Walking the Land: Sedona, Arizona – Vultee Arch
WHO ARE WE?
Eileen Nauman (Ai Gvhdi Waya is here Eastern Cherokee name) is 1/8 Eastern Cherokee via her father’s side of the family. Her great-great grandmother was on the Trail of Tears and as a sixteen-year-old, escaped and ran into Kentucky, where she later married into the Gent family. We know only two things about her: that she came from a medicine family and was from the Wolf clan of her people. Her medicine was being a shaman. And this gene has gone down through our family. Eileen was the chosen child to be taught this ‘medicine’ (this means an inherited skill of healing) by her father. She trained with him from age 9 through 18. Later, she had other Native American teachers and in 1990 began training others for Soul Recovery and Extraction, the medicine of her great-great grandmother.
Marchiene Reinstra is an interfaith minister. She has written many books and has been an advocate of women being equal to men in all organized religions. Coming from Dutch missionary parents, Marchiene grew up in India. She is cosmopolitan and has many natural psychic skills. She met Eileen in the mid-90’s and since then, they have become a psychic team in search of understanding the energy of the land where they live in the Verde Valley of Arizona. This includes Sedona, but the scope is much wider than that. Please see our blogs from 2009 as they worked to bring the chakra system of Sedona back online.
WHAT IS WALKING THE LAND?
Eileen’s genetic knowing about the land comes through her Native American genetics. She simply sees Nature as symbolic and is able to interpret it so she that she understands the visible and invisible energy in an area and what it is doing. Further, she is clairvoyant and can see the spirits, the guardians of sacred places, vortexes and everything else associated with the land. Her belief is that if we understand the energy and beings where one lives, that you can live in a deep and positive harmony with them.
The land is fed by the human’s gratefulness and attention. And the land’s energy/spiritual beings, in turn, create a far more positive energy framework and environment for the human. They must work together for harmony. Otherwise, if one ignores the other, we are ignoring Mother Earth and all her relations. That is like ignoring your neighbors and pretending they aren’t there or exist.
This blog is dedicated to showing the fundamentals of Walking the Land in hopes that you will take the information and apply it to your own area. And if you will, then you will forge a positive and healing link as a result. And the energy of your area where you live will be amplified, lifted and online so that the positive applications of this teamwork will benefit all. Weather will return to what it used to be. There will be no more floods and droughts, as an example. Water can be cleaned up with prayer and attention to the spirit of it. And so much more. You will learn as we Walk the Land here in the Verde Valley.
TWO BLOGS: Eileen will post her blog on Walking the Land first and then the next day, will post Marchiene’s. Each writes a blog based upon her experience as they walk the land in search of the planetary water snake, known as Bololokan to the Yavapai Native Americans who live in the Verde Valley. There are many powerful planetary beings that work with Mother Earth. Humans can interface with them as well but it is always the planetary, regional or local spirit who decides that. You can’t work with one unless your heart is in the right place, you practice daily humility and understand that humans are a small part of the mighty woven energy that is here on our home, Mother Earth.
Their intent is to discover the natural energy geology of where Bololokan moves/slithers, through the landscape of their valley. In discovering Bololokan’s path, Eileen and Marchiene will then perform ceremony to reawaken this path. In doing that, the energy comes back online and it lifts and helps feed the area in a natural way as it used to be when the First People lived here in union with Mother Earth and all her relations. It will change the weather pattern of the area, which has been in a twenty-year drought. Bololokan is the WATER snake. There are three other planetary snakes for the other three elements: earth, fire and air. Bololokan utilizes the Verde Valley area as one of her many sipapu’s (emergence hole) to come up into our area. She has sipapu’s around the world and slithers inside Mother Earth in tunnels that connect them all.
We’re fortunate to have her with us and we discovered her when we opened up the chakras of Sedona. She came to us and we had no idea she existed before that except in Yavapai legends who spoke of “Bololokan.” Once she contacted us at Rainbow Bridge, one of her sipapu’s, she has been with us ever since. This year in 2010, she asked us to discover her energy path throughout our valley and clean out those sacred points with human attention and ceremony. In doing that, her third dimensional energy in our valley will reawaken and bring harmony to it once more. We hope the drought will be broken and the rains that Bololokan brings, will once more, go back to its normal pattern. Join us on our journey and you can be a part of the discovery and education as well.
1.25.2011 Vultee Arch, Sedona, Arizona, Stop #3
Marchiene and I started out at 9:00 a.m. In the morning. We knew it was going to be a long hike, some 2.6 miles one way on Sterling Trail, to reach Vultee Arch. That was the third place that Grandmother Komwida of the Yavapai Birthing story, had told us to go. We stopped at Coffee Pot Restaurant in Sedona, home of the 101 omelets and tucked away a hefty breakfast.
