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by Drunvalo Melchizedek
The Shaman of Antelope Canyon
On the road again, we had ahead of us a long, mesmerizing ride to Page, Arizona, at the upper reaches of the Grand Canyon. But first, we would spend the afternoon and early evening at a unique natural cathedral known as Antelope Canyon — where we would meet with Darvin — a shaman whose fierce protectiveness of his people would provide us with our last test of faith and love.
Antelope Canyon is so sacred to the Navajo that visitors are allowed in only when accompanied by Native guides. These guides — Darvin and his two aunts, Carol and Lisa — met our bus, and we all piled into their pickup trucks for a fifteen-mile drive into what seemed the middle of Nowhere.
Through an almost hidden entrance, we trooped from the heat of an August afternoon in Arizona into the quiet coolness of this cave-like canyon. The sandy floor was smooth under our feet. Multihued light from occasional openings high above filtered down into the swirling vortex of energy that surrounded us.
 Antelope Canyon is a long, winding, narrow passageway — no more than twenty feet at its widest part — leading from one bit of desert to another, with redrock walls that look as though they were molded by some Divine Sculptor. The space flows and swirls like the water that formed it. It is a place like no other that I have ever seen. Its beauty will always be remembered by anyone who is blessed to enter it.
Darvin led us silently through the canyon, and when we emerged on the other side, he sat down on a rocky outcropping and began to tell us stories.
He spoke very slowly, in a measured cadence, and so quietly that we had to gather very close in order to hear him. He told of a near-fatal accident that he had had when he was young, and how it had marked the beginning of his path as a shaman. In a coma for a long time, he had "traveled" to the back of beyond. When he returned, he was changed.
He told us about his Way with Peyote. And as he spoke, he looked deep into our eyes, as though searching for who we really were.
After he had talked to us for a while, Darvin took us back inside the canyon — his Peyote Church. I realized that he was not sure of us, not certain how he felt about our doing ceremony in this sacred place, not totally convinced that we'd had the right to make our Medicine Wheel. Many members of our group sensed his questioning.
We finally came to a kind of circular spot deep inside the canyon, and there we gathered around Darvin again.  He played his guitar and sang for us. Then Vina, a part-Indian member of our group, gave him a medicine rattle that she had brought. He shook it a few times, looking at it carefully, listening, seeming to consider. Then, using the rattle, he sang for us two of his Peyote songs, the medicine songs of his path. (Afterward, Vina said, he returned the rattle to her and said that it was a good rattle. "It helped me sing good."
After hearing Darvin's songs, we returned his gift with what had become Our Song — Amazing Grace. He nodded.
Then I led us all in ceremony. We went into the Space of the Heart together, praying for rain to come to the Four Corners area and change the weather there, and for the Indian and the white man to become as One.
Our webmaster, Susan Barber, was sitting with Darvin's two aunts and spoke with the elder of them, a beautiful woman whose name was Carol. She wanted to know about Carol's experience of our ceremony.
Carol said, "Many, many groups come here and do rituals that never seem real or true to me. This is the first time I have ever felt the same way in ceremony with white people as when we do our own ceremonies." And then, smiling, her face radiant, she said, "I 'saw' the rains coming."
Darvin spoke once more, and what he said gave goosebumps to those who were near enough to hear him. For he said that the Medicine Wheel (and at this point, with his index finger, he drew an imaginery circle on his t-shirt — just like the one in my earlier vision) had a cross in it (he drew the cross, north-south and east-west). And the problem was that some people were doing everything "almost right." But instead of having energy in the form of a cross, he said, they had it in the form of an X. He indicated the imaginery X inside the imaginery Medicine Wheel, and said, "The X leads to the dark side."
This was the exact same image — right down to the t-shirt — that I had been given in my vision on the bus before we sang the Anasazi children on their way to freedom! And, as I explained before, I was later shown that our misalignment had been healed. Now, here was this teaching in "real life," confirmating my visions.
But Darvin still was not convinced!
Not All Superpsychics Are Children
Back outside, as we were getting ready to be driven back to our bus, Darvin pointed up at a "snake" shape on the wall of Antelope Canyon's entrance and began to tell us about it. He illustrated each detail of what he was saying by pointing up at the snake shape, moving his finger along the forty-foot formation. As he was doing this, his aunt Carol turned to me and quietly said, "You know, he's totally blind."
That was how I learned that Darvin — who had driven some of us there in one of their trucks (and would drive us back in the dark!), who had led us unerringly through the canyon, looked into our eyes as he spoke, and was now pointing out features of the "snake" that guarded his Peyote Church — had lost the sight in both eyes as a result of that long-ago accident he'd shared with us.
According to Carol, visitors to the canyon were never told about Darvin's blindness. In fact, not even his own children knew.
Once again, we had been given a gift of secret knowledge normally withheld from white visitors to Reservation lands.
