We had a wonderful time in Arizona last week. Here are a few photos and some random thoughts.

We stayed in the city of Sedona, located at the bottom of Oak Creek Canyon, about 20 miles south of Flagstaff. The area is famous for its dramatic red rock formations. I took several hundred pictures, none of which begin to do the subjects justice. Here's the second-best picture I took of Cathedral rock.

Interestingly, the best picture I got of Cathedral Rock was before sunset at a place called Red Rock Crossing, and it isn't actually a picture of the rock. At least not directly. Its reflection in Oak Creek begins to capture some of the mystery and grandeur of the place.

While I have no problem (in my sort of half-baked poetic mode) ascribing mystery and grandeur to the Sedona red rocks, there are those who will credit them with a good deal more than that. Sedona is home to a cottage industry of explaining, teaching about, and generally helping people to tap into the mystical powers of the rocks. A few select spots are believed to be intense centers of mystical energy. In the New Age parlance of the region, such a place is called a "vortex":

These vortexes are swirling centers of subtle energy coming out from the surface of the earth. This energy is not exactly electricity or magnetism, although it does leave a slight measurable residual magnetism in the places where it is strongest. There are four main energy vortexes in Sedona. The subtle energy that exists at these locations interacts with that which is inside every person. It resonates with and strengthens the Inner Being of each person that comes within about a quarter to a half mile of it.This resonance occurs because the vortex energy is very similar to the subtle energy operating in the energy centers inside each person.

Well, okay, sure. Or maybe we can all agree that they're pretty, anyhow?

On the other hand, there is a longstanding tradition of believing the rocks to be sacred. Our first full day in Sedona, we visited the Palatki ruin just west of town, where we saw what's left of a Sinagua Indian village. The Sinagua were a pre-Columbian civilization who lived in the region over a period from 500 to 1,500 years ago. They are believed to be the ancestors of the Hopi tribe. The rocks were sacred to the Sinagua, as they are to the Hopi and all other tribes in the region. There is no clear explanation as to why the Sinagua abandoned their longstanding villages, but the Wikipedia article linked above makes the intriguing assertion that the Hopis believe their ancestors left for religious reasons.

The Sinagua people lived in simple two-story brick structures which used a cliff wall for backing.

The Palatki ruin is home to a mysterious grotto featuring petroglyphs and other etchings created over several thousand years. The earliest of these are very simple geometric patterns, criss-crossings etched in the stone that could be as much as 10,000 years old. Obviously, these pre-date the Sinagua by a considerable margin, and if they go back that far would have been left by some of the earliest people in North America. Over time, we see more sophisticated images left by the Sinagua as well as by the people who came before and after them.

What's interesting is that people kept coming to this same spot, a few walls at the base of a particular cliff, and leaving their artwork. The ranger/guide at the ruin told us that it was believed that the original criss-cross patterns may relate to imagery associated with religious ceremonies. If so, and even if those etchings are "only" 5,000 - 6,000 years old, we can conclude that these rocks have been considered sacred for a very long time, indeed.

So who knows? Maybe just saying they're "pretty" isn't quite enough. We did visit another place, a short distance to the north and west of Sedona, which defies both description and photography. If I have ever beheld sacred land in my life, I think the Grand Canyon would have to be it:

Even the geographic features of the canyon have been given religious names. There is a Temple of Isis, a Temple of Osiris, a Temple of Shiva, and a Temple of Zoroaster (there may be more; those are the ones I saw.) Below is a shot of one of the "temples" -- I'm not sure which, but it's definitely not Isis, which has a more dramatic dome.

Whether sacred or not, there is definitely something deeply moving about these sites. It's no wonder that we have dubbed them cathedrals and temples.