Birthday cake!
And what a party it was! A group of Mayan dancers twirled and circled in the dark garden, censing all of us with sweet-smelling smoke, blowing a horn that set the neighborhood dogs barking and ending with a rose petal scattering that gave all of us petals in our hair.
Then Doug and his friends played music and people got up and danced. I read a few pages from the introduction to my latest book, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters (Sarabande Books) and Doug read from his memoir that included a stanza from a ballad: it’s the cracks that let the light in…
Our friends from Canyon de Chelly, Esther and Daniel, drove from Arizona, and Daniel delivered the birthday blessing, for all of us, in Navajo.
They were our guides and companions on the Earthwalks September trip to Canyon de Chelly; Daniel ran the sweat lodge, and his extraordinarily calm and focused presence was the same here as it was there. And Esther gave me the story of the Monster Slayer, whose image hangs on the wall in a Navajo rug.
It’s a complicated story and I probably don’t have it right, but it seems to involve a woman who was impregnated by her brother and gave birth to twins, who later began to ask her about their father… initiating a search and resulting in the brothers killing monsters, one of them a huge bird whose wing is preserved in Shiprock, another a monster whose blood is represented by a lava flow.
That night, as I picked a tiny blossom out of my hair, I reflected on how blessed I am in the people who have come and continue to come into my life here in Santa Fe…
The band
The birthday boy
Dancer’s regalia
I bet! ?