The Opening to the Womb of the World

The Opening to the Womb of the World John Hales AU seven teenagers stopped hiking at the same moment, turning to examine more closely the arrangement of sandstone slopes and clefts that marked the place where a dry streambed joined the broad sandy floor ofCoyote Canyon. "It's a sipapu," one ofthe students, a pale blond girl, said. They argued a little about this. One student said that a sipapu was manmade , a feature located in the floor of a kiva, the reUgious meeting place for Pueblo Indians. The blond girl responded with some heat: she had recently been thrown out of her house and was Uving week to ¦week with a succession of equaUy unenthusiastic relatives, and was feeling aggressive. She said she knew about kivas. That wasn't the point. A sipapu was an opening to the womb ofthe world, to mother earth, she said, and they happen in nature, too. As they walked up and down the wash, examining the sandstone formation from different angles and talking quiedy the group came to the conclusion that the blond girl was basicaUy right, if not exactly correct in her details. One boy said, with uncharacteristic delicacy, "it looks like . . . weU, a vagina," and we looked again, taking in the contours, the steep rounded banks, the narrow channel that emerged from a tangle of ledges and waUs to fifll ten feet into a round deep hole that melted like a funnel between two sloping sandstone thighs. There was no missing it. "Let's meditate here," a girl said. They paused, thinking: how do you meditate around a sipapu? "Let's do yoga," another student suggested, and everybody agreed: yoga was the thing to do. Another group might have continued the argument concerning the exact definition ofthe sipapu, discussed the complexities of culture and reUgion , invoked the sciences of geology and anthropology. Not these kids. They sfid their packs from their shoulders, walked from the sandy bottom ofthe wash onto a slickrock ramp that led to a kind ofporch attending the opening, a flat triangle bordered by the angled waUs of the thighs. 22 John Hales23 The opening, the hole, the sipapu—for that was what we now caUed it— was as round as a weU, five feet in diameter and textured with circular ridges stained darker as the tunnel deepened beneath the level triangular space where my students arranged themselves, each one facing the opening, filling the narrow space bordered by the sipapu and the sandstone waUs that echoed the form ofa woman's legs folded and bent upward from the groin, the posture of a woman on her back in the midst of dutiful sex or advanced labor. They assumed the lotus position, sitting with backs straight, calves and knees bent and interlaced in a way that never failed to cramp me up, extended their arms straight from their shoulders, and began chanting: "om . . ." A photograph hangs framed above the desk at which I'm writing, nearly twenty-five years later. In the picture, seven teenage boys and girls, my students , long hair loose and tangled or tied in ponytails or bound in handkerchiefs , wearing Levi's, sweatshirts, oversize flannel shirts with sleeves roUed to the elbows, sit cross-legged around a deep sandstone pothole. From the angle I'd chosen for the photograph, the indentation looks especiaUy vaginal, tan thighs spread open to reveal what might be a channel spiraling deep into the earth. I've framed this picture to remind me of a remarkable fact about history and about myself, proofthat at one point in the mid-1970s this actuaUy happened : a group of twenty-five teenagers identified by school counselors as "at risk" walked with their several teachers into a winding canyon in southern Utah that eventuaUy joins the Escalante River, which not many miles later empties into a murky arm of Lake PoweU. One of my students (we'd divided ourselves that day into smaUer groups) suggested that the rock formation looked like a sipapu, the passage to the earth's womb revered by native people who have occupied the American Southwest—long ago, the Anasazi; today, the Hopi and Zuni. This was an anthropological...