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 PILGRIMAGE
VOLUME 30 ISSUE 1
WORKS BY FRANK WATERS, LUCI TAPAHONSO,
DAVID PETERSEN, KEN LAMBERTON, PAT AMENT,
AND MANY OTHER FINE WRITERS AND ARTISTS.
From the Introduction
by Editor Juan Morales
Hózhó. Hózhó is a Navajo (Diné) word that defies any easy
translation into English. Though it names a way of being, best
understood in the culture where the word is at home, it speaks
also to a yearning for relationship, for truth and balance, and
for harmony and beauty that lives in many, if not all hearts.
In the Navajo (Diné) tradition, the prayerful greeting of each
new day in the pre-dawn light is a way of being open to the
blessings at hand. Hózhó, like an experience of the Holy
Spirit, is not something that can be grasped. It is instead an
experience that comes on its own terms and only when one is
open to it.
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The opposite of hózhó is alienation—from the depth of one’s own heart, one’s own family and friends, one’s place,
one’s culture, one’s sense of that which is holy. The harried complexities of life today are such that we may be more familiar
with the absence of the experience that the word hózhó names. But if the yearning for an experience like this is alive, then
so too is the possibility of coming home to it. If the stories in this issue are any indication, and I believe they are, animals
of all sorts can be trustworthy guides along the trail back to an experience like hózhó, or at least the notion that such an
experience is possible.
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| From The Horses by Frank Waters |
My few horses, then, helped to put me in closer touch with the wildness of the living land. A silent communication grew between us. I could not at first understand how they silently called me from the house when anything was wrong or they needed immediate attention; nor how when I wanted them and they could not be seen, they trotted out from the woods. Then I began without question to rely on their intuitive calls and responses. This involved of course the mystery of silence, in which all we children of our Mother Earth speak in a common tongue.
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| From Pilgrimage of the Eye by Cheryl Merrill |
My bones melt and my gait slows to a saunter, the acceptance in my mind and nerves tells me not to run
when a monster materializes out of a clump of brush and moves to an arm’s length, breathing so quietly I wonder
if it’s sleepwalking, I wonder if I’m sleepwalking, because everything that is happening, this monster, this place,
my fog of serenity, must be made from dreams....
The monster moves closer. My slow-motion mind slowly comes into focus. I stand to my knees in dry
grass, my camera lowered, eye to eye with an elephant.
Eye to eye with an elephant.
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| Words Along the Way from Doug Peacock |
 The smell of danger floated on the mountain air....My strength was returning, conditioned by the dozen
miles I walked every day. My physical senses were honed even sharper than they had been during my
jungle days. I heard the secrets passed by flapping ravens and smelled, when the wind blew right, the fetor
of damp bear fur floating down the trails.... |
