A visit with the Healer
After driving through a mountainside of freshly dead Piñon Pine trees, I take the sharp turn down the familiar seasonal wash turned driveway.
After driving through a mountainside of freshly dead Piñon Pine trees, I take the sharp turn down the familiar seasonal wash turned driveway.
The driveway is lined with Fendler’s Ceanothus in flower, Biscuitroots blooming white umbels with teal green lacey leaves under foot, Globe Mallow orange and swaying or not yet flowering, California Poppy and Golden Smoke in yellow and oranges that also paint color on the distant table lands beyond the canyons, Blue Dicks coming up from under every single available rock cluster. Blue Dicks: purple flowers in petals of three and sepals of three tucked under pretending to be petals, sitting squarely on top of a single stem, their paired snake-like rounded greens spitting out in hoops down low. Under the soil lies their starchy bulbs, and this year they show us they exist under there, coming out of hiding, even among washes turned driveways. The Emory Oak trees exist only in small shrubby form along this particular channel, clinging to crumbling walls, wirey roots exposed, ancient volcanic turned sedimentary rock barely holding on to caverns carved by past flash floods from seasonal July monsoons (if they come).
(Fendler’s Ceanothus in bloom)
Three-Leaf Sumac is starting to flower yellow spurts. Bitter and pungent aroma-ed, fuzzy stemmed; short branches jut all directions due to being in the full sun and cut back by humans to keep the road clear or to weave baskets alongside willow for gathering morels, brassica greens and the summer red corn harvest. I stop at the familiar wide two-door green gate, rusted and worn down, with many layers of paint showing through to its sturdy metal core. Held together by a heavy handmade chain and lock rarely shut, I get out, see the hand-painted sign warning the unwelcome, and know what to do.
The sun is harsh, the wind blows dust and pollen that has irritated my sinuses for days. The Mexican Eagles make their first appearances of the season, circling stick-made nests sitting perennially high in fat trunked Cottonwoods towering epicly above feral Apricot trees in flower, Hackberry and its corky bark and sweet fruits, Mesquite and it’s blacked branches, Siberian Elm with hanging edible seed and young leaves peaking through, Ash trees with gray braided barks among others. They grow all along the river bottom and the irrigation ditch canal which meanders out of the deep canyons of un-dammed and un-grazed lands, save for the feral cows left from when the Spanish first came to the region. The ground is covered in Mustards, Nettles, Poison Hemlock, Cleavers, Dandelion.
The sound of bulldozers in the distance break the normally silent peace- as the valley got an unusual amount of funding last year as the result of one side road flooding, to purposely channel the river bed so that flooding is less likely to occur, pushed by the nature conservancy nearby. It makes no sense, and yet the sound of rock being moved constantly in the distance pervades. Money must be spent. But only on this created problem, being touted as conservation, goodness. In a time where much needs to be done to slow, sink and save water, channelizing a river that has somehow escaped being damed for years, won’t help conserve much. The already struggling Cottonwoods and Willows of this river plain will likely die without flooding, and be replaced by Siberian Elm, feral Apricots, Salt Cedar, and then sprayed with poisons because they ‘don’t belong.’ This giant rock wall is being lined with plastic landscape fabric, to keep it from eroding, and holes within it planted with ‘natives’, though they will not be able to get water well with the plastic in the way. It will only deposit trash, make it incredibly hard for the river to spread into its snake-y alluvial plain preference, and damage the regional aquifer recharge, further contribute to the Colorado River water crisis that is reaching a head.
I open the gate wide, and drive my loud diesel truck through the entrance and up towards parking by the adobe storage building, painted pink with handmade plaster, surrounded by retired rusty metal farm equipment. I shut off my engine, I go close the gate. I know this all so well. It’s been six years of coming here, ever since the Spring of the pandemic, when I found myself in the exact spot, during the beginnings of the panic, in a place few go or know about. Where somehow, we lived outside of it all, cooking on fire, gathering herbs and drying horehound and mullein on sheets, putting the cottonwood bud scales falling during first opening in olive oil, finding morels with young children on search missions, doing sweats and drinking straight unfilered silty river water to cool, playing with baby burros fuzzy and fresh from the womb, escaping to the wilderness to walk and sleep on the dirt and soak in hot springs and eat primrose roots and rice. The outside world a surreal movie. It still feels like that when I come here. We were uncertain of what was to become of the world, there was no more normal. And to come out here, the wide space deafens and pushes away all that noise still, and its just the rock, the plants and the wind.
