For years it was my Plymouth Rock. The red rocks called out to me through the ethers. Come back, come back, they would say and I would find pictures of them to stare at day after day after day while sitting on the 23rd floor of a glass office building at the corner of Bay and King Street in downtown Toronto.
I can’t remember when the call first came but the first time I went was in February 1997 to a women’s conference at the Poco Diablo Resort. I flew into Phoenix and rented a car. The drive was intense up the highway to Sedona but the reward was worth the long travel. I cried at the sight of the beautiful Bell Rock that sat like a giant tiered bell or a strangely shaped flying saucer by the side of the road. The pilgrimage included stops at Cathedral Rock, Boynton Canyon which had been in my dreams. I ditched the conference and fled to the canyons instead, drinking in their dry ancientness, their energy that sparked an inward pull deep into soul territory. I wanted to speak to no one. I reveled in the walks to the vortex sites of power. I surveyed the horizon from atop the mesas. Even the church was a place of great earth energy and a necessary step on the pilgrimage.
That first trip was just a taste of years of traveling almost annually for a while to Sedona. The red rocks called, and I followed. Later in grad school I argued in a paper that Sedona was our modern day oracle site, like Delphi was in Ancient Greece. A place of pilgrimage and power.
And even though I haven’t been back in about 4 years, the red rocks still seduce me and I wonder and plot how soon before I can find myself there again, how soon before the pilgrimage wakes up again and the voice of the earth opens again to bring me in to drink of her richness, her ancientness exposed against the walls of her mesas. How soon before I sit at the base of Kachina Rock and watch the lizards scamper against the rock face . How soon before I go up to Airport Mesa and watch the sunset fall behind the peaks in the distance. How soon?
