Abstract
In an expanded version of an op-ed that highlighted a trip I took with a long-time friend, Larry Allums, I reflect on our experience of silence and centering during a visit to Pueblo Bonito, situated in Chaco Canyon in Northwest New Mexico in 2023. The experience for both of us brought us to reflect deeply on our cultural impulses toward distractions and outward actions that leave little or no room for inward pilgrimage to the center of who we are. Centering seems like a lost art of contemplation, of occasionally taking a measure of who we are and what our place in the world invites us to become. At Chaco Canyon, we entered the sacred space of its architecture. The rooms of Pueblo Bonito opened to the sky and to the kivas, underground mandala circles that may have been places of worship, of communal reflections, and rituals. We found in our pilgrimage a silence and deepening for which our daily lives make little space or time. We left the ancient pilgrimage site with a felt sense of the mystery of nature herself and of being embraced by the buildings and the desert as oases for renewal.
Published Version
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