The Little Wooden Man Day 2 of 30 days of continuous writing

 

The Little Wooden Man

It is 3:22 in the morning, and the desert will not let me sleep. Crashed in bed around 10 pm and now wide awake since three.

My feet are burning from the inside out, twenty-four thousand steps, twelve miles of sacred ground pressed into the soles of me, and I lie here in the dark knowing that sleep is not what this body is asking for. It is asking for a witness, for words for a story.  So, I close my eyes and let the day come back, turn on my voice recording app, with the bedroom window open, listening to the early birds begin to wake in the trees, and start recounting my thoughts and impressions of yesterday.

The Green Lights Knew

After returning home from Taliesen, I had a couple of hours to work on a few altar elements for the next event and then remembered that The 51 had been torn open, resurfaced, exposed like a wound the city was trying to heal. So, I decided to leave earlier and take the surface streets to the museum. I turned onto Camelback and made my way east, texting Lisa that my colleague was joining in building the altar, that I'd be late, bracing for the slow crawl of Saturday afternoon. But something else had other plans.

From Twentieth and Camelback to Forty-Fourth Street, every single traffic light turned green before I could stop. Every single one. A river of green, opening ahead of me like the desert parting for something it recognized.

This can't be, I laughed to myself.

But Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan would have known. He would have said: the road was dreaming you forward. The lights were not a coincidence. They were in agreement. The day had already decided what it was going to be, and it was clearing the path.

Beside me, riding shotgun in the passenger seat with my wide-brimmed Taliesin hat tipped over his ancient face, sat my little wooden man.

What He Carries

 

He is, I believe, at least two hundred years old, though some things are older than their age suggests, and he feels older still. Carved from wood that has grown darker and more concentrated with time, the paint long since chipped away from his outside surface, worn smoothly in the places where hands and years have found him. He came to me over twenty-five years ago at one of San Francisco's older flea markets, alongside his twin,  sold by a woman with yellow-dyed hair who seemed, to put it gently, like someone in the middle of unloading something she had no business holding.

I was in a particular season of my life then. Broken saints were finding me. People pressed them into my hands with an apologetic shrug. I don't know what to do with this, but I think you might. I didn't question it. When the sacred chooses you as its custodian, you don't ask for credentials. You just say yes.

I looked at those two statues and felt the pull immediately, that unmistakable gravity that certain objects carry, the weight of the prayers that have passed through them. I cannot leave these here. His twin, beautifully hand-painted, clearly tended and sheltered, stayed in San Francisco with my ex. Kept inside. Kept precious.

Mine came to Arizona. Chipped. Faded. Weathered. Kept outside, I've always suspected,  exposed to sun and rain and the slow teachings of the elements. In the tradition of Castaneda's desert, the one that strips everything to its essence, he had already been through his own erasure, his own reduction to something truer than ornament. I have always been attracted to what the world has weathered, what others look past, and what holds more mysteries than “new”.

I have always thought: if I cracked this old wood open, what would pour out of him? Tears, prayers, laughter,  joy, and the specific tenderness of pain that comes from witnessing too much and saying nothing. Twenty-five years of altar-keeping, and this is just in my care of it; there are a couple of hundred other years that it has held the thoughts, hopes, dreams, and transgressions of other humans. For me, twenty-five years of sage smoke curling across his face in the mornings of my private devotion.

He does not speak. He doesn't need to.

The Altar and the Ancient Site

 

Yesterday, when we built the altar together, my team and I, I made it clear this “work” was an homage to the Sonoran Desert, to the chefs who carry its flavors in their hands, to the gathering itself. Brown tepary beans nested in clay bowls, the color of burnt earth. Prickly pear pads, green and alive, their red thorns catching the light like tiny warnings. A drum waiting for the moment the air would ask it to speak. Objects arranged not by design but by listening, you learn, in this work, to let the altar tell you what it needs.

My little wooden man took a prominent position in front of a gifted drum, the drum for all humanity representing the heartbeat of us and “Her”, the “Mother”. He belonged there, he said. In front of the “Mound” of the Ancients.

And the museum is not a ruin to me. I want to be clear about that. A ruin implies an ending. S'edav Va'aki Museum is not an ending. It is a held breath, a long pause in a ceremony that never actually stopped. The Huhugam, the ancient ones, did not vanish. Their intention soaked into the caliche and the creosote and the mesquite roots that push down through the hardpan, looking for water, the way all living things look for what sustains them.

I would wager my life that much of the plant life at that site descends directly from what grew there when it was inhabited. The desert does not forget its gardens. It keeps them quietly, in the long grammar of seeds.

Three Smokes and a Smile

As the evening wound down and we began to dismantle the altar, I burned juniper, creosote, and grandfather sage, three plants from three different landscape regions of Arizona, three different desert personalities, three different languages of smoke.

Juniper: sharp and clarifying, the smell of elevation, of the Colorado Plateau, of cold nights and piñon silence.

Creosote: the oldest smell in the Sonoran Desert, the smell that rises when the first summer rain touches the earth, the smell of something so old it has become the land itself. The creosote bush, science has confirmed, can live twelve thousand years. Twelve thousand years of this same smell, offered to anyone paying attention.

Grandfather sage: soft and gray-green and forgiving, the smell of ceremony, of preparation, of the self being made ready.

