The Other Landscape
The healing ceremony was that night. A central part of it was the altar – a disc of earth that held red hot coals. Building the disc and tending to its coals was the job of a fire chief, in this case my friend Greg. He invited me to go with him when he went to collect the earth for the altar.
We got in his truck and drove into the Coconino forest. A sunny spring day. After about forty-five minutes we came to a clearing. Ahead was a big canyon.
“Any eagles in this area?” I asked.
“Yes,” Greg said, “but I’ve been here several times and seen one only once.”
“Oh,” I said.
As we got closer to the canyon the ground to our left rose to a hill. A hundred yards from the edge of the canyon the road turned left, hugging the hill. A quarter mile past the turn Greg stopped the truck next to a bare patch of hillside. We got out. Greg got a spade and some black plastic garbage bags from the back of the truck.
He walked a short way up the patch and stood in silence for a minute. He looked at the hill and began to talk. He said he was there to take some earth for a healing ritual. He thanked the hill and all who lived on it. Another moment of silence. Then he filled the bags and carried them down. They were loaded on the truck.
We got in, turned around, and headed back. Before we got to the turn, I saw an eagle floating in the canyon, not far from its edge. I mentioned it to Greg. There was a small parking area at the bend. We pulled into it and got out. The eagle was headed to our left. It banked to its right and made a wide circle that brought it back to where it was headed in our direction.
It flew to where we stood and started to circle the parking area a hundred or so feet above our heads. Soon a second eagle floated in from another direction and joined the circle, and then a third. The three may not have circled above us for more than a few minutes, but it felt much longer. Then, one at a time, each flew off in the direction from which it had come. We watched the one that headed for the canyon become a distant speck.
We got back in the truck and drove for a while in silence. Greg broke it. “Tell Bella tonight about what happened here," he said.
“OK,” I said. Bella was the Navajo medicine woman who was to conduct that night’s healing session.
The healing ritual was an all-nighter. During a break I found myself alone in the room with Bella and Alice, Greg’s wife. Alice was also a Navajo (Greg was a mix of French and Old Boston). I described our encounter with the eagles. Soon after I started talking Bella tilted her head away from me. She was listening and at the same time looking into the burning coals on the altar.
When I was done Bella giggled, turned to Alice and said something to her in Navajo. Alice looked amused. She looked at me and said "Money. She says money coming your way. The eagles, they are also on the dollar bill." They got up and went out for some cool night air.
I felt let down. I'd expected to hear something more uplifting, some revelation about the natural world and my relationship to it. I felt better when I saw that this kind of pragmatic take on an apparent mystery was what I liked about Bella and her world. Never mind that this one raised a question for me.
Because money did indeed come my way. In less than a year the income from my work would more than double and stay up there for decades until I wound down that business. Was that quick jump soon after what Bella said merely a happy coincidence?
Perhaps, but taken together with the other lucky breaks that accompanied this set of three healing ceremonies, perhaps not.
The specific focus of the last two rituals was my cousin Indira. She had leukemia. Two leading experts, one in London the other in Los Angeles, thought what she had left was most likely six to eighteen months of life. She was in Boston working with non-traditional therapists. I lived across the river in Cambridge.
Indira knew I had worked with Native American groups. She asked if I could set up a healing session for her. Traditional healers, I said, were hard to find, even harder to approach. But I would try.
I called Greg. Yes, they knew a medicine woman, she’d done ceremonies for them and for Greg’s mom. Perhaps she would be willing to do one for my cousin. But first she would need to meet me or Indira. That was a problem. Greg and Alice were in Flagstaff, Bella lived a five- hour drive away. Where on the Res or outside it she might be at any time was unpredictable. Her movements were not guided by our kinds of schedules. Smart phones hadn’t yet been invented.
“You’d need to come out here and hang out,” Greg said, “no telling for how long. And if you do get to meet her, no way to know if she would want to work with your cousin.”
I didn’t say anything to Indira. But I had mixed feelings about the task my cousin had asked me to do. I wanted to help, but was concerned about the cost, in time and money, of flying to and back from Arizona. All to do a task that might be a dead end.
I wasn’t feeling flush. I’d been a partner in a small consulting company but had recently quit to go out on my own. It takes time to grow a business. I was doing OK but didn’t have much money in the bank – barely the six months of living expenses consultants were told to keep in reserve.
One morning I was looking at my calendar. The usual amount of work booked. The usual number of open dates that I could use for trips to Arizona. But no work in that direction. I felt trapped between my wish to help my cousin and the facts of my checkbook. I was not in a good mood.