Two days earlier, however, there was a ‘sign’ that couldn’t be ignored about our coming work with Vultee Arch. There was a 3.5 earthquake in Sedona area on January 23, 2011. We don’t get them often. At the time it happened, I knew it was tied to what we were going to do which was to open up that area and bring the fire from Sycamore Canyon over to it. I talked to Marchiene about this. I told her that I had unexpectedly connected with a black dragon who lay beneath the area of West Kennett Barrow in southwest England, near Glastonbury and Avebury Circle. I didn’t know much about dragons and sought out someone at Chalice Wells Garden in Glastonbury who did know. He listened to my story and told me that next time, I should offer the black dragon a pearl. They saw a pearl as an egg. And that is what they loved: eggs. Not to eat, but to curl around and protect. I never got to go back there to do that, but I learned that black dragons were Earth dragons. Their job was to take care of the soil and rock on Mother Earth. And if there were earthquakes, it meant the black dragon in that area was moving around. I wondered out loud to Marchiene if there was a black dragon in our area. For we had seen dragon formations in the Red Rocks as well as in the sky the day we saw Bololokan rise up out of her sipapu (opening) at Rainbow Bridge last year. Dragon energy was definitely a part of the Verde Valley.
Here is the topo map where Vultee arch is located. If you will see a RED DOT just about in the center of the map, that is where Vultee Arch is located. And what do you see? Any animals? Birds? Serpents? Four legged ones? This is a good way to symbolically see the overlay of energy in a given area.
I then showed Marchiene the topo map for the area surrounding Vultee arch. There was a huge dragon’s head in the landscape, plus a vulture, hummingbird and bear. Here’s a photo of the Dragon’s head.
Here is what I saw on the topo map. The dragon’s head, her tongue sticking out and the rest of her massive body are prominent. Her tongue is pointed at Vultee Arch. I also saw a vulture to the west of the arch. Vultures are a west energy creature; birth/death, dying and transformation. Obviously, from my standpoint, dragon energy was the primary energy for Vultee arch.
We drove up to Sterling Pass which is located up 89A north and into Oak Creek Canyon. It was a steep climb and we had chosen it because the other route into the Vultee Arch area had been closed by the Forest Service. We managed to climb about 400’ when the trail turned to pure ice. I ended up slipping and falling to my knees. I cut my right knee and called back to Marchiene. I told her we were turning around and going back. All the way up from where we were, the path was nothing but ice. We didn’t have the foot gear or anything to make that hike. When we turned around, we slid down on our butts on a hundred feet of icy path. We were laughing and Marchiene made the comment that this is what she did as a five-year-old. My butt was numb, my pants soaking wet, but we laughed all the way to where we could find some muddy dirt.
Not giving up, we decided to drive down Dry Creek Road to see if FS 153 was still blocked off. It wasn’t. But it was going to take a high ground clearance vehicle and my little Prius had a 5-inch clearance—not enough. We drove back to Marchiene’s place and pick up her red Jeep. Once we got there, I took over driving because we’ve lived on a 2-mile dirt road for twenty years. FS 153 will take the guts of your car out if you’re not careful. It’s not a road for the faint-of-heart. You really have to know how to drive it so that you don’t cracked the frame on your car or rip out the transmission. We arrived safely at the Vultee Arch trail. We got into our gear. It was a 1.6-mile hike to the Arch area. We walked through sandy paths, a nice difference from pure ice on the other trail. Plenty of gorgeous grandmother pine and cedar along the way. It was mid-afternoon, the temperature about 65F when we arrived. We were out on a red sandstone “skirt” and about 1/4 of a mile away was Vultee Arch. I had no desire to hike up to it. For indeed, hikers could and they could walk across the vault. For me, this was a sacred place and one never walked on the sacred. I took photos and got to work.
Here is beautiful Vultee Arch. The way it got its name is that a Vultee aircraft crashed nearby about sixty years ago. I wonder what its REAL name was? Those that had a connection to the land long before us had a name for this special place.
As I drummed, Marchiene stood behind me. I immediately went into an altered state and the 4th dimension. I saw Bololokan, the rainbow water snake, moving quickly along the path of fire from the sipapu on Mingus Mountain to Sycamore Canyon headwaters where we had anchored it in weeks before. She took the fire up and out of the water and in a twisting motion, brought the fire up and around her gleaming, beautiful body. As she brought the fire down, she made a huge, twisting circle around the arch itself. The red, yellow and orange flames appeared to be woven like a braid of fire around the area.
