“The Great Grandmother” is a reflective journey into the heart of Utah’s Zion mountain wilderness, where the silent majesty of Zion’s sandstone canyons reflects an ancestral spirit of the Great Grandmother. As I journey in the mountains in the predawn darkness, I encounter the living presence of a bristlecone pine – the great grandmother tree – guiding me toward an inner communion with nature. The story weaves together themes of ancient wisdom, spiritual pilgrimage, and our enduring connection to the natural world.”
I am sitting alone in the mountains of Utah, where the canyons of Zion unfold below me, carving majestic passageways through sandstone mountains. This is a place I have always wanted to visit, a land that evokes my imagination about the beauty of the natural world. As Edward Abbey once declared, “This is the most beautiful place on earth.”
I came here in the predawn darkness, as if pulled toward this place. The whole mountain calls; every part of it is a holy voice beckoning to the seeker. The ground seems to hold the threads of an ancient spirit, a living presence that is everywhere, a holy presence that makes me want to bow my head. And so I sit as a witness to this holy work, breathing in whole mountains, canyons and the ever-unfurling wildness of nature. This is holy ground.
I came here when it was still dark, wanting to sense more deeply into what had always been an imaginary landscape I had come to know through books and stories. There is a familiarity etched in my heart, a land that, many years ago, was imbued with the passing of knowledge from ancient Tibet across the world to the west for safeguarding. In my heart, I knew this place; I felt its living presence inside me, connected to the thread that binds all life in a sacred tapestry of love.
This was a pilgrimage, to sit here among these temples of the gods, to feel how the dust itself tells stories of mountains carved by time, of rivers that sprung from the ground when the world was still Eden. It is saturated with the spirit of the Puebloans and their generations of sacred worship. With cupped hands, palms turned to the sky, I could feel how this place held the imprint of a story far more ancient than us. I raise my hands in supplication to the spirit of the land and pray for my soul to return home. And with my inner ear, I could hear the Puebloan songlines echoing in chorus with the song of the earth, weaving threads of love and connection from hearts directly into the natural world. Everywhere I felt the spirit of these people of the earth, so familiar and yet so forgotten, their story alive in the air, always calling us home.
It was here that I felt the presence of something more than my own inner dialogue: The unmistakable presence of an ancient spirit grandmother who walked in these mountains. I recognised this presence, her familiar gait, her weathered face with an otherworldly smile and the kinship of ancestral eyes watching over humanity beyond this mortal coil.
In those early hours of the morning when I came up here, I could see only the faint trace of cliff faces and trees. The voice of the grandmother was everywhere in the mountains, calling amid these temples of the gods, these colossal stone patriarchs. The stars were above me, swimming in the deepest, darkest black sky. Bitterly cold air cut into my warm chest, the icy breath of snow-capped peaks. She called with an aching pain in my chest, in air so cold it was hard to breathe without clenching my jaw.
Compelled by the call, I walked deeper into those mountains, into the dark blackness of the night. This was an act of trust and surrender to a sentience that pulled at my core. And as the sky turned its majestic star-encrusted palette, I called inwardly for a path to be shown that led toward her. But sometimes the journey outward is a necessary ritual to enact the inner journey. Taking one step at a time in the darkness, without knowing where we are going, trusting each step, I embarked on an inward perambulation into the soul’s wild labyrinth, wondering if such an act could ever be taken except in the darkness.
First, she led me down to the white sand riverbed and we walked in silence. The sand was like ice, cold and crisp. We laughed at how dark it was, how even my feet disappeared below me. Then she turned my head upward toward the rising canyon walls and there above me I saw a ledge. “Come,” she said, “climb up.”
So I ascended, climbing upwards and inwards toward her in what had now become the faintest light of an imminent sunrise, pulling my body up a steep rock face, clambering higher up the smooth sandstone wall until my arms and legs grew tired. As the light grew faintly brighter, I looked around and saw that I was halfway up a mountain in the early morning dusk and there she was, sitting on the plateau, the grandmother tree. She was thousands of years old, a bristlecone pine, ancient and sentient in her presence. I knew in that moment that this was the place to sit and be silent. This was the plateau.
There we sat together and I felt that she was lending me her vision. I plummeted into that other world and saw how, for thousands of years, she had watched over this rock, greeting the pink dawn. She showed me how every living thing was an eye through which she watched the world and witnessed the manifestation of God in her being, every part of nature an ear, a touchpoint witnessing the unfolding song of creation; the oneness of life, the continuity of spiritual light through aeons. I sat with her, an enraptured participant, seeing, hearing, feeling the earth through the eyes of creation.
Then she showed me how I have been here too, on this hill, inside my heart, over many lives. She revealed that it was she who taught me to watch with the eye of eternity, who taught me stillness, who showed me the living of many lifetimes and the great circle of time, time like a river. She showed me how I have sat with her in every forest, every mountain peak, in the ocean, in the flowering spring Karoo. Always it has been her; always her presence has shown me the way, wherever I found myself.
Ritual is the way we enact this sacred experience in the world. It is how we imbibe wisdom and bring it back into the earth. The inner journey requires the act of sacred ritual to draw forth that wisdom from the depths and offer it to the earth herself. So when I stood and saw the empty canvas of white sand before me, I felt compelled to record this meeting in the sand for us both to see. I drew circles that spoke of wholeness, of union, of time like a river winding its way endlessly to the sea. I offered these circles to the ground, to the sky, to the water below, to the rising sun, symbols of recognition to this sentient earth that gives so freely of herself – a gift etched into her flesh, a love note for the gift of her presence.
And then the sun started to rise and I knew that the moment had passed, so I sat in silent witness to her majesty. In that moment, she became both the tree and the light that touched it; she was wholeness, she was every living thing. She was there in the canyons, flowing in the clear waters, dancing in the darkness of the earth. She was nourisher, bringer of life, midwife to new life. She was the sky and the ground and everything in between. She was the grandmother who watched endlessly over the world and had loved the earth so deeply that her heart now carried the world within it.
We continued this visionary journey as I descended the mountain in the fullness of sunrise, watching her light touch the rocks. It was like the mother greeting the mother, from heart to heart, inseparably entwined. Each rock came alive, turning its face to the sun in monolithic prayer, a gaze most ancient, the eternal worship between earth and God. And as I stepped down, the light filled the spaces where I had offered prayers with her. My searching for her had become her answering voice, and it was light touching light. The sun painted the mountaintops, the sky turned pink; I looked up to her on that high mesa of pine, now lit by the sun, and inside my heart I saw that sacred place clearly resting within me. This was the answer to my prayer: to find that thread which is always alive, that exists everywhere within us and in the world around us, the holy thread, the one spirit that binds us all from heart to heart, the holy mandala of creation.
These were the words given to me this morning, from the silence of the mountain dawn.
