Kachina Lands by Julie Morrison

Pick Up Your Pen Contest
Northern Arizona Book Festival
Julie Morrison

Being in Northern Arizona is like being ten years old, gaping at the kachina on my father’s desk.

To approach alone is an event in itself. With others, there would be rules: how close to get, when to stop, perhaps a conversation about the delightful novelty of being there before a decision is made to move on, go somewhere else. Solitude can be a glory of breathlessness.

The view is more than I can take in. There is what I can see, but there is also the understanding that there is so much more to know – that this visible bit is just a glimmer of the mosaic it belongs to, whole in itself, yet almost laughably without context. 

In each place, I want to get closer—I also know proximity will only tell me so much.

There is so much about them I have never learned. History, symbolism, culture, customs – the sometimes-and-sparsely written but rarely-fully-grasped meaning of everything I’m looking at. All of it. I can guess at some things. Others weren’t meant for me to begin with.

I wish they were.

I sense there is a dance I’m witnessing, to which I have not been invited, but am drawn to, not only for the fascinating choreography of who and what goes where and at what time, but for the sense of not just moving, but living to a rhythm: snow and sun, breeze and quiet, rattle and ruffle, harmony and tension, always linked, never interchangeable. 

Then there are the contrasts: both are equal parts stillness and hustle. The place with its developing cities and communities among conserved space like a doll on a desk, both in suspended motion, yet where one is serene, the other is harried. 

I can observe all this for only so long before I am overcome by tactile cravings: I want to hike the trails, taste the snowflakes, stroke the pine boughs as much as I want to stretch a forbidden fingertip to those eagle feathers, even though I know none of what I touch can be mine to keep. It has already been claimed, mostly through stories I know only by reputation. Few of them are only happy: too many involve the subversion of one set of interests to accommodate another. It’s a wonder we would want to be close to a place or an art form whose company must also be a reminder of discord, except that they transport us into a world where beauty takes wildly different shapes. 

Mostly to be admired from a respectful distance.

I will never have enough history with Northern Arizona or the eagle dancer to claim it’s shared, and we may not ever truly belong to one another, but even now, each time I am in either’s presence, I pause to marvel, and can’t help hoping, someday, they might pause in return, then ask me to dance.