It was May of 2007, just days from my 50th birthday, that I climbed up a narrow precarious gulley in the Utah desert.   Although I was alone during the climb I felt as if I was in a place as inhabited as any city.  The presence of people was strong there because logic told me this was the only way to go and had been for centuries.  When humans lived here before, this is the route they took.  There may as well have been a sidewalk or a set of stairs leading up the sandstone wash.     

Morning broke into full light and I stumbled out onto a plateau in the desert.   High cliffs raised to my left and narrow tracks ran off across the dried catabolic soil to my right.  Some of these tracks were centuries old, directing me to a huge monolithic butte called Turks Head.  A raven landed on the rocks nearby and called to me mockingly.  He rocked back and forth with impatience and seemed intelligent far beyond what his tiny bird head could be capable of.  I moved out onto the plain ahead of me feeling as comfortable as if I was jogging in my own suburban neighborhood. To the southeast I looked into The Labyrinth.  A series of interwoven canyons in the middle of the Canyonland National Park.  It was like looking directly into the inside of the Earth with her red ribs jutting up to the sky.  I jogged up past Turks Head, my raven friend noisily flapping about, keeping his distance, and came to the edge of the cliffs that overlooked the green river.  A lush delta stood out below me and built into the cliffs at my feet were homes.  People, ancient ones, had built cliff dwellings overlooking what must have been their little farms below.  

There in the desert something in my mind went click.  My perspective of the world was altered.  I walked into a place so familiar yet so unexpected that I simply could not grasp it.  There was just too much to take in at so many levels.  I had to change my thinking to grasp the significance.  I became somebody different in that moment.  Somebody who for which the world no longer existed as a separate reality.  It was if I had stepped into my own body and it had been there standing in the desert all along.  

His protest finished, the raven flew away.  I checked my watch and realized that my party of river travelers was leaving soon.  I realized I was only one of millions of men and women throughout time who had that feeling - that feeling that we needed to get back - even though that just meant back to the place we would soon be leaving.  In a few hours I would be swept away by the rivers current, taking my place in the stern of my canoe, bantering with others in my party-clan-family, heading off to new explorations and new adventures.  This moment was gone in time but forever frozen inside me. 

Since then I have taken my place in more than my canoe.   I've learned to live closer to my beliefs, and to look at and live in the world outside of that Utah desert.  I live in my own city just as if it were the ancient home of other peoples.  Indeed, I know that it is.  I have examined the influence of people now gone 1500 years and people gone 6 months and I have found that their effect on my present life is more than tangible.  I've learned that we are all people, interlocked in time, passing along our existence through each other as a warm echo, a wave through humanity.  We have only the one gulley to ascend into the desert.  It's the same one used for centuries by many strangers but not people necessarily strange to us.  It's the way we rise, guided by the raven, to see deeply into the heart of the Earth, to find our place, and see (just a glimpse) of what is in our own hearts.   It is there that we first step into and take up residence in our own bodies, only to realize we have been standing there not only for our lifetimes, but for many lifetimes before.

Russ Woodward