Zuni

When distant from it ten or twenty miles, it is hard to believe that the effect is produced by contrasting colors, for the peak seems to glow with a light of its own.

In centuries past, the San Francisco Plateau was the home of Pueblo-building tribes, and the ruins of their habitations are widely scattered over this elevated region.

Thousands of little dwellings are found, usually built of blocks of basalt.

In some cases, they were clustered in little towns, and three of these deserve further mention.

These are known as coulees, and sometimes from these coulees cinder cones arise.

This valley of the Little Colorado is also the site of many ruins, and the villages or towns found in such profusion were of much larger size than those on the San Francisco Plateau.

Some of the Pueblo building peoples yet remain.

The Zuni Indians still occupy their homes, and they prove to be a most interesting people.

This teacup, this bug, that damned leaky faucet, it can just as authentically mean imagination with a capital I in the sense of infinite creative potential, the realm We enter in zazen, when body and mind fall away, emptiness that's neither dull nor static but free, that is empty of all limitation, that is a realm of infinitely creative potential out of which we dream, create, are unique, daily, inevitably repeated, moment by moment, breath by breath, thought form by thought form, It is where the highest we can imagine is the same as what simply is.

This is the kind of state you might experience watching the night dances at Zuni Pueblo, where plants, birds, thoughts, galaxies and stars enter the plaza as living, dancing beings.

There is a dream dreaming us, is a Bushman saying.

It is the empty realm of reality.

To a red mesa on the horizon that the people call Corn Mountain.

To the place the Zuni have always called Halona Etiwana, The Middle Place.

This is the story of WeWha, who lived between worlds and carried her people's dignity all the way to the White House and home again.

Imagine, if you will, the year eighteen seventy-nine.

You are standing at the edge of Zuni Pueblo in the territory of New Mexico before it is a state.

The sun is going down behind you, and the light on the walls has turned the color of honey.

The rooms of the village rise one on top of another, and wooden ladders lean against them.

Smoke is rising in thin blue threads from a dozen chimneys and folding itself into the dusk.