Every picture is biographical.
Back in 1996, I was living in Santa Fe. My then-girlfriend and I were out for a drive through La Cienega and (as usual) we were bickering about something.
As the argument escalated, I suddenly spotted this church up ahead, and the tombstone practically jumped out at me. I took the first shot through the windshield, the second on the ground.
We made up.
"Ghost town." The words evoke images of dusty streets with tumbleweeds rolling down them, the batwing doors of a barn flapping in the wind, rattlesnakes scuttling under wooden sidewalks at the approach of the thirsty traveler.
But not every ghost town resembles the set of a cowboy movie, or dates back to the days of the buckaroos.
Although Bodie was, in fact, a boomtown founded in the middle of the 19th century, it didn't become a "ghost" until well into the 20th.
At its peak in the 1870s and 80s, it had "two banks, four volunteer fire companies, a brass band, a railroad, miner's and mechanic's unions, several daily newspapers, ... a jail [and] 65 saloons..." according to the Wikipedia article. It also had a red-light district, a Chinatown complete with a Taoist temple, and of course a cemetery.
As the boom faded, it matured into a family-oriented place, complete with two churches, a school, a railway from south of Mono Lake, and electrification.
In 1912, the last newspaper closed, signaling the beginning of the end. The town hung on, though, until the last mine closed in 1942, by order of the U.S. government as a wartime measure that halted all gold-mining operations. The post office closed the same year.
After that the place needed to be protected from vandalism, with the owners of the town placing caretakers there.
It became a state historic park in 1962.
El Santuario de Chimayo was built between 1814 and 1816.
It is famed for the small hole in a side room which contains "holy dirt." Numerous cures have been attributed to it.
The site became a focus-point in 1810, when Don Bernardo Abeyta, a local "Penitente" (member of a flagellant sect) saw a light shining out of the ground. (It was Good Friday night, and he was out performing "penances" nearby.) Approaching the light, he dug down on the spot until he found a crucifix.
Other locals came to witness the miracle, and the priest in nearby Santa Cruz was summoned. He took the crucifix (in procession, of course) back to his church, where it was placed on the main altar.
The next morning, it was gone, having returned during the night to Chimayo.
A second and third time the crucifix was removed and returned, until it became clear that the "Lord of Esquipulas" wished to remain where he had been found, so a small chapel was built; the one we see today was an enlarged version built just a few years later.
(I have heard this story of a "flying crucifix," with variations, told about statues and paintings all over the Southwest, as well as both statues and bells in Japan and China.)
As for the healing dirt: People rub it on ailing parts of their body, or mix it in water and drink it. There is an anteroom filled with canes, crutches, and written testimony of healings. As the earth is taken away constantly (statistics indicate 300,000 visitors a year at the Santuario), the hole is frequently and unabashedly replenished from a pile of "blessed" earth outside the building.
No one seems to mind.
If you know me, ask me sometime about how my father was "healed" at Chimayo (and my mother and I almost died--laughing--as a result).
I once had a girlfriend who worked for Nestle. We took a few trips, she at company expense, me tagging along. One time we went to Chicago. (As I recall, it was my 40th birthday weekend in July of 1995 when I lived with the Urichs in Utah.)
Anyway, while the gf was working, I scooted around central Chicago visiting museums, and the famous "Bundy Fountain."
My favorite place, though, was the Field Museum of Natural History. I've always been a sucker for that kind of thing.
Here is my favorite view inside the museum:
Who looks more astonished, the brachiosaurus at seeing the woman? Or vice versa? (And who is that woman anyway?)
I've read that the dinosaur is no longer there, having been moved to the airport to make way for Sue the T. Rex. Chicagoans: true?
In early January of 2004, as I was preparing to move to China, I attended a very L.A. event.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) had sponsored an exhibition of Buddhist art called "The Circle of Bliss." In association with that exhibition, they sponsored a group of Tibetan monks to create an 8-foot-across sand mandala.
The "Circle of Bliss" Mandala
The outer edge of the mandala represents the world where we live. As one enters more deeply into the circle, one moves through various levels of symbolism, until at last one reaches the center, which represents the union of compassion and wisdom--in other words, Nirvana or "Bliss."
