Yet we were not finished, and I wasn't certain why. It had seemed complete. I asked Mother Earth what was left to do, and she simply said, “Drunvalo, what is left is a gift for you. A gift in understanding.” But I didn't understand.
So we were on the road again. Ahead of us lay the long, mesmerizing ride to Page, Arizona, to the upper reaches of the Grand Canyon. Here we would create our final ceremony. But first, we would spend the afternoon and early evening at a unique natural cathedral known as Antelope Canyon, where we would meet with Dalvin, a Navajo shaman whose fierce protectiveness of his people would provide us with our last test of faith and love.
Antelope Canyon is so sacred to the Navajo that visitors are allowed in only when accompanied by Native guides. These guides—Dalvin and his two aunts, Carol and Lisa—met our bus, and we all piled into their pickup trucks for a fifteen-mile drive into what seemed like pure desert.
Next, on foot, through an almost hidden entrance, we trooped from the heat of an Arizona August afternoon into the quiet coolness of a cavelike canyon. The light-colored, sandy floor was smooth under our feet. Multihued light from occasional openings high above filtered down into the swirling vortex of energy that could be felt surrounding us.
Antelope Canyon is a long, winding, narrow passageway—no more than twenty feet at its widest part—leading from one bit of desert to another, with red-rock walls on either side that look as though they've been molded by some divine sculptor. The space flows and swirls like the water that formed it. It is a place like no other that I have ever seen.
Dalvin led us silently through the canyon, and when we emerged on the other side, he sat down on a rocky outcropping and began to tell us stories about his culture.
He spoke very slowly, in a measured cadence, so quietly that we had to gather very close in order to hear him. He told of a near-fatal accident that he had had when he was young, and how this accident had marked the beginning of his path as a shaman. In a coma for a long time, he had “traveled to the back of beyond,” and when he returned, he was changed.
Antelope Canyon
He told us about his Way with peyote, saying that this canyon was a living peyote church. And as he spoke, he looked deep into our eyes, as though searching for who we really were.
After talking to us for a while, Dalvin led us back inside the canyon. I realized that he was not sure of us, not certain how he felt about our doing ceremony in this sacred place, and not totally convinced that we had had the right to make our medicine wheel in Colorado, which one of the group told him about. Many members of our group sensed his questioning.
Coming finally to a kind of circular spot deep inside the canyon, we gathered around Dalvin again. He played his guitar and sang, then said that he wanted to sing a peyote song for us, but that he didn't have his rattle. Then Vina, a part-Indian member of our group, gave him a medicine rattle that she had brought. He shook it a few times, looking at it carefully, listening, seeming to consider. Then, using this rattle, he sang two peyote songs, the medicine songs of his path. Afterward, Vina said, he returned the rattle to her and said that it was a good rattle. “It helped me sing good,” he told her.
After hearing Dalvin's songs, we returned his gift with what had become our song “Amazing Grace.” He nodded.
One of Dalvin's aunts asked us if we would do ceremony. We agreed, and we went into the Space of the Heart together, praying for rain to come to the Four Corners to change the weather in this sacred Navajo land, and for the Native American and the white man to become as One.
The canyon lit up with a soft glow, and it was easy to feel the hearts of everyone melting into oneness—everyone but one man.
Susan Barber, one of our members, sat with Dalvin's two aunts and spoke with the elder of them, a beautiful woman whose name was Carol. She asked about Carol's experience of our ceremony.
“Many, many groups come here and do rituals that never seem real or true to me,” Carol said. “This is the first time I have ever felt the same way in ceremony with white people as when we do our own ceremonies.” Smiling then, her face radiant, “I ‘saw’ the rains coming,” she said.
Then Dalvin spoke, and what he said gave goosebumps to those who were near enough to hear him. For he said that the medicine wheel (with his index finger he drew an imaginary circle on his t-shirt) has a cross in it (he drew the cross, north-south and east-west). And the problem was that some people were doing ceremony “almost right.” But instead of having energy in the form of a cross, he said, they had it in the form of an X. He indicated the imaginary X inside the imaginary medicine wheel on his shirt and said, “The X leads to the dark side.”
This was the exact same image—right down to the t-shirt—that I had been given in my vision on the bus before we sang the Anasazi children on their way to freedom! And, as I explained before, I was later shown that our misalignment had been healed. Now, here was this teaching in “real life,” confirming my visions.
So Dalvin still was not convinced.
Back outside, as we were getting ready to be driven back to our bus, Dalvin pointed up at a snake shape on the wall of Antelope Canyon's entrance and began to tell us about it. He illustrated each detail of what he was saying by pointing up at the snake shape, moving his finger along the forty-foot formation. As he was doing this, his aunt Carol turned to me and quietly said, “Its amazing, isn't it?” I asked her what she meant. “You know, he's totally blind.”
That was how I learned that Dalvin—who had driven some of us there in one of their trucks (and would drive us back in the dark!), who had led us unerringly through Antelope Canyon, looked deep into our eyes as he spoke, and was now pointing out features of the snake that guarded his peyote church—had lost the sight in both eyes as a result of that long-ago accident he'd told us about.
According to Carol, visitors to the canyon were never told about Dalvin's blindness. In fact, not even his own children knew.
Once again, we had been given a gift of secret knowledge normally withheld from the modern technological minds of most of the visitors to reservation lands. But little did I know that Dalvin was prepared to go much deeper to test our group.
That evening we arrived at Lake Powell, in Page, Arizona, a resort village at the very northern tip of the Grand Canyon formation. Here, Diane had a gift for us: a rafting trip up the Colorado River through Glen Canyon—a fifteen-mile ride through one of the most gorgeous places on Earth.
