© Copyright 7-18-2007 By Dana Shino, The Purple Phoenix, LLC www.thepurplephoenix.com “Teach Peace,” a freshly stenciled, spray-painted graffiti sign said to me from the sidewalk just as I was ready to cross the bridge over the Animas River in Durango, Colorado on my morning walk. “This is my kind of graffiti,” I thought. I resumed my walk, wondering how to teach peace; peace being an overall personal spiritual theme for me, bubbling through from the underside of my consciousness, weaving itself into my spiritual lessons. It has been so for nearly a year now. The messenger bee (literally, a bee) buzzed around my head that evening as I deeply considered text for this article. The bee, “Teach Peace,” and the Medicine Wheel bumped together to the surface of my consciousness, serendipitous inklings marking my path with lit votive candles in paper bags on a summer night along cobblestone to the Milky Way. Ten days ago, I left home and picked up Jody in Boulder, Colorado, traveling north on the way to Sheridan, Wyoming from Durango, Colorado to visit Linda, my friend and mentor. Both Jody and I are two of Linda’s handful of surrogate daughters. Linda collected Jody when Jody dated one of Linda’s sons years ago (Jody’s so happy the boyfriend didn’t work out, but that Linda did). Linda collected me at the independent insurance agency we both were employed at in Fort Collins, Colorado. Our meeting in Wyoming had been in the works for two years, and all three of us were ready to visit in filter-less style: rest in reprieve, laugh loudly, rage, cry, consider quietly, yell and swear, and occasionally raise a raucous holy hell of a womanly spiritual good time. We all needed it. Jody had recently returned to the United States after teaching Special Education in an international school in Russia for two years. I had walked away from an old life and was in the middle of building a new one. And Linda, her spiritual journey had taken her from Wyoming to Colorado to California and back to Wyoming in one big loop, tying loose end after loose end along the way. For some reason, through the several months prior to leaving for Wyoming, the mention of Sheridan brought to people’s lips “The Medicine Wheel.” Repeatedly, on numerous occasions, and sometimes from the same people several times over I heard, “Hey, you better go to the Medicine Wheel.” “Aren’t you going to the Medicine Wheel?” “Isn’t there a Medicine Wheel up there? You better go.” It became comical to the point I laughed with myself about “Gee, what are the chances I better visit the Medicine Wheel?!” Traveling, however, is no small feat for me these days. I used to joyfully and easily bound off on airplanes and drive across the country. But as the energies on the planet have systematically adjusted to higher resonances (causing all of us great energetic change) I’ve become susceptible to greater sensitivities and catharsis in my own energy body and system. It’s a work in progress (sometimes a messy work) learning new ways of energetically and emotionally responding and humanly being after dumping years (and probably lifetimes) of old energetic and emotional habits. Although I’m gradually gaining greater energetic and spiritual footing into greater degrees of soundness and wholeness, the thought of traveling through mass populated areas was a little more than daunting for me. So, when I reached Jody in Boulder on a beautiful blue sky Colorado day, I promptly handed her the keys to my truck and asked her to “Please, drive!” Reaching Jody had already proved a painful comedic spiritual journey (where IS the pause button?!) My Spirit Guides had channeled images and emotion to me while driving (not recommended), helping me further open my heart chakra and causing me to cry off and on from Pagosa Springs to north of Buena Vista. When I stopped in my favorite rock shop in Leadville for a break, I failed to remember I was wide open from crying and promptly picked up someone’s monstrous headache. I released the headache once I returned to my truck, only to find the energy in Leadville is challenging, and that’s putting it kindly. Fortunately, my Spirit Guides washed ‘honor’ energy through and around me, an exciting gift to receive as I’d been practicing it off and on for weeks. I quickly left Leadville, a little more grounded and a handful of miles up the road soon merged with traffic on I-70 headed east towards Denver. I promptly lost myself in a sea of a two hour mountain traffic jam. People were returning home from 4th of July festivities and the weekend. I felt myself drowning in the energy, but with systematic focus on nothing but driving and ‘releasing’ I energetically found