Top left to right and down: Bison hide in progress being tanned by Rain, Mandalin and the goats at the river, river crossing view, a basket made by Jordan, with a woven handle made by me, full of wild mustard greens to eat and camphor weed for infused oil, Golden Smoke, Blue Dicks, Biscuitroot.
This year, coming out of the place I go every spring where the clouds part I can’t help put to feel a parallel, a spiral, a pattern to notice. I come out; to the war, the diesel prices, to immensity of uncertainty, pain and violence that is normalized, able to observe more palpably and objectively the anxiety and edge that people exist in day to day, as if it is their duty to be in the madness and feel crazy about it, in order to prove its all wrong or out of fear of the unknown. Certainly it is, but we too easily get used to the flexibility and comfort levels that an extractive world creates and pressures us to want and need.
After I shut the gate, I let my dog out, he stretched his legs and we walk over to the Healer’s house, a one room adobe hut with foot thick walls, single pane windows. I don’t see him anywhere. I told him I was going to come by early, and as usual, it is nearly impossible to extract myself from the place where the clouds part. The place where mineral springs bubble forth from the earth with Orion’s belt, the Big Dipper and Pleiades mirroring bright speckled reflections back down bright on swift water beavers slap during building at midnight. And we sit in the seep, the in-between, the starlight moon on one side, the hot earth on another sandwiching us, our bodies sitting in each at the same time.
I see the Healer’s outdoor hearth still smoldering from cooking earlier. His outdoor kitchen is spotless. The vintage blue oven sits between two handmade countertops and and old white cast iron sink fed by rainwater catchment, a bucket underneath to catch the dishwater and dumb manually on favorite trees. A lone bowl of hominy sits prepared on the counter. A worn dotted drawing by Nick Neddo of the desert still hangs on the wall. A jar of honey half eaten.
I knock on the door, and hear a mumble. I wait outside on a raised stool, looking around and feeling the sinking familiarity of coming back to a place year after year, how the objects (like a rusty fence or a well used tool, a plastered wall..or a regularly pruned tree…) expand into universes with stories, embedded with a unique relational energy that only comes in cycles intimacy in non-linear time. I know one day the Healer will pass like all things do, and this will be no longer. Just as I can never go back to my grandparents’ farm that my family sold a few summers ago in rural southside Virginia, and feel the deep recognition in every blade of grass, White Oak tree, pile of rock, this will one day subside. Revisiting nodes as a ritual, keeping the constellations bright, connected to the dirt and the underworld below, reflected back up into patterns we can decide to know well. In that recognizing you see the nodes move and morph and shift and sometimes resemble something barely similar to your first meeting.
The Healer opens the door and comes out, gives me a hug, and pets my dog. All the neighborhood dogs come here and hang out with him, and he gives them lots of bones in return. He is barefoot with inch thick calloused feet, cracks like slot canyon caverns, his pants ripped and rolled up. His oversized shirt stitched up many times over hangs mid-thigh, he wears a fine straw hat with the center cut out, on a head of long gray hair, a thick beard that he didn’t wear long for many years,
forgoing the short hair and clean cut face to reflect the wild man he has been most of his life.
He walks with a limp and directs me to food on the stove he has prepared. A pot of niximilized Gila Red corn is cooked and ready on one of the burners of the blue oven, filled to the lid with beautiful spikey orbs, looking more like saltbush seed heads than swollen corn kernels. The other pot contains pickled chanterelles, soaked chilis, homemade broth and fresh wild greens cut thin.
We go inside to eat, to avoid the sound of the bulldozers that can’t penetrate through the thick earthen walls.
I walk in through the thin wooden door without a lock, and feel the immediate comfort of a cool floor and grounding quiet.
I sit in one of his wooden chairs at a table with his apothecary jars sitting on it and below it. The jars are filled with herbs covered in honey, or picked mushrooms covered in small-batch fresh bitter olive oils. A barely readable label covers the jars in masking tape, noting the plant name, no location or other scientific details, just a common name, many in Spanish.
Chiltepin peppers sit in one bowl, beautiful spicy red peppers of the wild Sonoran desert, also easy to grow in a garden, one of my favorite food garnishes. In another bowl is rough hewn salt harvested from Zuni lands, where many go to gather salt from natural deposits, including the Healer, every few years. Once he did show me though, how he harvested salt in the wilderness all those years he lived out there without going to a store. He showed me years ago the way he found the salts, in the canyons, on the walls, at certain angles, far away from obvious deposits.
