Medicine Walk in Tortolita

Since I recently did a post about gathering rocks for sacred ritual purposes, I discovered notes for a paper that I wrote of my experimentation with ancient ritual. The following is about this aspect of nudity, in which it can be an augmentation to exploration through ritual. I would suppose that this won’t be everyone’s cuppa, but food for thought.

This is the story of one of two rituals required during my studies. They were accomplished completely nude. There is something powerful in naked abandon. The senses, the awareness, the commitment to be completely open to divine guidance, to drop the interference of the world of role, clothing, or protection, to surrender the more conventional ideas of self to the intention at hand. There’s that surrender with trust.

Spring 2010

I am up at sunrise. I give prayer and ask for guidance at the alter in my home. I have no plan, except perhaps a smudge, which is forgotten. I have DF with me, she with a similar intention. At the top of the mountain hill after the rocky falls, we will find a place that “feels” right and then go from there.

We walk up the desert mountain trail into the Tortolita Mountains. It is quite a climb and I have been fasting for the previous 24 hours. On the way, the course changes. It “feels” right to head up an entirely different direction, one that we haven’t yet explored. I know that we are intuitively on track.

A trail presents itself. It leads to an unusual crested saguaro cactus. This one has three crested arms, like I have never seen. To get a better look, we walk around it, and find an old jeep trail. There are old matate bowls in the granite surface of the trail, where Native Americans would grind with rounded rocks for hours over years. Near that, I follow a trail of broken pottery chards to a pile of them under a bush.

We then follow this remnant of a road to a hill top. We take in a wide vista in 360 degrees.

I feel I have learned something. There is such energy about. It is the energy of Spring. The desert flowers are in full bloom. These are exceptional times, only happening every few years when the rains have been perfect. When the getting’ is good the wildlife take advantage of their environment and make themselves stronger. Nature knows this. It is a part of nature  to act now, rather than when there are fewer advantages. I tell DF of my sense of this.

She goes off with some toilet paper. When she doesn’t return, I figure she has found her time and her walk, our intention.

I happen up a hill, a part of a ridge and discover a rock formation. It has a layer of quartz crystal. The sheet of quartz is broken into small cubic blocks. It appears well organized. I find another layer below this one, which obviously runs through the rock. If I lay here, it will provide me with a crystalline bed. I decided to stay and wait.

I get into the moment. I feel of the cubes as my body shapes to their stiff demanding form. The air floats by across my body and occasionally the cool of a passing breeze. I listen to its approach.

A birds wings are heard.

Next to me, I notice some small plants which are each unique, but of the same species. In a moment, I sense how these are wild and adapting to changes and with the energy of the earth, and I identify with that. The quartz stones are organized in contrast.

I begin to think how a potted plant is not a part of that natural energy. A potted bred plant is not in touch with the universal energies, the unfolding of the universe. They are all the same.

The unusual crested saguaro couldn’t be what it is without this process. People cannot be a part of this, or special, or unique and magnificent, if they are being trained to sit in comfortable pots organized for the benefit of another’s creation. I too must be free to expand with the universe, as is my nature. I look back to the cubic pieces of rock and see that they too are each actually unique.

Without the thoughts and its dialog around it, but in my sense, or notion, is identification with the wild plants as brothers and sisters in this moment. This moment has the more powerful connection and deeper understanding than the intellectual thought that came of it. It is like an exploding energy and the thoughts are the residue flying out from it, through the air, just bits and pieces.

I lay here, cradled by the rock at each side of my head, quietly. The birds come closer as I am still. I open one eye and look over my nose at a brave soul on a bush’s small branch, just above me. One of my fellows, a smaller bush, rubs against my bare shoulder. I feel great gratitude and a part of.

When it seems time to get up, I do. I glance over and notice DF in a small meadow surrounded by stone formations, nude, her hair down, talking to no one. She happens to begin to get around to leave, like myself. Our timing is a kind of synchronistic harmonious dance.

We meet. We share. She puts her hand on my heart. With mine on hers, she looks into my eyes and begins to cry out another story, her experience.

Her story has a message from a Gila Monster, who, as she sat in her spot, passed surprisingly close by, next to her. When we become nude in nature there is a closer connection, a greater awareness of our senses, a symbolic shedding of convention. These are tools and a key to a more connected sense of self, being and what is more than five senses, intuition.

The tool of nakedness is ancient. Sages, used it in ancient times walking the deserts of the mid-east. It has been ingrained in lives and ritual in many cultures, from the times of early man. For many, it is a part of vision quest and for some the rites of coming of age.

Just for the record, no drugs.

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