Here, Marchiene is playing her flute for the guardians and spirits of the Vultee Arch area; a thank you for allowing us to connect and work with them in a positive, uplifting way.
Bololokan told me that the earth would then sink into the earth around the arch. It was a living, moving, beautiful ring of fire. Then, I saw Grandmother Komwida appear in her white buckskin dress and her long silver-white hair that hung almost to her knees. She took an abalone shell and from it, she threw silvery, star filled dust into the arc of the fire from where it had come from to where it anchored around the arch. When the star dust met the fire, briefly, it turned a beautiful mid-blue color. And then, seconds later, it returned to its original colors. I asked Grandmother Komwida what she was doing. She said she was sprinkling the memory of our ancestors into the fire’s knowing. She said that the people who came here so long ago had come from a constellation that hung above the arch in the summer. I asked her to show me the constellation. It was Cassiopeia. When looking at it, it appears to be a “W.” Grams called it the “double breast” star. And indeed, a “W” appears to be two breasts hanging down. Amazed, I realized she was right. And I knew Cassiopeia showed up in our summer skies. I just hadn’t thought of them as breasts. To the ancient people who probably had another story about this constellation, they certainly would have appeared to be part of a woman’s body. Breasts, back then, meant milk for the baby and thriving to survive. Breasts, then were very important. More so to the ancient people than today. It was a symbol of being ‘fed’ by the milky way which is often described as a milky river flowing across the sky. In Cassiopeia, you had the added symbology to prove why it was there.
Grandmother then came over. She explained that her people (and we were a part of them, as twin girls and she was our grandmother) came here at high summer when the constellation was overhead. They would then gather everyone from around the Verde Valley. Sweat lodges were given and the arch was honored as an anchoring in of the female energy that help to ‘feed’ the Earth. And if the Earth was fed energetically, then she would provide for all those who lived upon her. The children were brought to the arch and given lessons/stories about passing from life to another life. They were taught that Death was merely a walk across this bridge from one reality to another. The elders were carried here while near death, and ceremonies were given to them so they might pass peacefully across the arch to the next life. Grandmother Komwida then sprinkled the star dust on Marchiene’s head. And then on mine. She smiled, blessed us and disappeared.
Then, I saw to my right, high in the sky, a black speck. I saw it drawing closer and closer. And then I realized it was a black dragon! I got so excited. The dragon flew past us, went to the sipapu on Mingus Mountain, followed the arc of fire to Sycamore Canyon and then here, to Vultee Arch. She was huge! I saw her miniaturize herself as she flew in on her black wings and landed on the edge of the skirt where we were at. She greeted me. I noticed she had the same yellow eyes with a vertical slit in them as the black dragon I’d met at West Kennett Barrow in England. She smiled, if you could say dragon’s smile, her golden eyes twinkling. Mentally she told me that she was the sister to the dragon at West Kennett. I asked her what she was doing HERE. She told me that she was a regional earth dragon. That this area was part of her territory. I asked her about the earthquake. She said she moved and caused it. She said if she hadn’t relieve the pressure in the earth before we performed this ceremony, that it would have been very bad. It would have created a much more powerful earthquake. She said as we were once more opening up these dormant areas, that it creates a pressure swell energetically, like a tsunami wave. And by having a little earthquake instead of a large on, the area could handle the opening and remain quiet afterward.
She also said that the fire energy was a necessary energy to this area. And when humans stopped honor, connecting with the guardians and keeping these openings cleaned out so that the fire could move as it needed too, it starved her also. I told her I didn’t understand what she meant. She said that fire feeds her and many other beings who live in other dimensions. Ceremony is a must between human and the unseen, she said. “We each need the other,” she explained. “If humans would interact with us as they used too, this world of ours would no longer be out of balance. Only by reconnected and honoring one another, will this change.” I agreed with that. I asked the dragon how big she really was. She smiled, her lips curling upward. She said she was hundreds of mile long and wide. She sleeps beneath the earth, guardian to this region. I thanked her for coming. She thanked both of us for our prayers, our heart, drum and flute music. She launched off the red sandstone lip and flapped up into the air, climbing so high that I lost sight of her in the blue sky.
When I came out of my altered state, I shared what I had with Marchiene. We are always different and yet, similar. One of the great things working with another clairvoyant person is you’ll get the same thing, more or less…. usually more. We said our good-byes, thanked everyone and took off down the sandy path once more. Next stop, Rainbow Bridge! The sipapu of Bololokan, the Rainbow Water snake.
Tomorrow: Marchiene’s blog and experiences!
In Spirit, Eileen
