Wukoki

Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

                                                                                            Matthew 7:7-8

Wukoki Pueblo - Photograph taken 27 OCT 2024

The wind, invisible, but for the dust, which I don’t so much see as feel, gusts against me, incessant, intruding, inescapable. Wild. Thank God I‘m not wearing contacts!

And the landscape. Red sandstone, carved over time into surreal Dali-esque monuments by that insistent, unrelenting wind, by those tiny, no-see-um specks of cutting stone – granite and silica sculpting and polishing the towering red formations. Scrub bushes live in this wilderness, green and gray against the rolling red rock, punctuating the dips and swells that are inscribed on the land. Mountains edge the flat horizon, hazy and innocent with distance. The skies darken as clouds gather against the blue. Rain is coming.

I. Love. This. Place. I want to be IN the picture. I AM in the picture. Scanning the vista of red and green and purple, steel gray and clear blue, through the lens of my camera, I zoom in and out, trying to capture the feeling. Focus near, focus far, change the light. I am making decisions as I go, working on composition, on depth of field, on positive and negative space. How do I capture the wind?

I bring the photos home and load them in my computer. More decisions. There is an order to the madness of post-processing. I take out the highlights and shadows. I fix the white light – adding a little warmth to the temp, and coolness to the tint, hoping I’ve found the right combination of eerie expectancy, windswept fullness, and impending weather. I want to respect the ancients who built this place, who slept within, who gathered and cooked, who worked together, made music and danced. I want to honor the people who shared the wind, and blessed the rain. I want this photo, this scape, to speak. I want a viewer to want to be in the picture.

Imagine that. It starts because I want viewers to travel to this place within their mind. I want to help their imagination so they can clothe themselves in this photograph. I want them to commit to this scene, to validate its mood, I want them to feel as if they, too, can live inside this world of windswept rock and stone walls.

How often do we do that? Put ourselves in the picture? Do you picture yourself in a remodeled house or room seen on HGTV? Sierra watches American Idol, and the Voice. I can’t tell you how often she tells me which contestant she is, or which judge. (Or which song she wrote…) Do you put together an outfit because you saw it or something like it in a picture, or movie, or video? Do you try a new dessert or recipe because it looked so yummy on Pinterest or Facebook? My favorite Army guy built our kitchen cabinets in New York based on a picture I showed him. After the remodel, I felt like we lived in a magazine! Isn’t it interesting that so many of our decisions are based on seeing, reading, hearing something that we relate to. We relate because we put ourselves in it, see it on us, around us. We can taste it, hear it; we can almost touch it. We place ourselves in the picture.

And here’s the thing. We may start with placing ourselves in the picture, but a truly meaningful picture will eventually live in us. How many of us hold a picture in our imagination to calm us, to help us fall asleep, to meditate? How many draw on snapshot memories? Does special music or a certain aroma draw your mind to a specific place or time? A place that lives inside of you?

Jesus spoke with his disciples on a distant mountainside over 2000 years ago. He didn’t want his disciples to stay placed in the picture of ancient covenant, Old Testament rules, a conquered people, and layers of social class and expectation. He didn’t want them to keep wishing for a distant paradise that they would earn through death by way of ritual mumbo jumbo. He wanted them to see a new picture; he called it the Kingdom of Heaven, and he taught them, not how to place themselves into the picture, but how this picture could live inside them.  Imagine that. Two thousand years ago, Jesus turned his disciple’s world upside down in his Sermon on the Mount. He taught them how to find the Kingdom of Heaven in their hearts. And teaching them, he taught us. Imagine that! The Kingdom of Heaven can live in us!