Wild and Wooly Lenten Journey
Of late I have burnt the midnight oil for JEM’s digital life. It has kept me busy for hours and hours. It keeps me off the streets, and off the boob tube. But as great as it is helping out this extensively (otherwise unemployed these last couple months), being holed up in the digital den is not like being in the real world. So there is a plan for that.
JEM has been intstrumental in opening my eyes these last five years or so. The other organization that has expanded on that is the New Mexico-based Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), the ministry initiated by Franciscan Richard Rohr. Last year I completed their Mens’ Rites of Passage (MROP), a week of formal male initiation that any spiritually seeking man should experience—the younger, the better. This year, after a year or more of small voices saying “see what’s in New Mexico,” I get to go to that special state and dive a bit more into the CAC spiritual development ocean. This time, it is totally out of character for me. But that is the point.
CAC has a vast tract of open land in New Mexico where Navajo-Churro sheep [Wikipedia with more links] are kept and are being bred to repopulate after a terrible decimation of their numbers due to intentional efforts on the part of American pioneer Kit Carson and later US Government efforts to upset the Navajo way of life. [NPR.org article.] “Sheep is life” is how the Navajo see it, and for them, the slaughter of their sheep was economic terrorism that has sent their culture into a tailspin. What the CAC is doing is trying to right that wrong by giving the once-nearly extinct breed a place to blissfully repopulate. Guys like me, who know about the CAC and want to explore their various programs of ministry and spiritual development, are invited to be part of it by coming to the Red Mesa site in northwestern NM and doing some work as assistants to CAC and Navajo folks who manage it all. It is decidedly different stuff than sitting at the Mac all day, trying to herd pixels into one shape or another. I hear that herding sheep will be a humbling experience. And one that I feel won’t do me harm (as long as I don’t get impaled on a ram’s horn). The CAC knows this and uses this whole shepherding experience as one more way to teach the spiritual lessons that one can’t get from books, or even from church in most cases.
In a week or so I am off to participate in this ancient act of tending to the first animals that humans domesticated some 10-12 millenia ago. The sheep have remained remarkably similar in their nature across that span of time. I suppose that is a lesson in itself that undermines the hubbub and activity of our busy minds and bodies. Their patterns are timeless; ours are transitory. Meeting them and learning their patterns, and spending two weeks under the fabulous ever-evolving piece of art known as the New Mexico sky, I can imagine getting a lesson that JEM prepared me for, but that this time might be learned at a deeper level. This is the opportunity that CAC wants people to have.
Furthermore, when considering what JEM says about the different paradigms of superpower and Indigenous/Jubilee worldviews, this will be that lesson, in the fleece. This is sure to fill in a hole of knowledge about how life is lived on the underside of the Superpower. It is a perspective that I realize this white American male doesn’t know from the inside out. In a lot of ways, what CAC is doing with this Red Mesa encounter is like what JEM does with the trips to Chiapas, Mexico. The idea is to open eyes to another reality by even a short term immersion into a world that is foreign but interrelated with our own. I realize my two weeks on the ranch is not enough to amount to much but these kinds of experiences tend to reorient people’s internal compasses, and that is what I am allowing to happen, come what may. My own two weeks won’t do very much to right the historical wrongs of my predecessors but I can be a drop in the river flowing that direction.
The bulk of my time in NM will be at the Red Mesa site, but I have planned to stop by the CAC to see their operation and to stay a night before I launch into what seems to be a polar opposite endeavor from the business of lovingly tending sheep: going on a pilgrimage to what symbolizes the antithesis of the pastoral human experience, into the realm of technology that both embodies the power to fix our lowly condition, and the power to destroy all we ever accomplished. I am going to see the Trinity Nuclear test site where the nuclear genie was uncorked and set free from the bottle. Trinity is open just twice a year, and I happened to be in the area close to that first weekend of April. While in the area, I also have plans to see the Very Large Array, the set of 27 radio telescopes that function in unison to multiply their receiving effect. VLA is famous in images and movies like Contact. (Years ago when I was making my CD, Receiving, I wanted images of the VLA dishes but at the time did not know it was called that, nor did I know it was in New Mexico, and worst of all, Google did not exist then! The VLA did not make it to my cover art then, but maybe I can get my pictures now! I am a bit late though, because even Bon Jovi has a cover with nearly exactly the image I had in mind.)
Taken as a whole, I can’t resist the thought of how widely my trip encompasses the human experience: from ancient activity herding sheep to standing on the site of the first nuclear explosion that changed humanity forever, and also contemplating our effort to hear what is really going on outside our little dust speck in space.
That ought to give me something to think about on the drive back home to the digital den.
(After returning, I am soon to be one of the returning initiated men that attends the initiation rites of a new bunch of men, lending solidarity and continuity to the movement that Rohr started in the 90s. Fortunately for me, this opportunity happens in my own back yard in the mountains around San Diego. I also hooked up with a couple other initiates here in San Diego and will be meeting with them to cultivate the spiritual life as it unfolds. So I have a very CAC shaped lenten experience this year.)
Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 11:19AM Ed Lucas in Artistic-Prophetic Imagination, Environment, Land Use, Limits to Growth, Mens' Work, Simple Living, Spirituality earth community, ed lucas, education, indigenous economics, men's work, metanoia
Reader Comments (3)
Being part of the Navajo project with the sheep is by itself enough to make this compelling. Surely part of our coming of age as males is to restore wherever we can the damage of patriarchy and how it inhabits many practices of injustice toward Earth and species. I'm jealous of you on this trip, but will settle for a journal post somewhere in the future upon your return.
Sounds wonderful Ed and thanks for the side endorsement for the Chiapas trips! Indeed, we have a multitude of sheep in the mountains here that also need to be tended. The opposite end of the spectrum here are the WalMarts, Sam's and strip mining corps. that threaten the existence of the original inhabitants. Will also eagerly await your reflections upon your return and then we'll plan your Chiapas trip. Buen viaje!
oh, and the new logo for the website looks great!