We ate our bowls of food while occasionally stopping to sprinkle crushed red Chiltepin peppers and Zuni salt. I accidentally get some pepper in my eye, in-between sneezing brought on by the flying Juniper pollen outside, coating all in sight. I stop and close my eyes to wait for the clearing. The Healer asks about my water intake. We sip cool light green Chaparro tea made from Crucifix thorn tree in a quart mason jar. In past years we have lit dried
Datura leaves and inhaled the smoke briefly through the coiled channel the leaves create after dying back and dropping on the ground when my allergies have been too much, or when I get a migraine from dehydration. The leaves dry out and curl up, making a perfect smoking pipe. We did it again a few days before when wandering the river looking for morels after the gentle rain, and sniffing the spring ephemerals up: Camphor weed, Mule Fat, various brassicas, bitter Desert Vervain. I have been studying for my Wilderness First Responder re-certification, and certainly we discuss none of this plant stuff when learning what to do in emergency situations ‘in the wild.’
We chat about plants.
Who is in bloom. What Pine trees grow where. The Piñons dying. The channeled river. The patterns I see outside this orb. He tells me the patterns he sees mainly in this orb. He shows me his basket collection. Nets made of Agave fiber from Oaxaca that are 60 years old, meant as paneer bags to ride on the side of a burro. A gifted perfect Willow woven pack basket from Wind, the Hermit who lived in a wattle and daub hut on the backside of this land, near the river, for 10 years, not wanting to be visited or messed with. Last year, Wind came out of hiding, and ate meat with us, soaked in hot springs with us,
taught us to weave fine baskets of Yucca dyed with Canagarie, got in a car for the first time in years to show us Yucca gathering spots, showed us that another way is possible. He didn’t use anything metal. Not even a metal cook pot. He was inspired by the Healer, who did this for over a decade, and still, finds a way to exist one foot in the world of modernity, and one foot out. Wind is not around this year. He left me a voicemail from someone’s phone 6 months ago that I failed to respond to. I hear he is in another valley that goes into the wilderness. Trying out different places to be. There’s no way of getting in touch with him. Wind told me last year I remind him of his daughter that he hasn’t seen in a very long time. From the tone of things, I suspect he won’t again.
The Healer asks why I have to leave. Somehow, every time I come around here, I can’t seem to leave easily. The land and people want me around, and yet I leave to go somewhere not wanted as much, where the pressures of modernity are more glaring and complicated, where I tend to feel out of place, and feral in an irresponsible way somehow. Critiqued for taking up space in the wrong way. To the place of paying rent and bills, fixing cars and wearing shoes. And yet, I find my way in many worlds too. I come here to be reminded of another way, not by just visiting the Healer, but by the other characters I’ve met in the crevice, by the invitation of the land itself, and the welcome it gives me to not just visit but live.
I tell him I have to leave for my Wilderness First Responder re-certification. It’s a space I couldn’t imagine the Healer being, though he lived in the wilderness for a long time, with his burros, not going to a store or a town, or much civilization at all, barely even seeing other people sometimes for six months or more. I tell him about the river trips, the classes, the hide tanning. We talk about Colorado rocky mountain plants since he grew up there as a child. I tell him I have 20 deer skins to pick up in the Phoenix area from a friend who butchers in Montana seasonally, to pile onto my 20 sheepskins I have been toting around for a few weeks.
“People think they need so much more than they have. Are focused on getting more and more, and forget to realize they already have everything.”
He says.
He’s not necessarily referencing me and the amount of skins, per se, but he does have a tendency to speak indirectly about things he feels triggered by— speaking to you and to his own psyche at the same time, and the society as a whole. He gets heated when he feels people are taking advantage of the lands he loves, or hunt any animal really. I’m specifically being more vague about his identity directly or the place names mostly online. I have for years for a reason. We don’t agree about everything. In fact, the Healer has some beliefs and tendencies of an older generation of men that usually irk me, who believe certain things about gender and masculinity, wildness and independence that feel contradictory or cringey. I write plenty in angst about the connection between gender oppression and land oppression, and the harm I’ve felt from men, and yet, here I sit with the Healer. I find myself in many worlds, often in spaces where I don’t fully agree with the company around me, after all I am from the rural South and have danced this way since I was born. Honestly, I rarely meet anyone in which I’m in full agreement. It is here in this space, I find something in common. Over the hominy and wild mushrooms, agave fibers and sheepskin rugs.
“People love being victims. They choose their own abandonment because they choose the victimhood story.”
