SMOKY MOUNTAINS 2014

Day 21

Increased consumption of fat and lot’s of rest equals increased energy. The equation is simple.

The horses bear us three women to the rocky base of the pass. We thank them and turn them loose to graze the clumps of bright green grass and continue on foot.

Leaving the trail we enter silence as our offering to the sacred Hidden Lakes. I am cleansed, body and spirit in the waters and wander the rocky slopes with that presence that this place always brings me.

Sun obscured, I walk my naked body dry before clothing myself again.

I write a love letter to limestone far away not thinking it strange to be in love with the rocks or the trees or the waters.

Chére Mamut,

I write to you from perhaps my most holy place. I call it Hidden Lakes and they lay nestled in a mountain basin not far but still in some ways infinitely distant from my home. This is a sacred place.

I have brought your gift here. The gift I have carried since the spring, the colored stone that has traveled with me daily and shared in my joy and wonder at this living Earth. I have bathed it in the waters; the boiling geyser at Yellowstone, the streams and rivers of the West, and now here, baptized in the calm, silky water of the uppermost Hidden Lake. It has walked with me through sweat lodge ceremony and held the essence of my prayers. I have clutched it together with your gift to me when fear and uncertainty have plagued me in my fragile moments.

I have felt your strength and it has carried me through, I have felt the essence of your chalky body both in my dreams and between my fingers clothed in the leather amulet around my neck.

Today I have been three weeks immersed in these mountains, my body nourished and clothed entirely by the wild.

The elements are carving their marks upon me and I become their stone to sculpt.

I am in love also with the granite that I sit upon this moment.

Sun come warm me, I shiver in the breeze.

The sun comes. Thank you sun and I lie in peaceful reverie, happy to know that this place exists.

I am in no hurry to return to camp so I wander the troughs and swells of the hidden valley.

That night we eat three cooked meals: wild stews prepared in the big clay pots and we plan to move camp in the morning.

Sunset at the ceremonial fire pit, beauty on the mountain and on the faces in the fading light. We speak again our thanks to the land and to the ancestral grandmothers from whose wombs we have come in unbroken lineage.

Excerpt - Return: A New Look at Ancient an unpublished manuscript by Lynx Vilden