I was aghast. My roommate had just returned from a summer night on the town in Flagstaff with an implement used in Navajo religious practice. It was a coyote skull with feathers atop a two foot-long wooden staff. Quite a character, he must have used his considerable charismatic charm and entrepreneurial powers of persuasion to obtain it from one of the shamans at the evening’s public drumming ceremony. To celebrate his acquisition, he proudly recounted how a man exiting a bar saw him with it and recoiled in fear. Coyote is a sacred totem in many Native American cultures. Coyote represents the archetype of godly trickery, meant to teach lessons in humility to humans who tend toward hubris over their creative achievements. My friend obviously stood in need of such a lesson, I remember thinking.
He and I were among thirty teachers attending a three-week, all expenses-paid workshop on advanced placement biology at Northern Arizona University. One of a number of free “education vacations” for teachers I have enjoyed over the years, it was an outreach to the general education community as a stipulation of a university research grant. I remember that the labs and lectures helped cement an important principle that I bring to every class I teach, that biological systems are in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, called the law of entropy. Take a living cell, for example. It is a system that imports energy from outside itself and uses it to become more organized. Increasing organization in living systems is counter to entropy, the natural tendency for the bits and pieces that make up matter to spread apart, losing the energy of organization, until all of them are uniformly distributed in the space they are allowed to occupy. This defiance of the law continues as long as there is an outside energy source that can be harnessed to do work.
In such an important case as this, religion informs science. Coyote in Navajo mythology is a destroyer of order (thus, an entropic force) as well as a creator of order out of chaos (in defiance of entropy). He is a composite of characters known as Ma'i, which includes the actual animal in the wild, the symbolic character of disorder in the myths, and the personification of Coyote power in life (trickster, creator, and buffoon). Ma'i is not a composite but a complex, and the Navajo do not distinguish between his separate parts.* I can see how our creative triumphs invite lessons in humility from time to time. Coyote visits in ways we cannot always predict.
*(Ma'i Joldloshi: Legendary Styles and Navajo Myth in American Folk Legend, 1971)
The weekend following my roommate’s hi jinx, I rented a car and headed out with camping gear for Wupatki and Hovenweep National Monuments. They protect ruins of the pre-Columbian occupation of the Colorado Plateau, the former on the wind-swept flatlands south of the Little Colorado River, and the latter along shallow canyons of a broad plateau north of the San Juan River.
Wupatki is thought to be the result of a real estate stampede that occurred after Sunset Crater to the south blew in the eleventh century. The volcanic eruption spewed ash across the landscape, providing the Sinagua dry farmers with a moisture-preserving cover for bumper crops of corn, squash and beans. Wandering over the landscape pocked with unexcavated ruins, I fell, hurting my foot.
Undeterred, I continued on to Hovenweep just across the border of Utah in Colorado in view of the Ute Mountains to the east. There is an interesting fortress along a shallow canyon rim with peep holes that allowed the occupant views up and down the canyon without being seen. It is thought that a drought in the late twelfth century put pressure on the Kayenta Anasazi to build stone fortresses, which, in the case of Hovenweep, may have been to protect scarce water springs at the heads of the canyons. In-fighting amongst related clans over scarce resources might have been a reminder by Coyote of how the forces of destruction go hand in hand with those of creation.
I wanted especially to sit in a strange house on a boulder in Holly Ruins. To get to it required a four mile hike up one of the canyons. I found that without a wool sock, just the liner, my swollen foot withstood the hike just fine. I reached Holly and climbed up into it. Hours of sitting inside it sent me to lofty reaches of my intellect that from time to time requires a visit from Coyote.
That visit was to occur over twenty three years later.
By that time I had a son, now seventeen. My sister organized a "car-capade," driving with a daughter from her home in Massachusetts to pick me and my son up in Chicago on her way to San Diego where our mom lived in a retirement community. The journey included what was an immensely personal pilgrimage for me, a return to Holly. I thought of it as a metaphor for mythic return, outlined by Mircea Eliade's thesis of the "myth of the eternal return," periodically coming full circle in important cosmic creation events.