The first time he told me this was two years ago when I was panicking about some relationship anxieties. He is talking about himself as much as anyone and he admits it.
At times I agree and these words are good reminders of how we choose many of the variables, relationships and situations that cause us misery. Also, other things are beyond our control. It’s not always that simple. I think he also means this in reference to our choices to stay comfortable in the ways our society tells us we must, we accept those things, and then stress over the plight of having to meet those demands.
After a few bowls of food, some eye watering from pollen and Chiltepin peppers, he shows me some handmade fabrics, made in Guatemala 75 years ago. The felt coat he needs to repair. His ‘closet’ consists of just five hanging garments, one a buckskin shirt he no longer wears because it is so worn out. We go sample honey out of five gallon buckets, one labeled ‘Fairy Duster’ after the Acacia plant predominantly in flower during the time of that honey harvest. The other ‘Golden One,’ a unique honey he didn’t what plant to connect. The honey came from our mutual friend, a beekeeper on the border whose Mesquite honey I eat as I write this, on a 93 degree day, on my friend’s horse ranch on the outskirts of Phoenix, surrounded by shriveling Brittlebush I watch toasting out the window on BLM land.
We eat spoonfuls of flavorful honeys while looking out the window at the bright sunny day. I ask if he needs a Churro hide, as I notice there’s not enough soft things in his space, and speaks of the very little money he makes each month these days. I give away 1/4 or 1/3 of the sheep hides I tan, often the one or two that are still left somehow even when they are just as nice as the rest, and usually to an elder or a friend who helped me in some way, or even last year at Oak Flat, to an artist friend associated with the Apache Stronghold, to take to elders at Black Mesa.
He gives me Zuni salt. I give him a smoke tanned sheep churro hide. We go outside and look at the feral fruit tree flowers. Notice the Daffodils by the outhouse. I remember this corridor. I remember the long Sumac shoots just down the way. The good willow for basketweaving along the ditch. The walks to the river, ditch clearing days. Trying not to disturb the Hermit, Wind, when he didn’t want to be bothered all those years, but I could see his hidden shelter through the thicket.
A few days before, I pulled a tarot card about my work. I work often from signs, and at times they aren’t very clear, or I keep myself cloudy and they don’t come in as clear. At other times, they are very specific, even if I don’t know what it means yet, there is something obviously being said. The card described my exact location and events that had literally happened the day before. It described something I already knew, that this place, and these people, the trees, and the winds, renew me and heal me, reorient me towards what is most important.
Taking a break from the onslaught of the outside world, and all the ways that it tugs at us emotionally, physically, psychically, we CAN choose to opt out of at moments, putting the phone or computer down, and going to the water. I have found that since coming out, it has been easier to do my tasks, in Babylon so to speak. While still noise sensitive, or exhausted from driving around during a heat wave in the southwest, I find something I had forgotten, a picture that was already there, a framework, guiding me through. We must recharge in these ways in order to keep navigating it all. The reality is, not everyone can walk out like the Healer did, and live with just his burros and ‘wild’ food. Especially since wilderness areas are mystical imaginary realms that are fragile in conception. Out there, cliff dwellings are everywhere, pictographs. In the past, groups of people, ancestral Puebloans, lived, and made a life, without another life to go back to. There was no Babylon and wild. Life was just right here, and food was tended. We lived together, and not alone like the Hermit did.
I’m inspired and also reminded of all the ways it can look to opt in or out or do both.
Ground Shots, is like a snapshot of place and time, connected to the stars, and the mycelial network below. I’ve had moments of thinking of changing the name of my project lately, the zine photo and art project, turned podcast, turned educational platform, turned craft project. It can be all these things, its the nature of the constellations, the snapshots that Ground Shots has always embodied. Many things can be connected that don’t always seem so. Like visiting the river, the Healer, the Hermit, sitting in the healing waters at night seeing Pleiades above, Ground Shots is a practice of exploring interconnection, one glimpse at a time. What do the stars influence, and how long have they influenced things? For a long time. What do the underground networks of fungi teach us, and how long have they done so? For a long time. All the scurrying in between- what trouble do we dance with, and where do we give in to that which we do not know?
‘Oh! Don’t forget to get some red corn'.
He says.
We go over to the corner of the house where he stores dried herbs in soft sacks. On the floor is a large handwoven basket with a lid to cover what’s inside.
Are there mice in here?
I ask. So used to having my corn and pine nuts raided by mice, being forced to have to store them in glass jars or freezers.
