A "power spot" is that place on the Earth where one goes alone to cry for a vision. In traditional indigenous cultures, an elder or shaman often assigned a power spot to a person preparing to enact a vision fast. In modern western culture, in the new-old blend of traditions in which I quested, the quester finds his or her own solo spot -- or, ideally, the spot finds her. . .

            On the day that we went out in search of our solo spots, we found ourselves in a deluge -- rain that stung like tiny chunks of buckshot, diving in sheets that were thick enough to blind us. At the start of the heaviest rain -- a storm that turned on every "faucet", awakened every wash, tripled the width of the creek in minutes -- my buddy and I scrambled over boulders into a cave the size of a closet, where we crouched down beneath the thunder that ricocheted off sandstone walls. Inside, we were spiders, we were mice, we were lizards; it was 100 years earlier and 100 years hence. The air in that cave was so still that the stories of centuries could rest there -- and in those stories, human beings were just two words. Perhaps it had been 1,000 years, not one, since the last two-legged had been there; perhaps an Anasazi man or woman -- ancestor of Hopi and Pueblo -- had, like us, huddled inside, waiting out the rain. Or then again, perhaps no human had ever been there. It was a possibility, and it made me a wolf and a coyote and a cougar. It made me wild. And so we waited there, crouched on all fours, until the rain slowed and the thunder was just a far-off echo. Then, pulling centuries on with our raingear, we set out on two legs to resume the aborted search for our power spots.

            We were, once again, just vision quest buddies; as such, we would be checking on each other once a day during our three-day, three-night solos. We'd do so not by visiting each other's sacred place -- because then, after all, the solo would be less a solo -- but rather by building a stone pile halfway between. Tracey would leave a stone in the morning; I'd leave one in the afternoon; and if either of us failed to do so, the other would commence a search. That meant we had to know where each other's power spot was -- and, unless we wanted to hike long distances on empty stomachs and still-emptier heads to visit the stone pile, we'd have to choose spots in the same general area of The Canyon.         

            And so the two of us wandered together, trying to do so aimlessly, trying to let ourselves be called. We climbed up ridges, followed deer trails, peered behind gnarled pinyon pines and humpbacked, lichen-specked rocks. Where there was cryptobiotic soil, we stepped gingerly. "Crypto": Resembling hundreds of miniature drip castles made from the blackest sand, it is life at its most brittle, a living soil composed of algae, lichen, moss and bacteria on which plant life in the desert utterly depends. Cryptogamic soils take 10 or more years to mature, and a mind-boggling 50-250 years to recover from being trampled. Literally, then, one careless step can set life in the canyons back more than 100 years. So we watched out for crypto as we walked, trying to feel the pull of those sacred places that already lived inside us but were manifested here on the physical plane, somewhere in The Canyon. . .    

Copyright (c) 2002 by Elizabeth Brensinger.  All rights reserved.