Red Rock

Sedona is a beautiful place. The beauty and the starkness of the land around it, and the striking Red Rock emerging from it, are over-powering to be sure. I was, however, put off by the commercial pandering to upper-middle-class folk who want to dabble in the metaphysical for the weekend.

Everywhere there are pamphlets extolling the SCIENCE that proves each vortex, coincidentally located in the Red Rock formations, is a special energy field; each vortex, by the way, has its own special powers. At every turn, you can buy crystals from people who think of them as nothing more than souvenirs and won’t speak to you civilly unless they believe you are going to drop a lot of cash.

Over and over again, I was struck by the clash between this wild commercialism and the savage beauty of the place.

I understand the appeal; I even understand the marketing…we see this beautiful, unusual place and it humbles us. We want that humbling to mean something, so we attach supernatural qualities to this thing that is other than us but puts us in our place. It is all rationalization.

The thing about landscapes is that they are large, expansive, open and seemingly unending. They force us to place ourselves within them where our true size is revealed.

So, driving through the scruffy, wide desert you are humbled into seeing yourself as a dot on an endless landscape of brown rocks and cacti. You already know that you are, in fact, less than the cacti that can survive in this environment without aid from anyone or anything.

When the magnificent Red Rocks (you see, every time I even think of them they need to be capitalized) appear on the horizon your only alternative is to believe they are magical outposts where your energies can be aligned and restored.