Читать книгу Enlightenment Town - Jeffery Paine - Страница 12

2. Where the Hell Am I? A Tour

Suppose you were set down here blindfolded, could you guess — by the sounds, the temperature, the air quality, the felt speed of people passing by — roughly where you had landed? The temperature seems a bit cold for the time of year, since either in winter you stand deep in snow or in August the nights sink into the fifties. There is clue number one. The air inhaled has a fresh, dry exhilaration but, shortchanged a few molecules of oxygen, you cannot quite take in enough of it. Second clue, you are at a high altitude. Your ears strain to catch any telltale sounds, but how peculiar, there are none, no hum, rumble, or din to be heard. A wind does sigh through the trees, and an unidentifiable bird faintly cries, but where are the screeching alarms of ambulances, the coughing of leaf blowers, and the ear-piercing squeals of trucks backing up? Quietness is a scarcely obtainable commodity in the noise-polluted twenty-first century, and curious about how you landed in such a hotbed of silence, you rip off the blindfold. And then . . . a multiple-choice question. When you tear off the blindfold you see you are:

a) where the following story gets under way

b) in a Western, possibly Colorado township

c) nowhere, or nowhere you would want to be

d) on sacred terrain

e) not on sacred terrain

f) in Tibet

If you answered (f), you are wrong — but not obviously wrong. Set against Himalayan-like mountains, the terrain here is a doppelgänger for parts of Tibet. Like a village in old Tibet, the town sits at a high-plain-like altitude (eight thousand feet), abutted by even higher mountains (fourteen thousand feet), and overlooking a vast, seemingly empty valley (160 miles across). Tibet bares the nickname Land of Snows, and here, too, it can snow for months, alternating with dazzling blue skies, followed by a summer warmed by a blazing sun. And as in Tibet, Crestone’s terrain may be inhospitable to much in the way of development, but that very inhospitality makes it hospitable for retreats, monasteries, devotional practices, and solitary introspection. When the two most venerated lamas of Tibet visited Crestone they couldn’t get over it. “This is a place where Tibetan Buddhism can survive!” exclaimed one (the 16th Karmapa), and marveled the other (Dilgo Khyentse), “Many beings will become enlightened here!” Indeed, for some Buddhist practitioners today, Crestone is a New World annex of Old Tibet, but, even so — look on any map — if you answered (f) you flunked the quiz.

All the other answers above have some claim to being right. For most unblindfolded gazers the answer would be (c), Crestone is nowhere (nowhere they have ever heard of; nowhere with touristic attractions). Crestone lies hours away from any major airport. From that airport (either Denver or Albuquerque), you start out on busy highways, then drive down ever less crowded ones, and finally down a two-lane road, and when the road runs out and you can’t go any farther: Welcome to Crestone. In recent years the town has gained some reputation for its religious centers, which lures some tourists wanting to behold that spiritual extravaganza. Did their GPS go haywire? As an excuse for a downtown all they find is a post office, a few small businesses, and some empty buildings, situated on two north-south-running streets crisscrossing two east-west-running streets — negligible man-made scratches in a forlorn expanse of eternally arid real estate. (The various religious centers lie tucked away in the mountains, unobservable from the town.) Hanne Strong’s aristocratic mother visited from Denmark and took one glance at this — by her European standards — uncultured backwater, and she did not need a second. When informed that someone was writing a book about the town, she snorted, “It better be titled One Day Here Is Enough.”

To get the lay of the land, let’s take a drive on the land surrounding the town (the Baca, where most Crestonians live), which stretches mile after mile across prairie-like semidesert. We might be on the set of every other cowboy movie ever made. Yup, boys and girls, we’re out West. Or are we?

The houses you pass in that expanse form a crazed United Nations of domestic architecture. The first house is New England clapboard, but the next one you come to is Spanish adobe, followed by a log cabin; the one after that could be a futuristic Hobbit-hole, and a mile down the road is an alien spacecraft-like dwelling. On the right you ride by an Oriental palace, and on the left, why, look — a mound of dirt that got overly ambitious. After a while you ask yourself, What planet am I on? Crestone has no building code, which is what first drew ornery mavericks here, after the gold ran out.

Driving back into town we pass old-fashioned Americana, a plain old wooden Baptist church. I once slowed down to read its sign, which announced that Sunday’s sermon: CHRIST’S ERECTION. Whoa! If Jesus were a man as well as God, he could have had boners, I guess, but when had the Baptists gotten so frisky? The sign, it turns out, had originally read Christ’s Resurrection, until some mischief-makers got hold of it. (A sense of humor substitutes here for the commercial entertainments available elsewhere.¹)

Indeed, the real hero of this book may not be any individual, lovely as he or she may be, or spiritual group, interesting as they are, but the land. Our hero cannot speak for itself, but others are ready to speak for it, to say what living in such a momentous landscape means. Sister Kaye compares her Carmelite monastery here, Nada Hermitage, with their monasteries elsewhere: “At the Nova Scotia monastery we experience God through beauty. In Ireland we sense God through the people. Here in Crestone we know God mainly through nature.” Granted that all Earth is sacred, Walter Roan, an old Cree medicine man visiting Crestone, was asked, “What makes the land here especially so?” “Where the land is open and vast, when there’s water underneath [referring to the aquifer], and wind blowing across into the mountains, there is spirit and there is no place for the spirit to go then but up,” Roan answered. “Here everything rises.”

Let’s rise ourselves, and climb partway up one of those fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, and from there, looking down, obtain a last atavistic view of lost, virgin America. Below, the valley spreads out seemingly without end, and from this height it appears unscarred by human history or habitation. It is no Garden of Eden, for it is not verdant or rich in luxuriant vegetation. Rather, imagine the harsher landscape that Adam and Eve stumbled out into afterward, where the taunting wind sighed, “It is not too late. Something else there yet may be. Let us try once again.”

