Serpent Rock

Whew!!!  What a month this has been.  It started out with the last “Tools for Transition” workshop that I did through Rise Multiversity on August 27^th, not to mention all of the mushroom hunting and trips up into the mountains during August and early September.  Then we had our Labor Day Holiday here in the US.  Then preparing for and hosting a marvelous group of students learning the Quantum Sphere Healing protocol last weekend.  I am so blessed when a group comes together so nicely as this one did.  That makes my teaching job so much easier.  We even had one student whose glasses broke right on her face during the final healing journey.  She was sitting quietly and felt a lot of vibrating right before that happened. 

After a one day break to catch up, I spent 2 days with my friend Virginia and her research group out in the canyonlands of SE Utah doing archeoastronomy work.  The first day provided us with ideal weather, but by the second day the weather had turned and now a cold front has passed through bringing lots of early snow to the local mountains and cold and clammy weather down here. 

On Thursday night, I had scheduled a shamanic fire ceremony here at my house in honor of the Vernal Equinox.   The day was extremely windy with gusts as high as 40 miles per hour with more of that and big rain coming in later that evening.  I was looking at contingency plans in case we couldn’t have the fire.  Miraculously, the skies totally cleared up and the wind totally died down by the time we went outside around 7:30 PM.  I call that “shaman magic”!!!  I’ve never had to cancel a ceremony because of bad weather.  Several of us noticed a portal that opened up above the group, and also the strong presence of various star nations as we were around the fire.  In fact it was so nice outside that night that after the fire was finished, we all sat on my lawn in the dark and enjoyed a superior view of the brilliant stars and the Milky Way Galaxy overhead. 

Getting back to my trip to the canyons, the photo above is of one of the rock art panels that we found.  It is a good size, being about 1.5 by 3 feet.  It was found just down the road from the big monolith that we worked with during Summer Solstice and on the back side of the hill with all of the other rock art.  Clearly, this was a ceremonial center and calling in the monsoon rains was a big part of that.  The symbolism of the serpent is probably the most common to all cultures on the planet.  In this case, I will venture to say that the aspect of the serpent energy that was used here was that of the spirit of the clouds, and the thunder and lightning.   A Snake Dance may have been done to call in the monsoon rains around the time of the Summer Solstice.  This was to guarantee the fertility of the corn, beans and squash so that a bountiful harvest would ensue in the fall.  The rock art that we were looking at on Tuesday dates back to the Basketmaker III period of 500-750 AD, and very likely even further back to the Basketmaker II era. 

Below is the framework for a very old sweat lodge that we saw in a nearby area that we were scouting out.  Note the pile of rocks in the foreground.  This is not as old as the rock art, and most likely dates to the contemporary Navajo or Ute tribes that passed through this land. 

So now I feel like I can finally take a deep breath and get back to a more leisurely and introspective pace of life.  Time to photograph the fall colors, as the aspen trees in the mountains are starting to look good.