All three rose together in the evening air, and I sat with them swirling around me, and I looked at my little wooden man, and I will tell you, I saw something move across his face. Not a trick of light. Not exhaustion playing theater behind my eyes. A smile. Brief and small and completely certain of itself, the way the desert is certain of itself.

And I understood.

For twenty-five years, in the privacy of my own spiritual practice, I sat with him and burned sage and moved through the interior rooms of my own becoming. And now here we were, outside, under the open sky of an ancient gathering place, the smoke bigger and the ceremony public and the people arriving from every origin story this hemisphere holds. The same thread. The same intention. Just finally, after all that preparation, it unspooled into the larger world.

Carlos Castaneda wrote that a warrior doesn't apologize and doesn't explain. He acts, and in the acting, the world rearranges itself around him. The altar was that act. The smoke was that act. The little wooden man watching over two hundred people who were all, without knowing it, continuing a ceremony ten thousand years in the making,  that was the act.

The Drive Home

I put him in the car. We drove home in the particular silence of the utterly spent. When I pulled into the driveway, I could not immediately move. I sat there in the dark wanting to simply dissolve into the seat, my eyes closed, my head nodding away, the day still buzzing in my cells like the desert buzzes in the last hour before the sun.

I opened my eyes, and I looked at him.

I picked him up. Carried him inside. Set him back in his place, the place in our home where he keeps his watch, where he gathers the quiet of our nights and holds it.

Drank a long, cold glass of water. Felt it move all the way down through twelve miles of tiredness and something older and deeper than tired,  that particular exhaustion that only sacred work produces, the exhaustion of having been, fully, present.

Only now, lying awake at 3ish in the morning with the desert pressing its darkness against the windows, does it land: he was with me the entire day. The green lights. The altar. The three smokes rising. The smile. The drive home.

Everything is alive. Every carved surface carries the dream of the hands that made it. The intention of the order that commissioned him, representation, devotion, the desire to make the invisible visible in wood, that intention didn't end when the carving was finished. It pooled into him like water pools in a tinaja, waiting.

And my intention,  to build the altar, to honor the desert, to carry him with me into the ceremony, that is not separate from the carver's intention. It is the continuation of it. A river that began somewhere I cannot see, moving through centuries and a San Francisco flea market and a woman with yellow hair and the back seat of my car on a Saturday afternoon filled with green lights, and arriving at the S'edav Va'aki Museum and finally back home to our sanctuary.

When the Ancients built S'edav Va'aki Museum, they knew and always knew it would be the place that would continue past them, and more importantly, the new plant nations and animal nations would continue whispering about its sacredness. My little wooden man knew as well.

He is back in his place now, watching over the house while I write this in the dark. I think he approves.

 

In Beauty—Jeffrey

Harmony Welcome at S'edav Va'aki Museum,

Harmony Sonoran Desert Gala — Welcome Speech

Distinguished guests, honored friends, and all who have gathered here this evening —

Welcome. I am Jeffrey Lazos Ferns, Co-Chair of Harmony, with my dear fellow human Carmen Guerrero.

Before we speak of celebration, let us first speak of gratitude. Let us begin, as all worthy things begin, with acknowledgment.

We stand tonight on the ancestral, sacred, and living homeland of the O’odham, the Desert People, whose relationship with this land is not measured in centuries but in millennia. We honor, too,  the Ancestral Puebloans, the Huhugam, and all the indigenous peoples whose wisdom, stewardship, and sacrifice are embedded in every grain of this desert soil. Their knowledge did not disappear. It lives in the roots of the ironwood tree, in the corridors of the arroyo, in the songs passed from grandmother to grandchild across generations of firelight. We are in their debt. We hold that debt with reverence.

To the land itself, we offer our acknowledgment.

To the saguaro, who has stood as witness and provider across centuries, offering shelter to the elf owl, sustenance to the white-winged dove, and sacred fruit to the people who have called this desert home. To the mesquite, whose roots reach deep into the earth seeking ancient water, and whose pods have nourished communities long before this city cast its light across the valley floor. To the ocotillo, the brittlebush, the desert marigold, to all the green and flowering nations of this Sonoran landscape, we extend our honor and our care.

To the creatures who share this earth with us, the roadrunner and the red-tailed hawk, the Gila woodpecker and the diamondback, the javelina moving silently through the wash at dusk, you were here long before us, and it is our profound responsibility to ensure you endure long after.

And to our contemporary society, to the scientists and the storytellers, the artists and the activists, the farmers and the foragers, the young people learning to read this desert like a sacred text, welcome. You are the living continuation of an unbroken covenant with this place.

This is why the S'edav Va'aki Museum exists. Not merely to display the beauty of the Sonoran Desert, but to ensure that beauty is understood, in its full depth, its full complexity, its full humanity. To honor what came before, to protect what remains, and to imagine what is still possible.

Tonight's gathering, Harmony, is a word we do not take lightly. True harmony asks everything of us. It asks us to listen before we speak. To learn before we lead. To give before we take. It is the highest aspiration of a community in right relationship with its land and with one another.

Let this evening be worthy of that aspiration.

On behalf of S'edav Va'aki Museum, I welcome you with deep gratitude, solemn joy, and an open heart to this sacred and celebratory night.