I got up, walked to a window and stared at a tree that grew outside it. A thought came: "This is silly. Your cousin is fighting for her life. If there's something you can do that might help her, what does it matter if to do it you have to blow everything you have stashed away?"
The thought unloosened something. The feeling of being in a bind faded and disappeared. There was no longer any conflict between what I felt I ought to do and my concerns about doing it. My mood brightened.
The next morning I got a call from a client in Santa Rosa. "Short notice," he said, "but any chance you could come run a few sessions for us, last half of next week and the first three days of the one after it?" Yes, I said, those dates are open.
I called Greg. Would he be there towards the end of the week after next? I told him I'd be flying back from San Francisco, could easily fly via Phoenix and drive up to Flagstaff.
Yes, he said, he'd be home.
Turned out to also work for the client. The flight with a stop in Phoenix cost less than a non-stop from San Francisco to Boston.
I called Greg from Phoenix to let him know I was about to pick up my rental car for the drive to Flagstaff.
"Guess what," he said, "there's going to be a healing ceremony in our house tonight. Bella is O.K. with your being in it”
The ceremony, called Beautyway, began at dusk and ended at dawn. When it was over, Bella said she would work with my cousin.
There was a problem. Greg was the fire chief for this ceremony, but he was going to be away at the time Bella wanted to do the one for my cousin. Finding someone else to fill that role could be difficult. Whoever it was would want to check me out. That meant at least one more trip to Arizona. So be it, I was past being too concerned about that.
A day after I got back to Boston I got a call from Greg. The dates of the project for which he was going to be away had been moved. "You have your fire chief," he said.
The following week I got a letter from an airline. I'd done a lot of flying on it in the past eighteen months. Inside was a letter thanking me for the business, along with a coupon good for a round-trip flight anywhere in the continental U.S.
At about this time I began to wonder. Was this just a lucky run of events, like the streaks you can have playing cards or throwing dice? Or was something else going on? In either case I was glad it was happening.
After the first ritual for my cousin, Bella felt a second one was needed. It was the morning of this one when Greg invited me to go with him to get earth for its altar. And what the eagles did gave me another lucky happening to add to all the others associated with these ceremonies. I did eventually see a way to make sense of them.
Before I talk about that I’d like to address a different question that you may have: what, if anything, did the ceremonies do for my cousin?
In each ritual Indira became aware of psychic wounds she’d suffered as a child that had never healed. And she got some insights into what she could do about them. Had these injuries contributed to her leukemia? Perhaps, perhaps not.
My cousin lived for seven more years instead of the six to eighteen months Western medicine predicted. Were the healing ceremonies a factor? What about the other alternative treatments she followed, such as special diets?
If she did ever reach any final conclusions about these questions, I never got to hear about them.
There was an element in the ceremonies of group therapy, albeit run by someone with a remarkable ability to tune into what was going on in our bodies and psyches. It produced some unexpected insights and perhaps this was all the rituals were designed to do, but I didn't think so. If I was right, what else was going on in them that I'd missed? I didn’t talk to Greg or Alice about it, but a couple of months later I came across an answer.
The writer Barry Lopez notes that we all live in two landscapes, the exterior and the interior.
The exterior includes the relationships between the elements of the natural world that are "organized
according to principles or laws or tendencies beyond human control. [They have] an integrity that is
beyond human analysis and unimpeachable.” They are part of what “many Native peoples [see as the
land’s] sacred order.”
The interior landscape is a “projection within a person” of the relationships perceived in the
exterior landscape. But “the elements of one's interior life are subject to a persistent principle of
disarray.” The inner landscape may become estranged from the external reality. This is a cause of
illness.
The Navajo Beautyway ceremony, says Lopez, “is, in part [an] invocation of the order
of the exterior universe … The purpose of this invocation is to increase in [the] subject of the ceremony that same order, to make the individual again a reflection of the myriad enduring relationships of the landscape… To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health.”
What are some of these relationships? “A dominant theme in all Native America
cultures,” says Joseph Epes Brown, is the sense that we are related not only to other people but also "to
the land, to the animals, to the plants, and to the clouds, the elements, the heavens, the stars; and
ultimately [to the] entire universe."
Associated with this idea is the theme of reciprocity, “wherein if you receive or take
away you must also give back," because by doing so you don't break the "cycle permeating all of life.”
Everything "comes back upon itself.”
It’s possible that I began to get aligned with this element of the natural world’s order when I
looked out of my window and got the thought that resolved the conflict between what I felt I needed to
do and my concerns about doing it. The healing ceremonies may have strengthened that alignment and
extended its circle of relationships to include the world of the eagles.
