¡Colores!; 114; Understated Sacredness

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.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Santa Clara, India and Rina Swanzel provides an intimate look at growing up in a pueblo world. This physical understating of sacred places is typical of pueblo thinking. Because it is believed that it is better to understate than overstate, to be one with everything rather than be separate for conspicuous. .. . .. .. .. ..

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Here I meet the beauty of the Anasazi ruins of koala that is hard to imagine that is humankind enters in the last decade and the 20th century. relationship with a natural world is really a traumatic jeopardy. The greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, overpopulation have transformed the natural world from God's domain into a wretched human problem that must be solved.

We are, as one writer put it, witnessing the end of nature as we know it. What are we to do? Where are we to look for help? One obvious answer involves learning from cultures that are flourished and survived by maintaining a harmonious balance between the human and the natural world. In New Mexico, modern society has one profound example of such wholeness with which to be inspired the enduring perspective of pueblo-Indian worldviews. In her writings and work, architect Rina Swensel from Santa Clara Pueblo shares with us the Pueblo worldview. Quote, that the center of the Pueblo belief system, she says, is the conviction that people are not separate from nature and natural forces. The goal of human existence, she says, is to maintain wholeness or oneness with the natural universe.

Pueblo and anisazi cultures have survived for a thousand years or more on the strength of that conviction. They have constructed their towns and cities around the idea that the buildings humans make are just as much a part of nature as mountains and other landfolds are. In other words, the earth is not an exploitable commodity for pueblo peoples. It is a sacred space, a concept which the modern world desperately needs to understand. But pueblo peoples don't do any preaching about sacredness. They live it. Soft spoken and understated, Rina Swensel of Santa Clara Pueblo shares a cultural perspective with us of inestimable value to modern society as it struggles to survive. Its own abuse of the planet on which it lives and ultimately depends. Last summer, as I stood on top of one of Santa Clara Pueblo's sacred mountains, I was most

impressed by the wind, the beauty of the clouds and the flow of the hills down below. There is a shrine on top of that mountain with a few well placed stones which define a small area scattered with cornmeal and a deeply worn path in the bedrock. No special structure celebrates the sacredness of that place. Architecturally it is understated, almost inconspicuous. That particular shrine is typical of pueblo shrines in that it is visually disappointing. It is nevertheless a very special place because it is a place of access to the underworld from which pueblo people emerged.

It is a doorway of communication between the many simultaneous levels of pueblo existence. Understanding the visual understatement of that shrine is important to understanding pueblo sacred space. Early and physically understating shrines or for that matter, pueblo community and house forms stems from the very nature of pueblo cosmology. At the center of the pueblo belief system, it is a conviction that people are not separate from nature and natural forces. This insoluble connection with nature has existed from the beginning of time. The goal of human existence is to maintain wholeness or oneness with the natural universe. Santa Clara pueblo was a wonderful place for a child who grew up.

I was a child there in the 1940s and remember the incredible sense of well-being and containment, both socially and physically, from the plaza or the booping ye, which is literally the middle heart place of the pueblo, we could see the far mountains and circle our lives in place. The booping or heart of the earth for the table people is the open community space where the ritual dances and other community activities happen. The booping ye contains a literal center of the earth or the non-sipu, which translates as the belly root of the earth. Each pueblo's cosmos encircles the non-sipu and the surrounding mountains where the earth and sky touch are the boundaries of the well-organized spaces for people, animals and spirits to live. The house and kiva also emulated the low hills and mountains in their interconnectedness

to the earth. The Adobe structures flowed out of the earth and it was often difficult to see where the ground stopped and where the structures began. The house structures were more over, connected to each other, enclosing an outdoor space from which we could directly connect with the sky and focus on the moving clouds. It was one day when I was walking from the pueblo to the day school and walking through the fields and along the stream by the sagebrush bushes, sort of looking around, taking everything in and as I looked up, there was this incredible cloud in the sky and it kept moving, it kept changing. I was maybe seven or eight years old watching this wonderful cloud below and grow and change

its form in front of me, but it was so exciting. It felt so close and yet it was so full of energy and it was so full of life. It moved and it changed and I could see its form getting bigger and the blue and back of it was so, it was just unbelievable and it's enormous, white billowing that was just moving within itself. It was transforming in front of me. I stood there and I must have watched that cloud for about half an hour before I went on my way to school, but it was one of those moments in my life when I began to realize what it meant when the people talked about what happened to us when we die, when we die, we

go, our energies, go into becoming clouds, we become the clouds and we move through the sky as that cloud was doing and then we drop water under the earth and that whole cycle of moving between the earth and the sky became very clear to me. The key of the structure was totally symbolic, its rooftop was like the purple plaza space from where we could connect with the sky while the rooftop opening took us into the key of the structure, which was like going back into the earth via the non-seepoo in the plaza space. The connecting ladder of tall spruce stood in the middle near the non-seepoo, a simple stone, the single simple stone in the middle of a table of rubble, extremely significant because it is the place that reminds us of where we came from, it is the place where

we flow back into the underworld and it is that place out of which the, out of which the breath flows, it is the place that we flow in and out of to connect with the other levels of existence that are there is simultaneous to this one, but usually, but usually all that marks that very incredible place in the earth is a gray stone that is not even special looking, it is just a stone that would be picked up in the fields, can the arroy or out by the river or wherever and it gets brought in place there and it is, it is the, it's the center of the world, everything is organized to constantly remind us of