No, not in here. I don’t have mice in here.
They don’t get through the clay walls. How nice.
He told me days before about how they revived the corn with the red cobs and kernels over the years in that valley, where Seeds of Change seed company was based in its beginnings, after corn lobbyists wanted to get rid of red corns and tried to ban it. It was because corn tends to cross very easily. Corn is pollinated by the wind, and these red kernels would get in monoculture corn crops, which would then later get ground to cornmeal, and would make the meal red or pink. People are funny about the colors of things and consistency in the products they buy, and occasional pink cornmeal was not desired. Red corns became fewer. Thankfully a few people were growing it in remote places still, and through a series of crazy events, the seed was redistributed again. With a little research, I noticed that a few red corn varieties have almost gone extinct and been brought back by different groups of people for different reasons across North America.
I haven’t had a farm of my own in many years. In my 20’s I farmed A LOT and tended acres of gardens and plant varieties for many years. I miss this tending and focus, this rootedness, this responsibility. The creative possibilities of gardening. I haven’t found a place to tend this way in awhile. I hope to soon. I miss growing things. Occasionally though, I do try to find landowners who will let me grow out a crop or two- so that I can keep some seeds going.
He found a paper bag, and we scooped the loose red kernels in the bottom of the basket into the bag for me to take for planting. He also told me to choose a full cob, all looking so different from one another. I’m not sure yet if I will have a place to grow out the corn this season, but I’m looking into it.
It’s hard to leave. I have to painfully pull away, to drive back out into the wider world. He stays right here, content with not leaving much, except to go visit his grandchildren and son.
Visiting the Healer for a moment, gives me the quick glimpse into another world, one that is possible. It’s not a perfect one, not without difficulties or flaws. Not to be romanticized, but to be noticed, seen, absorbed, washed by.
Pushing against didatic dualisms, I see ways of being, seeing and thinking as difference faces that reflect light on a gem, a jewel. One jewel, can reflect the duality of light in many ways, yet its one jewel. This keeps me from black and white thinking. People want that so bad, to decide if this is the right way or wrong way.
I go start my loud diesel truck, get the dog in the car. I hug the Healer goodbye, he offers to close the gate for me. The burros scamper around in the distance. The bulldozers have stopped for a bit, maybe it’s a snack break. I drive up the wash turned driveway, and billows of dust follow me, sometimes catching up when I go slow. I hit the gravel road, and head out of the valley.
Til’ next time.
book club date and time. April 13, 5:30 PM-6:30/7 pm. MST. We’re reading ‘Ceremony’ by Leslie Silko. I’ve mentioned this book many times in my classes in person and here on substack, and I want to talk about it with folks. It’s a short book, so we will discuss it in entirety during this time, rather than with multiple dates and chapters to cover. I’ve been re-listening to it as an audiobook this time around and really enjoying it. Trigger warning, the book speaks of war and PTSD. Some offensive language. Trust that the book in itself is a ceremony and it resolves itself by the end. We will meet here on substack and I will create a video time for us to meet (never done it on here so will be figuring it out) and it will show up in your feed or email. It’s free but donation towards the Ground Shots Project are greatly appreciated. Buy me a coffee.
Some offerings handmade by me are still available in my sh0p. One sheepskin from this winter’s tanning remains. I’ll have more with more color and hair variety again in May. The clay beads I handmade, the seeds I collected, hide I tanned and naturally dyed, bags I sewed. Very much offerings from exploring land connection through material exploration. I haven’t shown any pictures yet but I did a bunch of sewing this last month when I was out of service, to make some things for myself, finally. I’m still working on more jewelry. I’m slow as always. Your support by claiming a handmade or hand tanned offering from me means the world. I’ll be back at my apothecary soon too, In Paonia, Colorado, where I’ll be processing my low desert medicines from the past two months of travel, and able to ship more promptly. When you go to the store, you can see that there are still small batch apothecary good left from last season as well.
In-Person Hide tanning classes for May are filling. Claim a spot, here. And YES, you can claim your spot and sign up for payment plans when you go to check out. You take home your hide. I show you how you can tan at home. We have fun together. We feed you a hearty lunch, snacks and beverages. Music at Big B’s down the road at night and a place to camp, if you’d like. Please email me with questions if you have any.
If you sign up for both, don’t forget to use the discount code ‘tanningdiscount’ when you check out so you can get $100 off BOTH classes. This is a great way to get a cheaper rate and fully immerse for a week and a half of tanning, a few days break in-between.
