the totality of the vision

 

faith in stone

in the high interior of New Mexico,

in the middle of desert,

with little water, and little ease to the living,

ancestral Puebloans fought dissolution and entropy

with the substance of what they could do with their lives,

what we now call Chaco Canyon came to be the Mother

that tens of thousands of people knew,

they who created structures of stone and structures of thought

that saw the truth beneath it all,

and let it be realized upon the Earth,

we saw today, and marveled, upon the extraordinary reality of their work,

in the hundreds of thousands of stones cut from the mesa

and organized into physical structures to express

the abstract structures of the astronomical, of the divine,

of who they realized that of God to be

and of how that spiritual truth should be noticed and expressed,

and the greatest of these divine expressions I know of

is the totality of Chaco Canyon,

how gratifying and intimidating

to see how fully people can live their faith.

by Henry H. Walker

March 9, ‘26