Out on the river, red-stone walls as high as 1,800 feet rose above us on both sides. We were literally in a deep crack in the Earth. We saw great blue herons skimming the water, and we listened to the stories told by our river guides of the people who had lived there before the white man came.
At one spot, we debarked from our rafts to walk on the shoreline, where we saw petroglyphs left by the Indians who had inhabited those canyons centuries ago. We speculated on what the images might mean. One seemed to be saying, “It's okay to hunt here.” Or perhaps, “Go this way to find some good ducks.”
The next morning, we left for our final destination, Grand Canyon National Park. I knew that here, near the rim of one of the seven wonders of the natural world, was where we would hold our final ceremony.
We chose the Giveaway Ceremony because it was used by the Ancient Ones long ago and even by Native Americans in our own time. It consists of identifying an object that we are attached to and want very much to keep—and giving it away as a sacrifice. In doing so, the Native world believes that we heal both ourselves and our relationships.
It sounds simple. But because we place so much value on our possessions, and because our emotional body is also often connected to these possessions, profound healings often occur.
Three of us—myself and two of the other men—searched for a long time in the Grand Canyon forest land, finally agreeing on a place among the trees, hidden from the rest of the park. We marked the spot with a special rock and drew a small medicine wheel in the red dirt. Then the two men left me and went to bring the others.
When they'd gone, two elk—a mother and her daughter—approached me to see what was going to happen. We looked at each other, and they both sat down to observe. In that moment, I knew that what was about to happen was perfect, whatever it was.
I arranged everything in preparation for the ceremony, and when finished, I sat down on the ground to meditate. As I did, Dalvin appeared to me very clearly in a vision. He said, “I want you to prove that you and this group are truly connected with Mother Earth and Great Spirit. If you do, I will join with you in my heart and help you in every way. But if you cannot, then you will be my enemy.”
I told him that I also sought proof that we had truly accomplished our purpose on this sacred journey and offered to him what that proof would be. I knew that the only proof that Dalvin would accept would be one that came from Mother Nature, one that I would have no control over. So I said that when the Giveaway Ceremony begins, at the exact moment that the first person hands their gift to Grandmother, the leader of the ceremony, lightning will come out of the sky and strike the ground very close to the circle. In my vision, he accepted.
The members of our group began appearing through the trees, first one, then many, and arranged themselves around the little circle of stones. The elk became nervous as so many people arrived, and they quickly disappeared into the forest.
When we were settled, I asked for the oldest woman to come forward to be the Grandmother. She would receive the gifts, hear the words of those who gave them, and then, at the end, select a gift for each person in the circle to receive in return. Susan Barber, or Moon hawk (her medicine name), became our Grandmother.
As Grandmother settled in the circle on one side of the small medicine wheel, we all became aware of a change in the weather. It was almost sunset, and instead of the still, hot air we'd been accustomed to for nearly two weeks, it suddenly was growing cool. The wind gusted, whipping the tall pines that encircled us. Stormy-looking clouds scudded across the darkening sky. There was an eerie, otherworldly feeling.
I gave an opening prayer that all would be done in a loving way. Then Grandmother asked the first person to approach with his gift.
This was Osiris Montenegro. He came forward with tears in his eyes—for his giveaway in the ceremony was an object of huge significance to him—and knelt on both knees in front of Grandmother, holding his gift in both hands.
Just at the moment he was about to hand his gift to Grandmother, a bolt of lightning shot across the sky, an ear-splitting clap of thunder exploded around us, and the lightning struck the ground only about seventy-five feet from the circle. The people sitting in our circle jumped into the air, startled.
I was not startled. I was happy. I started laughing. I couldn't help it for I knew that we'd succeeded with our sacred journey. I remember looking at the group and realizing that before me were souls of great depth and compassion—a global community of masters. I couldn't say anything. I looked down at the ground, but the joy kept coming out of me.
After the ceremony, Vina—who had loaned her rattle to Dalvin for his peyote songs and knew nothing of what had happened in my meditation shortly before the ceremony—said that Dalvin had appeared to her after the ceremony and asked her to give her rattle to me. I knew that the gesture had come from him and that from now on Dalvin would be a friend to help us as we continued with our sacred ceremonies in other lands. The gift of Vina's rattle had been for us all. We were truly breathing with One Heart.
The Giveaway Ceremony lasted roughly three hours. Throughout this whole time, the wind kept blowing. The limbs of the trees above us whipped and clattered. Many thought a huge storm must be coming our way. This was day four after the medicine wheel in Colorado.
But at the moment the ceremony ended, this entire display of weather ceased as if by magic. The wind stopped, the clouds went away, the trees were still. And above our circle, a million, billion stars glittered in the night sky.
We headed home the next morning. As we entered Flagstaff, drops of rain began to pelt our bus. It was just as Mother Earth had told me after the medicine wheel ceremony. It had been exactly five days since Hovenweep.
When I picked up my own car later that day, the sky was dark with clouds. I drove into my hometown in the pouring rain.
The medicine wheels were now One Heart also, for they were our creations.
The people who met in the space of the One Heart for this journey also went their own ways, to their homes and their loved ones. Although we are now separated by distance, in our hearts we will always be One. We will always remember how our love guided us upon this pilgrimage, remember meeting the people we met, and joining our creative power into one force, performing ceremonies for the healing of the world.
I know the Anasazi are now our brothers and sisters, and that a time will come when their presence in our hearts may make a crucial contribution to our great ascension.
May Great Spirit bless us as we return to the ordinary world and bless all those our lives will touch.