Desert rain

Monsoon rains
Photo by Venaya Yazzie
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2016

Desert rain. The utterance of that phrase is like the sweetest candy. Finally it seems the high-desert has been blessed by the nomadic clouds via monsoon rains in our arid lands in northwestern New Mexico.

I captured this moment in time as the rains arrived to the San Juan Valley. I am always inspired by the rain, and this has been so. I can remember the days of my childhood and how it rained so much more in the dry desert at Huerfano, NM. I can recall how all of us cousins would stand and run in the downpours of monsoon rain. We never ran from the rain or try to 'shelter' ourselves from it. Instead we'd open our mouths to the heavens, hold our hands out and welcome the rain. Those were beautiful moments of the early 1980s, when we as Navajo desert children actually played and explored the outdoors in nature. We had no use  of technology because we dialogued with each other and told stories of our imaginations, thus we 'loved' the land and had reverence for her.

Today I watch my little cousins and other relatives with cell phones and electronic devices in their hands, their brown eyes glued to tiny screens. I am sad for them, as they will never know the pure joy of the Land. They will never come to really see the beauty of the nature world around them.  I may sound a pessimist in this expression, but I really believe that era in which I was able to experience is forever in the past, technology has come to us as an 'evil doer' in my mind - for it has taken Our Navajo children and youth hostage...

As an adult I still truly love the land. I enjoy every moment I can spend outdoors and it is here that I find inspiration and solace. And, it is in the nature that I express and experience prayer. In Navajo we express the act of prayer as sodizin.

This way of being was instilled in my by my Dine' matriarchs. They taught us Werito-Yazzie children that prayer is everything. That prayer holds every that is good and it will bring life a 'balance.' So for me, prayer is my rain. I know when pray pours out of me and for my by others, my life will be richly blessed.  That is how it is.

Hozho Iina.