This evening, the world will collectively cross a threshold, bidding farewell to spring even as it greets the first night of summer. They call it the Summer Solstice, and traditions the world over mark it as a moment of symbolic significance.
For us, this will be one of the hottest days of the year, summer having decided to present itself here a few days in advance of the calendar’s formal arrival date. There is much to do with the land, with earth of which it is made, but most of it will be delayed a few days more, until the scorching temperatures recede a bit.
Summer is a time of great activity here, despite the heat: The day-to-day duties of the ceremonial season are largely past; the people here are preparing for the powwow that is now only some three weeks distant. Thereafter, work will begin in earnest in the old village, as masons patch and plaster the millennial structures, mudding in and resurfacing the adobe walls in preparation for the feast of San Geronimo in the fall — and, in eminently practical terms, to repair the damage of the winter just past and shore up the old homes in preparation for the winter to come.
For peoples whose existences are bound so inextricably with the land, with the soil itself, it’s no surprise that they should regard earth as sacred space. It is, after all, the very stuff of which their collective home is made, a material as indigenous to this place as they are themselves. It’s no accident that their most sacred chamber is one built in the earth itself, a center of culture and ceremony from which history and tradition emerge as one.
By the same token, it is no doubt no accident that the village’s more modern manifestation of the sacred assumes an earthen form. The mission church is by far the newest, youngest structure in the village, but it was built out of the same soil that forms the building blocks of the much more ancient homes.
The architects appear to have had an eye, consciously or otherwise, for the subversive power of symbol, too: The detail of the building, particularly of its curtilage, speaks in the hushed tones of an ancient tongue, one that needs no reduction to the written form and that describes a world far beyond the reckoning of those who demanded a monument to a faraway god, a deity whose link to this place was forged along the edge of a sword.
It’s no accident that Wings captured this image from this particular vantage point: not a view from the outside looking inward to the church, but one from beyond the church’s outer walls, looking through the courtyard threshold in reverse, eyes drawn to the much older village and still more ancient mountains beyond.
It’s no accident that he titled this image The Real Sacred Space.
The arch, a doorway of sorts, that serves as the photo’s focal point is the entryway to the courtyard of the church — and the exit back to the outer area of plaza, village, and lands beyond the church’s reach. The doorway itself is an opening with no actual door, permitting free ingress and egress, free movement in and out and through its frame. and it has been carved out of an earthen arch, one made of the same brick and mortar, mud and plaster, as the rest of the village structures, but one with a unique shape: an arch that rises above the opening, then flows downward on its upper edge in a pattern recognizeable even to outsiders from the symbolism peoples’ pottery and other arts, that known as the kiva steps. And centered at the top is a cross that is not precisely a cross, composed as it is of four spokes of roughly equal length: spokes that radiate to the Four Sacred Directions, extending to and encompassing the powers and forces of the earth, of Mother Earth herself.
In Wings’s view and vision, that symbol of the Four Sacred Directions arrays its spokes against the backdrop of earth and sky, of the golden red dust of the plaza and the green blanket of the mountains and the white thunderheads arising into the blue of the summer sky.
Whether writ small in the tiny grains of dust that form this land itself, or writ large as the wider world we call, collectively, our Mother, it is earth as sacred space.
~ Aji
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