Anasazi

As we flew home from our ten-month trip around the world, and I looked down upon the vast canyon lands of the American West, I thought...

"This is it. I am home."

Canyon de ChellyI thought that even though I don't know these canyon lands well. And even though I wasn't born here.

Trail to White House, Canyon de ChellyAt that moment of coming back home, I also made a spontaneous vow "to keep my pilgrim self alive."

I knew it wouldn't be easy. And it hasn't been.

Chaco CanyonSo you can imagine how good it felt to be on the road again, this time on a road trip through
Anasazi lands in the Four Corners.

Pueblo Bonito, Chaco CanyonAnaasází is a Navajo word that means "Ancient Ones" or "Ancient Enemy." Ancestral Pueblo peoples is the preferred term now because Anaasází suggests a sudden mysterious departure of the old ones and a radical discontinuity between them and the Pueblo people living in the Four Corners today.

Hubbell's Trading Post, GanadoI just heard Robert Harrison say that he writes for the dead. And I understand that.

But we don't only hear the dead through the texts that they have written. Although those texts more than help us.

Mesa VerdeMaybe, in fact, they are portals, shamans' caches, places, as the Celts would say, where the world is thin.

Artist Melissa LoftonAnd so places where we, too, can pass back and forth more readily between our familiar waking worlds

Mesa Verde...and that other realm that we don't quite know how to name.

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A full gallery of Debi's Southwest photographs appears here.