I WAS AT Pizza Edge in Chinle, Arizona, contemplating the idea of the sacred. The air was warm for late autumn. I recognize this weather: warm, faint winds, and the awareness that at any moment the day could turn toward winter. It made me think of the crescent moon, which my partner describes as a bowl that holds within it the cold. When the bowl tilts, it pours onto the land wind, snow, and ice. Every fall and winter, he notes the moon and its tilt. I think of the lunar cycle and its deep time. So many communities have studied and derived meaning from this cycling, my own included. The moon and other celestial bodies make up a more sacred part of Diné thought and lifeway. As a child, my mom would remind us constantly to never look at the full moon. But we would spend summer nights camping out studying the night sky with very little light pollution. Each star, planet, and satellite a reminder of force and energy. It’s an immensity I still to this day can only wonder and imagine. Sacred things, we conclude; things beyond our understanding. And maybe that’s okay.
The idea of sacredness tends to come up often in my work. What anoints something as sacred? It’s a question I often receive as a Diné poet talking to audiences across the country. But it’s a subject I feel I can’t talk to, because that kind of esoteric knowledge is unreachable. Not in the sense that I can’t learn it, because I can. It’s unreachable in the sense that perhaps I am not ready to learn it, or I have not made the right kind of commitments to learning that kind of knowledge. During the Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute, a summer program for creative writing held at Navajo Technical University in Crownpoint, New Mexico, Philmer Bluehouse talked about the three realms of Diné knowledge and the ways esoteric knowledge is almost meant to be just beyond our grasp. Because that knowledge unlocks a different coding of reality, a different approach to the world, and it’s one that has sustained Diné thought and lifeway for generations. In the wrong or unprepared hands, the knowledge could backfire. So, instead, I answer knowing what I know based on the stories I’ve been told: that a sacred space is anywhere meant for reverence to a realm beyond our current spatial awareness of reality. That this sacred is beyond our three dimensions, maybe even dimensionless. It is the beyond