the primary connections with the earth sky and other life wars, these primary connections are constantly rearranging as at that shrine that I mentioned earlier, the non-seepoo and other points of this well organized cosmos are marked by a very inconspicuous stone or a grouping of stones, this physical understating of sacred places is typical of pueblo thinking because it is believed that it is better to understate than overstate, to be one with everything rather than be separate or conspicuous, there is then little need to create or cause distinctions among people or objects or even places, since everything, everybody in every place is sacred and has essential worth, there is no need to individually, the people in their world

are sacred and indivisible, the shrines, boundary markers and centers then serve as constant reminders of religious symbolic nature of life, pueblo people do live at the center of the universe, their world is incremental, it is a world thoroughly impregnated with the energy, purpose and sense of the creative natural forces, it is all one, sacredness then is recognizable in everyday life, the purpose of life for the pueblo people is to be intimately connected with everything in the natural world, directional forces the world of the world are so important and move in and out of the earth rather than upwards towards the heavens, clay is taught too because it is the earth and shares in the flow of life,

that flow described as all wah-hah, water, wind, breath is the essence of life, existence is not determined by a physical body or other physical manifestation but by the breath which is symbolized by the movement of water and the wind, it is the breath which flows without distinction to the entirety of animate and inanimate existence, it is movement, it is transformation, it is literally the breath. Every time we take a breath, we become the universe, we become the bow-wow because it is a bow-wow that gives expression to the universe, that is why we can talk about the

world being nondiscriminatory because we are all expressions of that breath and the cosmos itself being an expression of the energy that flows through it, it is life itself. It is that which makes the water flow and the wind blow, it is a movement in the world. The bow-wow then is the creative force causing life, much as Christian God is the originator and creator of Christian existence, further the belief that the bow-wow flows through

an animate as well as animate beings, allows buildings, ruins, places to have life spans and to come and go as to other forms of life. Buildings and defined spaces are allowed to have life and death. One day as I was about tasting houses on my way to school, I noticed that there was a crack forming in the wall of one of the better-tasting houses and watched that crack for a couple of days and saw that I kept getting bigger, I went home and asked my grandmother why those people weren't doing anything about that crack that was forming in the wall. She shook her finger at me and says, it's none of your concern, that's been a good house, it's been fed, it's been blessed, it's been healed, it's been taken care of.

It served with the people well and it's now time for her to go back into the earth again. I stood there for a moment and says, do you mean the house is going to die? She says yes and it's good to house, now it's time for the house to go back into the earth again. Again, back to that notion of cycles again that the greatest respect that you can pay any gift to anybody, whether it's a tree, a plant, an animal, house is that you allow them that cycle of life and death, the coming and going out of the earth. Make sure enough the house fell down. There is general acceptance that houses human bodies, plant forms, are temporary abodes through which the bull on half flows. They share in the essence of life which gives them cycles of life, birth and death.

Traditional Santa Clara poor blow with its valuable mud structures is an organic unit expanding, contracting and changing with other life forms and forces. The older I get and as I watch how the world is changing, the more I understand the value of our old lifestyles, the leaves and architecture for ourselves, as well as for other people who have moved away from an intimate relationship with the land, clouds and other life forms. I see that the respect for the natural environment that was inherent in the style and the process of building was so special and crucial for the survival of the world. I value tremendously the unself-consciousness or lack of aesthetic pretensions which led

to doing everything straightforwardly, yet which still consider it the context and connections so that the practical and symbolic function were never lost. Most importantly, I treasure the sense of sacredness which pervaded that old pogo world. All of life, including walls, rocks, people, were part of an exquisite flowing unity. Thank you. I'm one of the hard things about glasses that it's inherently beautiful if you just

drip it on the floor. And that's something that in fact is really hard to overcome, that you've got this stuff that almost no matter what you do to it, it looks pretty good, is intimidating for me. And I think about how glass drew me, it's because I was just so concerned with all of the things that glass does, for the way it hides things, the way it reveals things, it's clarity, it's lucidity, it's still mysterious to me, it does things that I'm going to read and thought. I was doing what I was doing in the piece, and there was something about that that I love and glass. It's just been something I've always really loved. We make all of our glasses from raw materials, meaning sand, soda, potassium, lime, and various

colorants, which I take a good deal of pride in. So within the furnace, there are three crucibles containing that glass. The glass is drawn up on the blowpipe, which has to be preheated for the glass to stick to the blowpipe. Then it's drawn from the furnace around 2100 degrees Fahrenheit. It's taken from there over to this large steel plate, which is called a marver, and it's shaped on that marver. Then what really is going on is a waiting game.

That glass needs to solidify and create a foundation to add more glass too. So you have to go back and sit at the bench and roll up and down and keep it on center. While you're waiting for this foundation to build. But we'll go ahead and keep on building up layers and you just keep building up the masses of glass. So you're up to about 12 pounds. It only takes me about 20, 25 minutes to blow this piece of glass and to cool it. But it's going to take the grinding shop about six or seven hours at a dead minimum to process that piece through, and it used to take 22. What we've done is constantly working as a group of honed the process found anywhere where we could not cut corners, but just save time and getting these done. And that's been a process that's taken the last three and a half years. Here blows a hole, became any cuts away from it until it ends up with a form that's

just totally resolved. But that's how he goes at doing his pieces, whereas I'm more of a builder. When I do a piece, I build it up piece by piece, by piece out of all these different elements and I create a whole structure and I embed things in the piece and he reveals things in the piece. It's interesting, a difference in where we work. I think that glass absolutely astonishes me after 20 years and does things on a daily basis that's surprise me, which I think is wonderful. Thank you so much for watching, and thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you

next time. Bye bye.