I may have answered my question about what else the rituals were about. But others remained. To what
extent is my internal order truly mine? Much of it was formed by the ethos of the modern world in
which I live. How does that ethos relate to “the land, to the animals, to the plants, and to the clouds and
the elements,” here on this Earth?
A half century ago Native Americans began to talk openly about what they saw: a relationship
that was inviting disaster. Here’s what one of their seers, Rolling Thunder, said in the early seventies:
“The earth is sick now because [it] is being mistreated, and some of the problems that may
occur, some of the natural disasters [in] the near future, are only [the] readjustments that have to take
place to throw off sickness. A lot of things are on this land that don’t belong there. They’re [like]
viruses or germs. [What is] going to happen in the future will [be] like fever [or] vomiting, what you
might call physiological adjustment.
“It’s very important for people to realize this. The earth is a living organism [that] wants to be
well.”
What Rolling Thunder saw coming is here now. The Earth is sicker but there are now measures
for her fever. One is the rate of biodiversity loss, now higher than it has ever been in our history and
clearly attributable to our modern way of life.
Living in a way that continues to stoke the Earth’s fever is sure to subject my inner landscape to
“a persistent principle of disarray.” I no longer have easy access to a traditional healer, so I have to find other ways to prune my inner life.
Our ideas about the world are based on the stories we tell ourselves or are told about it. So one way to do the pruning is to continuously replace some of my inherited stories with ones that I feel are more closely aligned with Nature’s rhythms and cycles. For me the ones that feel right are those rooted in both modern science and our ancient wisdom about how to live sustainably on this Earth. Such stories are not hard to find, if you look for them. An example:
The Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard has demonstrated how trees in a forest use underground networks to feed and inform neighbors about the presence of pests and diseases. Older trees nurture younger ones. They cooperate across species and make forests a collaborative venture.
The forest management practices of the Menominee tribe echo these findings. They have harvested their 200,000-acre forest in Wisconsin since the mid 1800s, yet it looks pristine. “Some trees are more than 200 years old and more than 200 feet high.”
Hard-core Darwinians have trouble accepting Simard’s finding of cross-species cooperation among trees. They don’t seem to get that the “selfish gene” understands that its long-term survival depends on the well-being of its eco-system, on the health of the whole. Simard and the Menominee do get it.
We got in his truck and drove into the Coconino forest. A sunny spring day. After about forty-five minutes we came to a clearing. Ahead was a big canyon.
“Any eagles in this area?” I asked.
“Yes,” Greg said, “but I’ve been here several times and seen one only once.”
“Oh,” I said.
As we got closer to the canyon the ground to our left rose to a hill. A hundred yards from the edge of the canyon the road turned left, hugging the hill. A quarter mile past the turn Greg stopped the truck next to a bare patch of hillside. We got out. Greg got a spade and some black plastic garbage bags from the back of the truck.
He walked a short way up the patch and stood in silence for a minute. He looked at the hill and began to talk. He said he was there to take some earth for a healing ritual. He thanked the hill and all who lived on it. Another moment of silence. Then he filled the bags and carried them down. They were loaded on the truck.
We got in, turned around, and headed back. Before we got to the turn, I saw an eagle floating in the canyon, not far from its edge. I mentioned it to Greg. There was a small parking area at the bend. We pulled into it and got out. The eagle was headed to our left. It banked to its right and made a wide circle that brought it back to where it was headed in our direction.
It flew to where we stood and started to circle the parking area a hundred or so feet above our heads. Soon a second eagle floated in from another direction and joined the circle, and then a third. The three may not have circled above us for more than a few minutes, but it felt much longer. Then, one at a time, each flew off in the direction from which it had come. We watched the one that headed for the canyon become a distant speck.
We got back in the truck and drove for a while in silence. Greg broke it. “Tell Bella tonight about what happened here," he said.
“OK,” I said. Bella was the Navajo medicine woman who was to conduct that night’s healing session.
The healing ritual was an all-nighter. During a break I found myself alone in the room with Bella and Alice, Greg’s wife. Alice was also a Navajo (Greg was a mix of French and Old Boston). I described our encounter with the eagles. Soon after I started talking Bella tilted her head away from me. She was listening and at the same time looking into the burning coals on the altar.
When I was done Bella giggled, turned to Alice and said something to her in Navajo. Alice looked amused. She looked at me and said "Money. She says money coming your way. The eagles, they are also on the dollar bill." They got up and went out for some cool night air.
I felt let down. I'd expected to hear something more uplifting, some revelation about the natural world and my relationship to it. I felt better when I saw that this kind of pragmatic take on an apparent mystery was what I liked about Bella and her world. Never mind that this one raised a question for me.