Rafting on the Colorado
That evening we arrived at Lake Powell, in Page, Arizona, a resort village at the very northern tip of the Grand Canyon formation. Here, Diane had a gift for us: a rafting trip up the Colorado River through Glen Canyon — a fifteen-mile ride through one of the most gorgeous places on Earth.
 Out on the river, red stone walls as high as eighteen hundred feet rose up on both sides of us. We saw blue heron skimming the water, and listened to the stories told by our guides of the people who had lived there before the white man came.
In one spot, we debarked from our rafts to walk inland, where we saw petroglyphs left by the Indians who had inhabited those canyons so many centuries ago. We speculated on what the images might mean. One seemed to be saying, "It's okay to hunt here." Or perhaps, "Go this way to find some good ducks."
The next morning, we left for our final destination, Grand Canyon National Park. I knew that here, near the rim of one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World, was where we would hold our final ceremony.
The Giveaway — Our Final Ceremony
The Giveaway Ceremony chosen was one used by the Ancient Ones, and even by Native Americans in our own time. It consists of identifying an object that we are attached to and want very much to keep — and giving it away as a sacrifice. In doing so, we heal both the world and ourselves.
It sounds simple — but because we place so much value upon our possessions, and because our emotional body is often connected to those possessions, profound healings often occur.
 Three of us — myself and two of the other men — searched for a long time in the environs of the Grand Canyon forestland, and finally agreed upon a place among the trees, hidden from the rest of the Park. We marked the spot with a special rock and made a small Medicine Wheel in the red dirt. Then the two men left me alone there and went to bring the others.
When they'd gone, two elk — a mother and her daughter — approached and decided to sit down and see what was going to happen. We looked at each other. In that moment, I knew it was all perfect.
I arranged everything in preparation for the ceremony, and when I was finished, I sat down on the ground to pray. As I did, Darvin appeared to me very clearly. He said, "I want you to prove that you and this group are truly connected with Mother Earth and Great Spirit. If you do, I will join with you in my heart and help you in every way. But if you cannot, then you will be my enemy."
I told him that I also sought proof that we had truly accomplished our purpose on this sacred journey, and told him what that proof would be.
The members of our group now began to appear through the trees, first one, and then many, arranging themselves around the little circle of stones. When we were all settled, I asked for the oldest woman to come forward to be the Grandmother. She would receive the gifts, hear the words of those who gave them, and then, at the end, select a gift for each person in the circle to receive in return. Susan Barber, or Moonhawk (her medicine name), became our Grandmother.
 As Grandmother got settled in the circle on one side of the small Medicine Wheel, we all became aware of a change in the weather. It was almost sunset, and instead of the still, hot air we'd been accustomed to for nearly two weeks, it was growing cool. The wind was gusting, whipping the tall pines that encircled us. Stormy looking clouds scudded across the darkening sky. There was an eerie, other-worldly feeling.
I gave an opening prayer that all would be done in a perfect way. Then Grandmother asked the first person to approach with his gift.
This was Osiris Montenegro. He came forward with tears in his eyes — for his giveaway in the ceremony was an object of huge significance to him — and started to kneel, holding his gift in both hands.
Just at that moment, a bolt of lightning crossed the sky, accompanied by a gigantic, ear-splitting clap of thunder. The people sitting in our circle practically jumped into the air, they were so startled.
But I was not startled. I was happy. I started laughing.
For this was the proof I had asked for: That at the moment our ceremony began, lightning would strike near our circle.
And Darvin had been watching. I knew now that he was going to be a good friend. (As a final note, after the ceremony, Vina — who had loaned her rattle to Darvin for his Peyote songs and knew nothing of what had happened between us since — felt called to gift me with this rattle. I knew that the gesture had come from him, and that the gift had been for us all.)
The Giveaway ceremony lasted about three hours. Throughout this whole time, the wind kept on. The limbs of the trees above us were whipping and clattering. Many thought a huge storm was blowing up.
But the moment the ceremony ended, this entire display of weather ceased as if by magic. The wind stopped, the clouds went away, the trees were still. And above our circle, a million billion stars glittered in the night sky.
And Then the Rains Came
We headed home the next morning, which marked the fifth day since the Medicine Wheel at Hovenweep. As we entered the city of Flagstaff, drops of rain began to pelt our bus.
It was just what I had been told after the Medicine Wheel ceremony. It had been exactly five days since Hovenweep.
When I picked up my own car later that day, the sky was dark with clouds. I drove into my home town in the pouring rain.
The Wheels were now One.
The people who met in the space of the heart for this journey also went their own ways, to their homes and their loved ones.
But although we are now separated by distance, in our hearts we will always be One.
 We will always remember how our Love guided us upon this Pilgrimage, meeting the people we met, joining our creative power into one force, performing ceremonies for the healing of the world.
I know the Anasazi are now our brothers and sisters, and that a time will come when their presence in our hearts may make a crucial contribution to our Great Ascension.
May Great Spirit bless us as we return to the ordinary world and to those our lives touch.
© Spirit of Ma'at LLC 2003
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