Eight or nine years ago, an American Indian came to me in a dream. He taught me a simple rain dance. When I awakened, I practiced the dance — and then watched it rain. For a few days afterward, I could not refrain from telling the dream, even teaching the dance to friends and students. That was the winter of the floods in Topanga and Los Angeles. Though I was not so arrogant as to feel responsible, I came to suspect that I had betrayed a sacred trust.
Last summer I was traveling in the Southwest, trying to understand the landscape, the trees, the blue hills, the odd visual marriage of desert and miniature, twisted groves — pinon, juniper, and cottonwood — which characterizes that area. Such a landscape can break someone whose imagination has been formed by the art and vistas of the East Coast or Europe, who has been taught that beauty is limited to the dense, green forest, the pastoral meadow, or the precise curve of the ocean’s crashing waves.