footing. I thought I was doing well until halfway through the Eisenhower Tunnel (the several mile tunnel running under Loveland Pass), my world unexpectedly tipped 90 degrees to my left. A heartbeat later, my world up-righted itself, but not before I naturally turned the steering wheel in the same direction my world had flipped, nearly sideswiping the vehicle beside me. It scared the bejesus out of me and I was never so happy to arrive at Carey and Craig’s outside Boulder, for the evening. The next morning, I gladly handed the keys to Jody and we left for Sheridan, Wyoming. We made quite a pair: one neurotic psychic and one world traveler decompressing from Moscow. Linda had grounds to be concerned we would arrive safely... but we did. Jody navigated us beautifully through the cities, and once I was in the home of my Big Sky country, I breathed easily again. Wyoming reminded me of some of my early loves: big country swallowed by bigger sky; cowboys in their Wranglers, boots, button downs and hats; random barbed wire fence the antelope clear as an after thought; Gretel Ehrlich’s “Solace of Open Spaces” (Wyoming poet); stark desolate beauty; jack-a-lopes (mythological rabbits with deer antlers who only breed during lightning strikes); cataclysmic water-colored sunsets; gritty, dusty good ol’ boy cow towns, scattered across the landscape like forgotten pebbles. Even though it is a country containing people whose ideologies I don’t cotton too, I still cotton to the people and their salt-of-the-earth ways. It is a country that has always exhilarated me, drawn me with a deep sense of respect and awe and a shadowy, lingering feeling of homecoming. Jody and I arrived in Sheridan on the eve of the town’s annual rodeo. The previous weekend, cowboys and cowgirls had finished riding at Greeley’s Independence Stampede. After Sheridan’s rodeo, they would move on to the ‘Grand Daddy of ‘Em All,’ Cheyenne Frontier Day’s. The rodeo circuit, with its cowboys, full fledged rigs and horses and leather laden gear, was in full swing, juxtaposed to our quiet little spiritual sisterhood gathering. Jody, Linda and I, we had a good time. We talked about the green man looking out Linda’s bedroom window to the patio, keeping watch on her. We shared stories about elementals. We swapped rocks and recent book titles. One evening we listened to Ray LaMontagne while Linda grilled wings and I set up dinner and Jody designed a salad. We watched the black and white male gay duck pair waddle across the lawn to the pond. We visited the ‘45th Parallel,’ the local metaphysical shop (Sheridan has one!) and observed, baffled as the shop filled to overflowing directly after us, as did the Buffalo Bill Inn Restaurant and the ice cream shop. (You can’t take Light Workers anywhere these days.) We shared wisdoms and stories. We talked shop. We viewed the distance we’d come and the distance yet to go. We randomly, gently unearthed things about one another we did not know. So, when it came time for me to visit the Medicine Wheel, my women friends had filled me with their words, laughter, insights, stories, tears, safety, security and comfort, time, energy and love. They kindly granted me the freedom, time and space to visit the Wheel on my own, as I had felt the tug of this unknown place from the morning after I arrived. Merely sitting at Linda’s kitchen table, drinking tea, thinking and talking about it brought strange tears to my eyes and power running through my heart. What was previously a funny little joke was now an important journey and task. My alarm rang at 6 a.m. on the morning I was to join the Wheel. My Spirit Guides encouraged me to arrive as early as possible. When I woke, I knew six o’clock wasn’t early enough, but it was going to have to do. I arrived at the trail to the Wheel about 9 a.m. with only one other couple ahead of me. We were at nearly 10,000 feet on the west side of the Big Horn Mountain Range, a long way from anything resembling a town. Mountains always speak to me in their quietness, amplifying the shrouds of natural detail they ensconce and are ensconced by. Whether this is deliberate or chance, it seems as though the mountains magnify the seemingly simple things of bird calls cutting clearly through the rush of breeze when the wind is weaving through pine needles. Or mountain stream water rolling and caressing ways round pebbles and rocks and boulders as art in motion. Or Aspen and Pine trees giving way to one another back and forth as sister and brother. It is not planned, yet it is not an accident. It is the finest form of un-deliberate art I’ve ever witnessed. So, when I stood on the mountain, next to the Medicine Wheel, or