Because money did indeed come my way. In less than a year the income from my work would more than double and stay up there for decades until I wound down that business. Was that quick jump soon after what Bella said merely a happy coincidence?
Perhaps, but taken together with the other lucky breaks that accompanied this set of three healing ceremonies, perhaps not.
The specific focus of the last two rituals was my cousin Indira. She had leukemia. Two leading experts, one in London the other in Los Angeles, thought what she had left was most likely six to eighteen months of life. She was in Boston working with non-traditional therapists. I lived across the river in Cambridge.
Indira knew I had worked with Native American groups. She asked if I could set up a healing session for her. Traditional healers, I said, were hard to find, even harder to approach. But I would try.
I called Greg. Yes, they knew a medicine woman, she’d done ceremonies for them and for Greg’s mom. Perhaps she would be willing to do one for my cousin. But first she would need to meet me or Indira. That was a problem. Greg and Alice were in Flagstaff, Bella lived a five- hour drive away. Where on the Res or outside it she might be at any time was unpredictable. Her movements were not guided by our kinds of schedules. Smart phones hadn’t yet been invented.
“You’d need to come out here and hang out,” Greg said, “no telling for how long. And if you do get to meet her, no way to know if she would want to work with your cousin.”
I didn’t say anything to Indira. But I had mixed feelings about the task my cousin had asked me to do. I wanted to help, but was concerned about the cost, in time and money, of flying to and back from Arizona. All to do a task that might be a dead end.
I wasn’t feeling flush. I’d been a partner in a small consulting company but had recently quit to go out on my own. It takes time to grow a business. I was doing OK but didn’t have much money in the bank – barely the six months of living expenses consultants were told to keep in reserve.
One morning I was looking at my calendar. The usual amount of work booked. The usual number of open dates that I could use for trips to Arizona. But no work in that direction. I felt trapped between my wish to help my cousin and the facts of my checkbook. I was not in a good mood.
I got up, walked to a window and stared at a tree that grew outside it. A thought came: "This is silly. Your cousin is fighting for her life. If there's something you can do that might help her, what does it matter if to do it you have to blow everything you have stashed away?"
The thought unloosened something. The feeling of being in a bind faded and disappeared. There was no longer any conflict between what I felt I ought to do and my concerns about doing it. My mood brightened.
The next morning I got a call from a client in Santa Rosa. "Short notice," he said, "but any chance you could come run a few sessions for us, last half of next week and the first three days of the one after it?" Yes, I said, those dates are open.
I called Greg. Would he be there towards the end of the week after next? I told him I'd be flying back from San Francisco, could easily fly via Phoenix and drive up to Flagstaff.
Yes, he said, he'd be home.
Turned out to also work for the client. The flight with a stop in Phoenix cost less than a non-stop from San Francisco to Boston.
I called Greg from Phoenix to let him know I was about to pick up my rental car for the drive to Flagstaff.
"Guess what," he said, "there's going to be a healing ceremony in our house tonight. Bella is O.K. with your being in it”
The ceremony, called Beautyway, began at dusk and ended at dawn. When it was over, Bella said she would work with my cousin.
There was a problem. Greg was the fire chief for this ceremony, but he was going to be away at the time Bella wanted to do the one for my cousin. Finding someone else to fill that role could be difficult. Whoever it was would want to check me out. That meant at least one more trip to Arizona. So be it, I was past being too concerned about that.
A day after I got back to Boston I got a call from Greg. The dates of the project for which he was going to be away had been moved. "You have your fire chief," he said.
The following week I got a letter from an airline. I'd done a lot of flying on it in the past eighteen months. Inside was a letter thanking me for the business, along with a coupon good for a round-trip flight anywhere in the continental U.S.
At about this time I began to wonder. Was this just a lucky run of events, like the streaks you can have playing cards or throwing dice? Or was something else going on? In either case I was glad it was happening.
After the first ritual for my cousin, Bella felt a second one was needed. It was the morning of this one when Greg invited me to go with him to get earth for its altar. And what the eagles did gave me another lucky happening to add to all the others associated with these ceremonies. I did eventually see a way to make sense of them.
Before I talk about that I’d like to address a different question that you may have: what, if anything, did the ceremonies do for my cousin?
In each ritual Indira became aware of psychic wounds she’d suffered as a child that had never healed. And she got some insights into what she could do about them. Had these injuries contributed to her leukemia? Perhaps, perhaps not.
My cousin lived for seven more years instead of the six to eighteen months Western medicine predicted. Were the healing ceremonies a factor? What about the other alternative treatments she followed, such as special diets?
