Think Hendrix, sliding those rising chords up along the neck of that impossible guitar. So let us not talk falsely now... I left Phoenix in the morning heading East, the sky strangely expectant, rain on the way. Rain. In the desert. I made good time. All the while thunderheads moving in, and later, lightning slashing down from a roiling sky, the mesa tops still illuminated by steep slanted afternoon sun. ...the hour is getting late. I was driving back to Colorado in a much needed car Steve Larsen gave me. Gave me. Flew down there to pick it up. Days by the pool with Steve and Maggie, their daughter Ginger. Days out of time. Time out. Stories of days past, and of what had happened to us in between. And me wondering of myself: what had? Maggie packed me stuff for the trip, sandwiches, great food, lots of water. Friends. I'd forgotten. I would stay outside Santa Fe that night in a cheap motel run by a Chinese guy in a neck brace, the decor early-modern People's Republic, the ironing board hanging on the wall next to the television set. But hours yet until I even hit New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, the magic maybe coming back but still running on empty, passing everything in sight, great little car. I'm fooling with the radio, trying to tune in something for the road. I think I won't get anything out here in this wilderness, so far from anywhere, breathtaking landscape like another planet.

But I'm wrong about the radio. Classic rock the strongest signal on the dial. Here comes the new boss... Am I disappointed. Are you kidding? ...just like the old boss. Pedal to the medal, wasn't looking for Mozart. Out in the middle of nowhere fast, rockin the top off. And I get down on my knees and pray... headful of random history.

Emerson prefigures Olcott, and so also... Guénon. Perennialism as understood by Emerson... continued independently during the twentieth century, perhaps most famously in Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy... Olcott might today be as respectable as Huxley had it not been for the activities of a new friend of his, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (born Baroness von Hahn), a Russian adventurer with a dubious past... @

There must be some way out of here... Over the border now and running hot for Santa Fe before the light fails. Would have stayed at La Fonda except that I'm broke, flat busted. Out of money, out of time. But this was a while ago and it was all North-bound from there on in, coming home. Is this a great country or what?

from: Anasazi Agriculture: Recipe for Success? by L.S. Cordell
source: New Mexico Journal of Science, 1 November 1999
via: HighBeam™ Research

The Anasazi successfully farmed the Colorado Plateau and adjacent regions of northern parts of the Southwest for 1,300 years; their descendants continue to farm ancestral lands in Arizona and New Mexico. Anasazi farming technology enabled them to sustain farming villages despite dual problems of aridity and short growing seasons. Their successful strategy required the ability to relocate villages. When that kind of residential mobility was no longer possible due to increased regional population and commitment to the water and soil control features of intensified agriculture, the Anasazi abandoned the major portion of their original homeland.