as the Native American Indians call it, ‘The Place Where the Eagle Lands,’ a deliberate art placed some 10,000 years ago by human hand, I felt the mountain amplify its sacred circle only by the act of silence. Any sound, except the rush of the breeze, seemed to defile it. I have never wanted more for my feet to soundlessly touch the earth as I approached and rounded the Wheel, giving my awkward attempt at offering tobacco to the grounds, Gaia and the gods at the cardinal directions. Some say the 80 foot diameter Wheel, with seven cairns and twenty eight spokes, is a Vision Quest site. Others call it a representation of Sun Dance Lodge or a turtle effigy. Some say it marks the Summer Solstice. It is undeniably a visiting site of ritual, prayer and vision, held sacred by the many Indian Nations – Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota, Sioux and others. It is a sacred site marked by the wisdom of elders and all those who have gone before and hold the sacred energies powerfully in the circle. Without any kind of agenda, I intuitively began my visit on the east side, the place of the rising sun and rebirth on the Wheel. I knew nothing to do ritualistically, and I am not given to public displays of my own channeling work, but I knew I was there to communicate with the Wheel. So, in front of the Park Ranger and the couple, I set my working crystal on the ground at my feet, grounded, centered and quieted myself in as much honor as I could gather with my palms open to the Wheel and my eyes closed. I opened myself and waited. In the silence that followed, I was energetically taken into the deep places of light around the Wheel. I was shown where I had come from and inklings of where I would be going. I experienced the art of sacred geometry, its forms embodied in both the Wheel and myself. Briefly, I was allowed in the center, where I was both shown the great power of and scolded by a Native American Indian Elder in full head dress. Little surprise, he humbled me for my lack of preparation. He was guarded by ominous male native sentries and with deep impatience told me, “So many like you who do not know what you are doing... sigh... but at least you try.” Then he dismissed me, but not without a good energetic thump to make his point. The visit to each point on the circle was a journey into a new energetic land, with personal messages for me from different entities, voices and light. Though the elder had initially scolded me, when the energies in the Wheel danced, I was energetically given that which I knew not that I sought or needed: Peace. I was graciously seeded with the experience of Peace. But it was not just any kind of Peace. It was (and is) a Peace seeded in the heart of Power. It is a Peace that knows the ancient calmness of centuries and saturates every point of power rising up and through it. It is the natural amplification of mountainous Peace through the stillness and silence of Power. It is the Peace in the Power of an Eagle landing from flight in the middle of the circle. As the Peace in the Power came to rest in me, I was told this: “Your nation is at war. It is destroying the Earth. Please carry this message on Doves: ‘CEASE.’ ” We are a great nation of the Eagle. We live with the belief that our power lies in our prowess. The Wheel showed me otherwise. How we wield our Peace, as individuals and as a nation, derives our greatest Power. The Dalai Lama knows this. Mother Theresa knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this as well. The Native American Indians have held this energy for centuries. How can we come to see our own Eagle landing in the center of our Wheel? After I finished the channels, gave gratitudes and wrote my notes, I walked down the trail meeting others coming to find what they could at the Wheel and exasperate the Elder. I silently held the grateful solitude and Peace of knowing that even in a nation ensconced in the beliefs of fear and war, there are still natural bastions in our country holding the natural energy of Peace. I returned later that day to my women friends, individuals who graciously, momentarily created for me a safe, loving enclave. We gratefully feasted that night on the grand finale dinner of crab. The next morning I regretfully drove away, waving to Linda and Jody. Out on the open highway of mountains and bluffs and prairie, as the winds of love blew through my heart for these women and others in my life I love, for the first time I was not washed away by my tears. Somewhere deep inside me, the energies the Wheel seeded within me held. They held me steady and stable on my road home.  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