s tactics of holding their mail, accusing them of theft, peering in their windows, and continually harassing them. I tried to talk them into standing up to him, but the women feared for their safety, as did the single father with a daughter. By fall we were living in a mostly vacant complex right across from a madman.
One day we received a note in Mohammed’s large scrawl demanding that we remove the camper within two days, or else he would have it towed. James negotiated a few more days’ time out of him, but in the end, we decided to sell the truck and the camper. Then I noticed houseplants were missing from the porch. When I spied them inside Mohammed’s apartment, I confronted him, to which he responded, “You white people are all a bunch of liars and thieves!”
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