The Partnership has adopted work with others to restore the ecosystem of the Rio Grande Bosque. Efforts to protect Otero Mesa, Valle Vidal and other sacred sites engages the Partnership in hands on work, public witness, letter writing and action.

“The Valle Vidal is national treasure that is now threatened. Drilling in the Valle Vidal is not a long-term, responsible energy strategy — we cannot drill our way out of our current energy problems.” — U.S. Rep. Tom Udall, D-NM (from Coalition for the Valle Vidal)

The long struggle to save the Sacred Petroglyphs in Albuquerque was honored in a sacred march to and prayers and speeches at the site of a proposed extension to Paseo del Norte road. Over 400 people from the area and throughout the country gathered Sunday, November 20 for the honoring, prayer and to speak with their souls that they do not support the construction to begin in December. SAGE council organized the momentous event.

This Afternoon: The Sounds of Creation

Besides the soughing of the wind through the winter grass, another sound comes off the tumbled rocks of this escarpment. Can you hear it? Tick, tick. Then silence as if you had dreamed something.

One hundred thousand years ago the creation came to this place in violent volcanic eruptions, spreading magma over the silts of the Rio Grande: fifteen billion years welling up in a flow of information to whoever might be interested. Tick. The stars are flying apart, says the sound, and the people must try to understand. The shaman grasps a hard pointed stone in his right hand and tells the stories of the origins of the people by chipping away the dark glistening fudge-colored varnish on the rockfaces to reveal the figure that he sees but the others do not see. The figure is in the stone. The shaman knows that it has always been there. Put there by the spirit of the place. Tick, tick, tick.

Finally, we see it. It is familiar to us, knows the story if we can understand it. Hands are raised as if in supplication, or fear, or joy; legs apart ready to spring, or dance. Tick. Finished now, and eager to let the figure tell the story of the earth, the shaman moves to his left, still hunkered down, and begins pecking again. We crowd around, for we have many questions. You see, all the people who have ever been here and ever will be here are here now, this afternoon. And that includes you and me.

Anyone who comes this place, a place called Petroglyph National Monument, can will herself or himself to grasp this simple fact, just as the shaman grasps the pecking stone. All that's needed is to rid the mind of the false notion of time, the nanoseconds and epochs that destroy meaning. That is why we call such places timeless. The tick we hear is a galaxy forming, a seed dropping, a story we have not heard, but know well.

I have been told that some people (not “the people,” of course) have decided that through this place of no-time and all-time there should be a highway. It will cut across the escarpment of the story of creation.

Let me tell you, I would not want to be the person to do this, the person who would banish the people from the place, make them disappear for eternity. I would not want to be the person who would substitute the blatting of the semis passing through from nowhere to nowhere for the soughing of the winter grass and the faint, but clearly discernible, tick, tick of the shaman who tells the stories in the rock of our being.

The earth is restless under our feet this afternoon, and probably understands what we are thinking. We can only hope that before evening comes, those who worship the money that highways bring will consider the consequences of evil thoughts.

—Charles E. Little, 1998