The Stones are Bones

Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (not my photograph)

     On a recent visit to Chaco Canyon here in New Mexico, I was sitting in the plaza in the ruins known as Pueblo Bonito, staring up at the cliffs of sandstone and the many ancient faces that can be seen there.  I was terribly sick at the time with Strep throat and Bronchitis and should have not even gone on this trip, but I felt utterly compelled that I needed to come to Chaco.  Perhaps it was a stupid decision, sick as I was, and as contagious as I was (I ended up getting my companions sick as well, which I feel horrible about) but I knew I needed to be here.  
     I was leaning up against one of the walls, seeking a bit of shade from the too bright afternoon sun and staring up at the faces in the rock.  I was feeling very out of sorts, not only in my physical body but in my energetic and emotional bodies as well.  When I had visited Chaco once before, and very briefly, I had had a profound sense of a past life here, a deep connection to the land and to the ruins of a once large and thriving civilization.  I felt that connection still, but as sick as I was I was having a hard time sorting through everything I was experiencing.  So I leaned against the wall in the scant shade and saw the faces of the ancients in the cliffs, felt their spirits around me, and I felt so weary.  Not only weary from being sick, but intensely world weary.  
     I had lost my little sister Cindy to what amounted, in the end, to a freak accident only eight months previously.  I had handled her death fairly well and felt at peace with it, but her loss, and the losses of the loved ones of others, the tragedies happening in nature, the environment, and the state of things in the world in general left me feeling pretty bleak in that moment.  I began sending out a prayer to the ancients I felt around me, to the great oneness that is the Universe, and before I could even start to voice what was in my heart, before I could even understand what I really wanted, or needed, I felt gentle laughter emanate through the rocks and through me.  More in feeling rather than actual words I felt the phrase "The Stones are Bones" in my very being, and a huge sense of stillness and peace washed through me.  In that moment I experienced only what can be called a "download" of thought and feeling, more than I could process at the time.  What I felt more than anything was the deepest connection to All That Is, in the sense that there was no time, no space, no right or wrong.  Everything in the Universe was exactly as it should be.  It always had been, and it always would be, so nothing else mattered but this exact moment.

     The rocks are the bones of the Earth, the same bones that are in my body.  What difference is there except the make-up of atoms?  The wind is my breath, the same that sighed softly through the canyon.  The rain was my tears, my sweat.  The rivers and streams my blood.  The vast ocean my womb, my heartbeat.  My spirit was the whole of the world...no, the whole of the Universe.  The same as there was no difference between the rocks and my bones, there was no difference between me and the Universe.  None whatsoever.  So the ancients found it gently amusing my all too human distress at the state of things in the world.  
     The rocks had always been here, even when they were but sand in the ocean, even when there was no ocean, nor any planet Earth.  Time would wear the rocks away to sand again, and eventually to even baser mineral components, but they would still be here.  All things had always been here, and always would be.  Change is inevitable, the ancients told me.  All things change their form, their shape given enough time.  The change was the beauty of life, of living.  What did the rocks care if they were a cliff side, or wall shaped by the hands of inventive and ingenious ancient peoples, or the concrete struts of a sky scraper?  Life celebrates change, flows with it, adapts to it with grace and joy.  Species dies out and new ones adapt.  Climates shift and change according to the rhythms of the Earth.  Nothing is ever really destroyed, only changed, and there is no "good" or "bad" about it.  
     My sister had died, and it was neither good nor bad, it was only change, and because of that it was joyous.  SHE was joyous in her new form, and soon she would go on to another.  As I would do the same one day, and will everyone that I love.  We cannot lose one another because there is nothing to lose.  Because we are, all of us, small parts of the great whole, and yet we ARE the great whole ourselves, forever a part of everything that is.  The stones are our bones, and one day they will be dust that will return to stone again.  We are endlessly changing, as is the world, the cosmos, the Universe.  There is no fear in change as it is neither good nor bad, but joyous, and there is only ever Now, which should always be celebrated.

     Sitting in Pueblo Bonito, I felt the ancients with me and knew they had never left.  I had never left, because I was still there.  In all things, in every place, I am still there, and I always will be.  The world will change, life will change, and it will be joyous because that is the nature of change, even change we find difficult to understand or see as "good".  Life is amazing, the world is beautiful, and I am utterly blessed to be exactly where I am, right now. 

"One day you're waiting for the sky to fall,
The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all"
- Bruce Cockburn