Nuhuakalda

the mountain is a seed

When I reached my arm into the water, I found pebbles and then rocks and finally a thick layer of compact clay, grey and black, speckled with tiny shining stones that came from high up on the mountain long ago. I squished the clay between my hands, saw how it held the markings of my fingerprints and the lines of my palms. I rolled it into a ball, squished it again, left it in the tall grass beside the spring.

I reached my arm in again, moving the stones and clay, up to my shoulder in water, the heaven-sent sound of splashing liquid echoing through the dry meadow, and I found the bottom. I scooped the clay out, pile after pile of perfect pottery clay. I shook out the rocks and pebbles and then the water started bubbling up in a new way, filling faster than it did before. I thought about copper and jade. The miracle of water. The smell of scorched earth.

I moved the long skinny irrigation pipe to the dead and golden grass, let it run there for a while. A few butterflies came to drink. A white one and later a black and orange speckled one. Thirsty.

There’s new neighbors down and across the road from me now. Bought the mulit-million dollar property about half a year ago. They’ve put in new roads, fences, little signs that say the name of their ranch posted up on the trees all along the road. A few days ago I noticed they put up a surveillance camera about a mile up the unmaintained forest service road, behind one of their new shiny black gates. They come up to drink and target practice, ride their machines around. I hear all different kinds of guns. Shot after shot after shot, firing at the small metal target, sometimes erupting in a loud PING that echoes through the hills. Hours and hours of shooting.

They are shooting as I clean out my spring, as a I leave an offering to the setting sun, as I make a giveaway to the good spirits that have blessed my life.

They don’t understand that the mountain is a seed.

To the Kogi people of northern Columbia, mountains are the sacred houses that keep inside them the infinite potentiality of creation itself - the dark womb of life. Inside the mountains and high peaks is the inner-other world that supports all of life. It was said that in times of old, when the especially knowledgeable Mamas, or spiritual leaders of the Kogi, gave payments at the sacred sites in those mountains, they could manifest food out from the Nuhuakalda, like fish from the sea. Nuhuakalda is the nutrient-dense field of potentiality, where all things come from, and with which the Kogi have, for generations, learned from and communicated with on a daily basis.

To the Kogi, the mountains are very sacred - where creation begins.

The mountains are houses of knowledge. The peaks are the where life began, through the lakes, and cascading downwards, all of life came to be. All knowledge can be found within the black inner world that lives inside the mountains. This knowledge is communicated to humans through the trees or from inside high mountain caves, and through the fasting and protocol that the tribes of the Sierra Nevada have fostered for hundreds if not thousands of years.

And they say that when someone damages a mountain, like in mining or fracking, or mindless destruction of its environment, the Nuhuakalda drains out of the mountain and weakens the entire landscape. The knowledge and spiritual potentiality leaks out, leaves the land, evaporates.

To the Kogi it is very serious business to damage any aspect of the ecosystem.

The land is not a place to recreate, take, own, do with what you like.

Just like a woman. A woman is not a place to recreate, take, own, do with what you like. She is not a voiceless bystander of your entitlement. She, like the earth, is a conscious living being, with rights and gifts and moods. You don’t cut a woman where you want, stick needles in her, plug up her veins, severe her limbs, drain her fluids out, excavate her organs. To the Kogi, there is no difference. Chopping off the top of a hill is the same as cutting a finger off the Great Mother.

The Kogi are like Chinese pulse-readers of the ecosystem - understanding a landscape as anatomy, a mountain as a spiritual storehouse of knowledge, and a river as a living thread of the Great Mother’s thought.

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I feel like an old lizard living up here in this heat. Coming out from another timeline, beneath a rock, rubbing my eyes in wild disbelief at the times we find ourselves living in.

But I guess that’s why we’re here. To make something good out of all of this.

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