Can’t blame it on the Indians. I’d be happy to, but chthonic spirits did this to me. Drop your guard too many times in fifteen years and look what happens! Remember when a golden eagle snatched a tusa from the field next door in San Cristobal and ate it in the road? (Victory! Great Joy! Rodent molecules in pumping blood of eagle-thing!)
They had help. The elk, deer, bears, bulls, cows, eagles, prairie dogs, goats, sheep, horses, coyotes, rabbits, foxes, raccoons, skunks, snakes, lizards, tarantulas, and twice a frickin’ peacock in or near the places we’ve called home. Antelope, cranes, and mountain lions on our day trips. The hummingbirds that let me catch them with my bare hands when they flew in through the open windows. (Especially them!) And now I use a drum to find a house…
With a hand drum and a leather beater, I walk around the old adobe tapping out a heartbeat: bim-boom, bim-boom, bim-boom… (It needs to know we’re here and we’re alive.) When the feeling’s right, I shift into a steady, rapid bum-bum-bum-bum shamanic trance beat. That’s the power play. It’s not all dust and lard and cracking sidewalls, chilluns. Someday one may say of me, if one says anything at all, “Invisible, he sank into the sage.”
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
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