My son and I hiked the trail late at night, arriving after midnight, with a full moon shining overhead. I sat with him inside the musty ruin in a pile of desert rodent droppings. I was out of shape and feeling painfully tired, which reminded me of the pain in my ankle years earlier. Undeterred, I was hoping to transfer to my son the significance of this revisit to an odd fortress built out of desperation so long ago. However, Coyote was to have the last laugh. My son thought me peculiar and just couldn't understand what I was getting at.
Passing down traditions, by means of ritual reenactments of past events, once an important act of "world maintenance" for our ancestors, is harder to achieve today in a culture that discredits the past as obsolete. Modern generations are eschewing the past, putting a premium instead on new ways of thinking and acting. But I know that despite my failure to instill in my son a respectful regard for these ancient puebloans' struggle for existence that took such an interesting form in these ruins, wandering up that sliprock canyon for half the night resulted in cool kind of father-son "bonding" experience.
Nick Toombs
Coyote dropped in again recently in the guise of a friend of mine in Cincinnati. I have learned that this woman possesses the wisdom of the ancient ones regarding simple domestic rituals of field, family, home, and hearth. I remembered again about sitting in the Holly ruin thinking about lofty concepts, such as those that explain the modern mind, which include abstraction of social functions, greater importance of the future as opposed to the past, the individual as more important than the collective, liberation from past constraints, and secular values as more ideal than sacred ones, and not about the truth of simply living on the land that, with hard work and a little luck, bequeaths its bounty in support of family and community. This truth was posited by a delegation of Hopi elders, descendents of the ancient ones of the cliff dwellings, to the “Washington Chiefs” in 1894.
“…The family, the dwelling house and the field are inseparable, because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest with her...”
My friend in Cincinnati, who bakes, cans, garnishes meals with herbs from her garden, and harvests eggs from her hen Henrietta, all with clay crockery she makes herself, wrote me last summer,
“…I find the spiritual in everyday life as ultra grounding. I trust what I know. I find the domestic rituals humble and restorative. I am fine holding the mystery and don't need to find all the answers….”
She admonished me in regards to these things,
“The biggest obstacle is knowing everything! Get a mentor. I suggest a Buddhist.”
Or, perhaps, a Hopi tribal member, such as Rina Swentzell of the Pueblo Santa Clara, who says,
“...for us life is shrouded in mystery, and the world defies explanation...humans do not need to know everything there is to be known. The human past, we feel, is a universal past. No one can claim it, and no one can ever know it completely.”
Paul L
I did learn a lesson on that journey I will never forget, one that I can now attribute to Coyote. The lesson took place during the last weekend while at Walnut Canyon National Monument. Sensitive to how it was once the home of some four hundred Sinagua pueblo families eight centuries past, I carefully defied the rule of staying on the designated trail in the name of public ownership, tip-toeing down Walnut Canyon off trail in order to view unexcavated ruins. Many had graffiti from the days of discovery and vandalism in the nineteenth century. I stopped to contemplate one cliff dwelling, sitting and musing while fiddling with two potsherds found lying in the darkened interior. Just like at other sites on my wanderings, the ancient ones here in the Walnut Canyon community grew crops at scattered plots in the surrounding forest, raised children, made stone tools and other implements, talked, laughed and played, and followed the ceremonial cycles that had been passed down for generations. 
And then it happened. The two potsherds in my hands suddenly fit together along the crack that entropy had caused between them eight hundred years earlier. Waves of emotion rippled through my being. I felt an overwhelming sense of humility as I realized how this chance reconstruction out of simple earthen shards was a revelation from the ancient ones regarding simple domestic rituals of field, family, home, and hearth. They might have just been pieces of hardened clay from a simple water pot for washing or drinking in this household centuries ago forgotten. But for me their coming together was an epiphany, a gift with a divine origin, a lesson Coyote means to teach, that each of us is temporarily granted a life in defiance of entropy, one which my friend suggests ought to be lived through humble domestic rituals in the service of family and friends.
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