If she did ever reach any final conclusions about these questions, I never got to hear about them.
There was an element in the ceremonies of group therapy, albeit run by someone with a remarkable ability to tune into what was going on in our bodies and psyches. It produced some unexpected insights and perhaps this was all the rituals were designed to do, but I didn't think so. If I was right, what else was going on in them that I'd missed? I didn’t talk to Greg or Alice about it, but a couple of months later I came across an answer.
The writer Barry Lopez notes that we all live in two landscapes, the exterior and the interior.
The exterior includes the relationships between the elements of the natural world that are "organized
according to principles or laws or tendencies beyond human control. [They have] an integrity that is
beyond human analysis and unimpeachable.” They are part of what “many Native peoples [see as the
land’s] sacred order.”
The interior landscape is a “projection within a person” of the relationships perceived in the
exterior landscape. But “the elements of one's interior life are subject to a persistent principle of
disarray.” The inner landscape may become estranged from the external reality. This is a cause of
illness.
The Navajo Beautyway ceremony, says Lopez, “is, in part [an] invocation of the order
of the exterior universe … The purpose of this invocation is to increase in [the] subject of the ceremony that same order, to make the individual again a reflection of the myriad enduring relationships of the landscape… To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health.”
What are some of these relationships? “A dominant theme in all Native America
cultures,” says Joseph Epes Brown, is the sense that we are related not only to other people but also "to
the land, to the animals, to the plants, and to the clouds, the elements, the heavens, the stars; and
ultimately [to the] entire universe."
Associated with this idea is the theme of reciprocity, “wherein if you receive or take
away you must also give back," because by doing so you don't break the "cycle permeating all of life.”
Everything "comes back upon itself.”
It’s possible that I began to get aligned with this element of the natural world’s order when I
looked out of my window and got the thought that resolved the conflict between what I felt I needed to
do and my concerns about doing it. The healing ceremonies may have strengthened that alignment and
extended its circle of relationships to include the world of the eagles.
I may have answered my question about what else the rituals were about. But others remained. To what
extent is my internal order truly mine? Much of it was formed by the ethos of the modern world in
which I live. How does that ethos relate to “the land, to the animals, to the plants, and to the clouds and
the elements,” here on this Earth?
A half century ago Native Americans began to talk openly about what they saw: a relationship
that was inviting disaster. Here’s what one of their seers, Rolling Thunder, said in the early seventies:
“The earth is sick now because [it] is being mistreated, and some of the problems that may
occur, some of the natural disasters [in] the near future, are only [the] readjustments that have to take
place to throw off sickness. A lot of things are on this land that don’t belong there. They’re [like]
viruses or germs. [What is] going to happen in the future will [be] like fever [or] vomiting, what you
might call physiological adjustment.
“It’s very important for people to realize this. The earth is a living organism [that] wants to be
well.”
What Rolling Thunder saw coming is here now. The Earth is sicker but there are now measures
for her fever. One is the rate of biodiversity loss, now higher than it has ever been in our history and
clearly attributable to our modern way of life.
Living in a way that continues to stoke the Earth’s fever is sure to subject my inner landscape to
“a persistent principle of disarray.” I no longer have easy access to a traditional healer, so I have to find other ways to prune my inner life.
Our ideas about the world are based on the stories we tell ourselves or are told about it. So one way to do the pruning is to continuously replace some of my inherited stories with ones that I feel are more closely aligned with Nature’s rhythms and cycles. For me the ones that feel right are those rooted in both modern science and our ancient wisdom about how to live sustainably on this Earth. Such stories are not hard to find, if you look for them. An example:
The Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard has demonstrated how trees in a forest use underground networks to feed and inform neighbors about the presence of pests and diseases. Older trees nurture younger ones. They cooperate across species and make forests a collaborative venture.
The forest management practices of the Menominee tribe echo these findings. They have harvested their 200,000-acre forest in Wisconsin since the mid 1800s, yet it looks pristine. “Some trees are more than 200 years old and more than 200 feet high.”
Hard-core Darwinians have trouble accepting Simard’s finding of cross-species cooperation among trees. They don’t seem to get that the “selfish gene” understands that its long-term survival depends on the well-being of its eco-system, on the health of the whole. Simard and the Menominee do get it.
Amarjit Chopra is an innovation facilitator and writer. Publications include: Finding Hope (Gaia Lit, Issue Three, Summer, 2022); The Other Self (The Humanist Magazine, May/June 2020); Managing the People Side of Innovation (Randolph, VT: The Public Press, 2014)