Sitting in meditation on a rock at the
end of the trail through Boynton Canyon, near the cliff ruins – which for all I
knew these flat rocks could have been stacked up only the week previous into
the little fortress walls; shoulder-height and roofless, there was something
more than a little disappointing to these ancient Indian relics, which struck
me more as a fort built by enterprising children to play at being Indians
inside of – I used the visualization exercise I’d only just learned from the
psychic channel in order to connect with some other entity (the one I would in
time identify as IMHOTEP) and felt energized, though more by a high level of
anxiety than any sense of coherent spiritual contact. I wasn’t really expecting
much from the exercise. This was, after all, only the first time I’d ever done
it. Nevertheless, when finished, I walked the winding trail through the canyon
back to its source with a sense of deep significance, searching for a presence
of something – though with half my mind I doubted that there was anything more
to this feeling than a desperate need to believe I’d accomplished something,
that this whole episode had been more than simply being taken for a sucker.
With another part of my mind, I felt as if I needed to watch for signs, because
they would likely be there.
There were few others on the trail; in
fact I don’t now remember anybody else, though I did at one point see, at less
than halfway back, up ahead quite some distance, a white and moving dot of what
I took to be the fabric of a sweatshirt. Though I hadn’t actually seen this, I had
the vivid impression of a middle-aged woman coming in my direction. This was
visible only for some brief moments through the foliage between us, yet it (or
she) seemed clearly enough to be moving toward me, human-sized and following
the trail ahead, in the dappled sunlight and shadows of deciduous trees, and I
don’t know where exactly I’d gotten this impression that it was a middle-aged
woman, because I never saw any detail of this figure beyond the whiteness of
the shirt, but that was the picture I was distinctly left with. When I
eventually reached the point in the trail where the two of us should have met
up with one another, there was nobody. Maybe I’d just misjudged our
trajectories, I thought, but even further on, there was no sign at all of her.
When I got to the place where I’d last seen her white dot through the leaves, I
stopped and looked carefully around. Nobody. But what I found instead was only
the barest hint of something like a trail, not exactly a well-worn path, but a
path all the same, undoubtedly, something that at least animals had traveled. It
led up a rock embankment to my right, so I followed it, scrambling up. I wanted
to see where this woman could have disappeared to. But I never did find her, if
there even was one – although a short distance further in, well out of sight of
the main trail, there was a plateau of red rock, and across the shelf were
dozens and dozens of deliberately constructed little piles of rocks in small pyramidal
constellations. These were things I’d sometimes run across in the area, along
the trails: little constructions left by hikers, I supposed, other pilgrims to
these mystic lands, to signify a spot where they’d stopped and maybe (I
guessed) found some kind of insight, or at least a pleasant moment of
meditation. Or maybe they just liked where they were, because it was nice. On
this shelf, these arrangements were clustered in every direction, closely together,
as if an orgy of meditation had taken place there; a whole battalion of seekers
wide-eyed as myself, come to this particular spot, hotly visualizing God knows
what; or just sitting and, you know, just sitting. But there were no people,
not now. I felt certain that I had been led here deliberately by the appearance
of the mysterious white dot, which I realized only in that moment had never
really appeared as anything other than just that.
In a related aside, I later ran across a
very similar massed arrangement of small stones. It was late in October of
2001, and I was on my honeymoon, driving through Southwestern Ireland. My new
wife and I stopped somewhere in the countryside to see a long barrow tomb or
collection of standing stones, I forget exactly where. A tour bus had stopped
also in the parking lot, and there was no shortage of people about, hefting
cameras, on this bleakly overcast afternoon. Many had gone to snap photos of
the small monument or returned already to the coach, but nobody seemed
interested in the rock field immediately next to the lot where hundreds of
these small arrangements had been made. No one seemed to so much as noticed it.
There was something wondrous to seeing so many little deliberate piles of rock,
so carefully and absurdly set. There was nothing haphazard about it: hundreds
of these stacks balanced directly beside each other, with no space to move
between them. The effort to do this would have been enormous, and carefully
considered as well, and though I don’t mean to imply that there was anything
paranormal to it, it struck me as at least a little curious that no one else
seemed to notice this or care.
I remained in or near Sedona for another
week, having taken a room in a bed and breakfast in nearby Jerome. Soon my
friends would arrive – they would be flying in later. But for now, I was by
myself, engaged in having visions, writing madly about everything I thought or
saw or thought I saw in a manic and all-but-unreadable, looping scribble,
filling page after page of notebook paper with the wild and blank intensity of
fever. I’ve since lost the notebooks. I don’t know what I wrote, and don’t
think it matters. I spent the remaining days in a desperate, wired state,
looking for something I couldn’t imagine, needing something I would never quite
find.
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