MONUMENT VALLEY GO TO CHURCH MEETING is a short-story that may have happened long, long ago in another space and time in the past inside of my very self....call it fiction...then no one can say it never was...or is to be....

MONUMENT VALLEY GO TO CHURCH MEETING

So, in that time, Laura and Tonia were in Monument Valley to be part of an American Church Peyote Ceremony. Laura couldn't get over the idea, that had been witching around in her fertile brain all day and the night before, that this was all a movie set. The huge Tepee, the trailers outside of it, the whole scene was completely unfamiliar, very, very strange. She felt a little foolish. It wasn't actually possible for her to have more than a few sips of wine, before a silly fatigue and a light feeling of nausea and mild doom would actually settle upon her and in her. So, she was pretty clear that actually going into this Tepee at night was not going to happen for her...

There were lots of cheerful kids running around, and women and men standing and talking quietly, so she asked Tonia about the kids. It turned out that the kids were put to bed in the two trailers closest to the tent, so folks could hear if they were crying or whatever, and would come out and take care of them for awhile. This gave Laura something to do, is what she was thinking...she could baby-sit the kids in the trailers, while the people were doing the ceremonies and all in the Tepee. There were a great deal of negotiations about this idea, and then everyone agreed that would be fine. There was a white woman journalist who the Indians were all being very respectful towards, who said that, being older, she might come out and sleep with the older kids in the second trailer, to help, at some point during the night. Everyone was cool about that.

It took a long time to get all the kids settled down for the night, tho it was very late. Still, the people were all standing outside. They said they were waiting for the Grandfather, the Peyote Button, to come to the services. At some point they all started filing into the 'church', the Tepee. Tonia and the Elder Lady were last in. The tent door flap closed. She could see the folk's shadows around the fire, since the fire make the tent walls kind-of like a shadow screen, with the people moving around throwing their shadows pretty accurately on the walls. Drums began, maybe two of them. At least two men began wailing and chanting sounds of ceremony over and over. Laura stopped standing at the trailer window, and went inward to pick up one of the babies, who was crying.

The drums kept going. Laura gave two babies their bottles, and they drank them right down and fell back to sleep, after she changed their diapers. These were all a great bunch of kids, she was noticing. They were sleeping in little piles like puppies, all curled up together and quiet. They must hear drums often enough, she was thinking, and the wails and whines of the ceremonial languages in song. She was drifting herself in an old stuffed rocking chair, almost asleep. But then, another little one cried. All the other kids stirred a bit, and then went deeper into sleep, but the little one could not be consoled, and didn't want his bottle. She started walking him against her breasts, so that he could hear her heart beat while she walked. She had good ways of getting babies settled down. She knew how to be very patient. The inner workings of a baby take lots of time to settle down sometimes.

Laura was walking back and forth in front of the trailer window that looked out at the 'Church'. The shadows were more still, but occasionally a person would leave the flap door and go off into the bushes to pee or to vomit, all a part of contact with the peyote, which took a lot out of a person for all it gave, she thought. There would be muffled drum sounds, and then soft calls and chants...some of the sounds were like bird noises and singings. Everything was stiller then, for awhile, even the shadows.

A woman who Laura remembered seeing before, came out of the Tepee flap. She had a bucket of water and a ladle. No one else came with her. Laura felt suddenly very still herself, and the baby was breathing quietly asleep on her breasts. She stood there very quietly looking out of the dusty window.

The woman ladled out one scoop of water, and silently, but with lips moving softly in ways that might not be heard, murmured to a direction...North? Laura wasn't sure. She bowed her head to the direction, and tossed the ladle-full of water in that way. Then she did the same movements and murmurs to the other three directions. She looked up. She saw Laura standing with the baby in her arms in the window of the old trailer. Scooping up a ladle of water, the woman tossed it toward the trailer, smiling softly. Laura smiled back, and bowed her head down and up in respect. The woman went back into the tent with the bucket and the ladle. She had looked kind of beautiful...middle aged and substantial, with black hair hanging down simply to her shoulders, with ordinary, plain clothes, not ceremonial dress.

Laura put the baby back in the little crib he slept in. Exhausted and yet, somehow, a bit refreshed, she fell asleep in the old sofa next to the puppy-pack of kids sleeping and gently breathing as safe animals in the night...

She and the kids slept a few hours, and then it was dawn. Some of the service's participants were slowly coming out of the Tepee, exhausted, but peaceful. No one smoked right away, Laura noticed, looking out of the window. The sun was just rising over the monuments of stone in the valley. The tepee walls became a dull, opaque white, no longer almost transparent as they had been in the night. No one looked newly awake or groggy from drug use, as Laura had expected them to look. She felt like they looked, to her, preoccupied, quiet, at ease on the planet, part of it, yet not part of it. Life just flowing through, and without them... She thought they might be feeling that, the way she was. It was just a guess. The delusions and illusions they had gone through had not been hers. More to the point, no powerful substance had coursed through her blood stream and bathed her cells with its own life...no spiritual journey had been made or experienced or even imagined.

The parents began to come into the trailer to pick up their kids. They thanked her, she noticed, with a certain dignity. She was feeling pretty happy about the whole experience, the part that had been hers. It hadn't been scary or weird at all. It had been gentle and kind and very non-intrusive, which most religious ceremonies didn't feel at all like, in her experience. Jars and bottles of water were being passed around. Little was being said, but what was said was quite friendly, in a gentle way. A few ladies were inside of the Tepee, which looked ordinary, like nothing had gone on inside of it's large roundness at all. They were heating up a big kettle of lamb stew over the slow remains of the fire in the center pit.

Tonia was with the ladies. She smiled gently up at Laura, and she looked fine, just tired, like everyone was. She asked Laura how the night had gone, and Laura told her. Then Tonia asked if she had got the gist of what the ceremonies and so on had been. Laura told her about the shadows and the chants and the drums. Tonia told her that the Elder Lady had stayed with it for the whole service. Everyone was feeling a lot of respect for her, because it hadn't been easy...Then Laura told Tonia about seeing the woman outside of the Tepee with the water bucket and the ladle....

Tonia was suddenly very awake.
What did you see;
I saw a lady come out, and she ladled water in the four directions. I think she was praying, maybe. Then she threw some water towards the trailer, when she saw me holding one of the babies in the window frame...
Laura. That was CHANGING WOMAN. NO ONE at the rites EVER sees Changing Woman. No one is SUPPOSED to see her! I don't believe this!
Well, I saw the lady, and it happened. You can ask her.
I can' ask her! She doesn't exist now! The lady she was in won't even remember her!

Tonia looked at Laura very closely, not unkindly, but with a strange look on her face.
I don't understand. You always get to see these things and do these things. I work for years to be worth one sight, one sound, that you get to have for nothing! I just don't understand this!

Laura sighed. This was an old saw between her and Tonia. There was nothing to be done about it. Everything just happened the way it did, without explanations or directions or hindsight attached at all. There really wasn't anything to say, so Laura said this instead:

Come on, Tonia. I'll drive us to the cafe in town. Lamb in the morning will just do your stomach in, and I can't eat it at all. I'll treat breakfast.

Tonia got up quietly, her face a little more at ease.
There really is no explanation for any of this stuff, is there.
No, Tonia, I don't think so anyway.

They drove away slowly. The sun kept rising, and the Tepee got smaller in the distance behind them. The monument stones of the valley were turning gold and scarlet in the sun. Some of them sparkled. The sun's rays shot out like water from a ladle, blessing all four directions, all of them at once....