Crestone: Sacred Turf?

Spirituality is Crestone’s cash crop. Imagine that every genre of Hollywood film got spliced by a crazed editor into the same surrealist movie. A religious version of that movie — mixing together holy hermits, a bearded rabbi, monasteries, ashrams, crucifixes, goddess statues, Buddhist stupas, a Middle Eastern ziggurat — is playing daily in Crestone, with no need for projector or screen. Hindu nuns in saris umpire at the local baseball games. At the Christmas Mass at the Carmelite monastery, whole rows get taken by Buddhist monks in their flowing draperies. It’s like a League of Nations of spirituality, assembling five continents and three thousand years of religious history. This — the cohabiting of so many of the world’s religions, all breathing down each other’s necks — has never happened before.

What would you like to do? Sweat it out in a Native American sweat lodge? Be frum (devout) at the Yom Kippur services in the old 1880s schoolhouse? Meditate in an old mine shaft, which serves as your hermit’s cave? Twenty-five religious groups populate Crestone, but the most important one may be the twenty-sixth, the culminative effect of all of them together, which you need not attend services to be part of. Elsewhere spirituality is the Sunday or Sabbath singularity of the week; here it is the week. You can hear the hum of religion, even when you are not listening. When those you bump into at the post office are practitioners, when it’s what you see all around you and take in without even trying, when it’s in the jokes told, even as a nonbeliever you can be an uninfected carrier of spirituality.

But is Crestone itself — is anywhere — sacred land? The answer to such a question could influence how we treat our natural surroundings, whether we exploit or preserve them. Let’s explore three possible answers as to whether Crestone is sacred turf.

1. No. Some folks here spill their fantasies over the landscape like a can of overturned paint. Some have even moved to Crestone expecting that living in a spiritual place would ameliorate their problems — a marriage gone sour or unmanageable children. Harsh remote surroundings, where diversions and distractions are few, however, can actually make those troubles worse. Many arrive bearing a bundle of hopes and later leave, forgetting to take that bundle with them. “Crestone’s one renewable resource,” Kizzen Laki, the newspaper editor, jokes, “is disillusioned visionaries.”

2. Yes. That yes once would have been the Native Americans’ unqualified response. Although no one could live in such a harsh, charged environment, or so they believed, the Hopi and the Ute and the Navajo undertook pilgrimages to these mountains, regarding them as a spiritual entity. Before horses were reintroduced into America, travel in this high valley meant inching across it, allowing the landscape to migrate inside you. Here, where Earth heaves up almost to touch heaven, they found a fine place to meditate, to fast, and to pray, and the best place of all to die. (With the winds blowing against the mountains, Walter Roan said, the departed’s spirit could only go up.)

3. Yes and no (or no and yes). Einstein asserted that for an intelligent adult there exist only two possibilities: either that nothing is miraculous or that everything is. Two construction workers in Crestone, Jack Siddall and Pattison Kane, decided to work only on sacred buildings, and with that decision carpentry lost its tediousness. Pattison is now working on a Buddhist temple high up in the mountains, and as he reflects on the temple’s purpose and all who will benefit, he gets excited, as though each detail he carves or paints is a holy icon. When some residents claim that the Sangre de Cristos are divine handiwork, that belief may impose on a matter-of-fact piece of physical geography lustrous associations and cloak it in an intangible aura, whether real or imagined.

About whether or not Crestone is holy ground, why have so many great Tibetan masters in exile made a beeline to here, I have wondered, when it’s so off the beaten track, hard to get to, and offering little in the way of potential students or influence? This is the answer told to me: Centuries of Native Americans on sacred pilgrimage to Crestone have seeded the ground here with blessings and infused the atmosphere with their lingering prayers. How could anyone evaluate a statement like that? Besides, it only pushes the question back a notch in time: Why, then, did so many great Native Americans make a beeline here?

Perhaps what drew them is that in few other places have hardship and majesty married each other so well as they have here. With its tall mountains on the right and a vast valley on the left (or if you’re standing the other way around, then the other way around), majestic Crestone certainly is. But it can be hard to live here. In spring unrelenting winds howl for weeks on end — saturated with agricultural chemicals blowing up from the valley — and can make you half-crazed. In winter you can be snowed in for weeks and, when snows stop, the black ice on the roads can still keep you housebound. At such times it is just you and the mountains and vast, empty space — no way and nowhere to hide — and everything within you may rise up and you will have to meet it as never before. “Crestone is not the best place to come if you want pleasurable experiences,” one practitioner here (Esteban Hollander) observed. “But a great, great place if you want to ‘wake up.’”

You cannot buy a digital gauge on eBay to measure the spirituality of a place. Perhaps the only measure is whether it makes its citizenry consistently more thoughtful, more generous, and lighter and kinder. Crestonians, in my unofficial census, often do display more helpfulness, open-mindedness, and playfulness than most other locals I know. I am writing this book, hoping that vicariously it might do something similar for some reader (and for me as well).

And with that thought, we can supply the answer to the multiple-choice quiz earlier in this chapter. It is (a): where the story now gets under way.

1 An earlier sign on the Baptist marquee had read: GOD’S FAVORITE WORD IS COME! When a couple, Mark Jacobi and Chris Canaly, decided to get hitched, they lewdly draped themselves over the sign and used that lascivious photo on their wedding invitation — COME. The Baptist minister’s wife then ran into Chris at the grocery store and, innocent of the sexual meaning of the word, gushed, “You used our sign on your wedding invitation. Aren’t you just the sweetest, sweetest people on earth!”