The mandala was created in October, over a period of several weeks. As a rule, such mandalas are created and then immediately destroyed, symbolizing impermanence. The creation of the mandala itself is a meditation, and the benefits to be had are in the making; the image itself is but a by-product.
LACMA kept its mandala on display for over two months. The event that I attended that Sunday was the destruction and dispersal of the mandala.
The Beginning of the End of the Mandala
After a ceremony of chanting by six monks, the sand of the mandala was swept up. Small boxes of the sand were given to all of the attendees, and the remainder was taken to the Pacific to be spread upon the waters, distributing the "bliss" represented by the mandala throughout the world. (I brought my sand home and placed it on my garden shrine.)
Gone, Gone, Absolutely Gone...
One of the things that strikes me about this whole process is the integrated thinking it represents.
On one level, a bunch of guys in robes play in the sand, then destroy their creation, like boys at the beach building a sand castle and then bombarding it.
But the participants--and the remarkably large crowd attending--see in this process a prayer, a blessing, a fulfillment of human potential. Even scoffers lined up to get their little box of sand.
What this tells me is that metaphors are powerful, and the ability to see beyond the literal to the transcendent is a liberating power that frees us from the mundanity of our lives and opens us out to cosmic vistas.
At Wilshire and Fairfax, next to the Tar Pits.
When I worked in Tokyo, I had a counterpart in our Osaka office named Alex May. (Alex, if you Google yourself and find this, get in touch!) Anyway, because we had the same job, when he was busy, I was busy; when he was free, so was I.
This allowed for long, leisurely e-mail conversations during work hours.
Once, he pitched me a rare and wonderful idea. Our two cultures, he said (he was Australian, I from English-speaking North America) were the world's two "fake cultures."
How so, I asked?
Well, he said, our cultures lie atop the land, without penetrating it. We have no sacred wells, no holy hills, no trees that are worshiped.
He's right, and I really felt this in Japan, where the land has been so heavily sacralized.
Before I ever "went East," I fell in love with the "non-Western" cultures of Mexico and the American Southwest. They have adopted Christianity--to a point. But just under the surface still lie the ancient beliefs.
Frank Waters, a Southwest author, wrote of a tribe in northern Mexico that was usually resistant to Christianity, and how they oddly had embraced one particular church. There was an earthquake, and the altar tumbled over, and under it was found a squat stone idol.
Thus, Waters concluded, when the Indians were bringing flowers and otherwise venerating that place, they were actually giving tribute to (I still remember his exact words) "the deep pool of unconscious that underlies all religion."
Yeah.
The popular image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, too, pays tribute to the ancient beliefs. Although ostensibly Mary, the Mother of God, in fact the image we see first appeared on a hill formerly occupied by the temple of the Aztec earth goddess Tonantzin.
If you look carefully at the image, she is standing on a crescent moon, surrounded by the rays of the sun, in a robe decorated with stars.
Who else could she be?
She is venerated throughout the Americas (and even in the Philippines). These images were shot at a roadside shrine in Baja California on a December, 1990, trip when I drove the length of the peninsula.
Six years ago, my good friend Prince Roy and his wife and I took a "road trip" down to San Diego.
Another friend of mine had become "Thich Chan Phap Vu," a monk in the engaged Buddhism tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh. Chan Phap Vu was staying at Deer Park Monastery near Escondido before going to France to stay at the order's Plum Tree Village, where "Thay" (an affectionate name for Thich Nhat Hanh, meaning "master" or "teacher") has lived since he was exiled from his homeland in Vietnam.
Before the monastery was located at Deer Park, the land had had many uses. It was once a camp of some kind, and the old buildings had even been used as a police department shooting range.
It's much more peaceful now. I have always loved the California "dryscape," the chaparral and scrub ecology that covers much of the state. It looks fabulous as a backdrop to mild touches of Asian design. Enjoy these images.
A gateway. Note the use of natural
materials and the minimalist design,
against a crappy old pressboard bungalow.
Stone lantern and lush lawn in
the foreground, dry hills beyond.
The lotus pond especially caught the eye
(and heart) in that environment.
Guanyin, bodhisattva of
compassion, in a natural setting.
Some laymen play cards, while the abbot
and a visiting laywoman eat watermelon.
