At the Medicine Wheel

At the Medicine Wheel

I visited the Little Brush Creek Medicine Wheel with the Mountain Club on December 20th. Thus, it was actually Winter Solstice Eve.  We had received permission from the owners – it’s a privately owned site. We walked down snowy roads to a sandstone alcove, which had predictable-if-impressive Fremont Culture anthropomorphs.  Ornately decorated rock carvings of those prehistoric farmers, or their gods. After viewing them, we walked up to the Medicine Wheel, created by a white man named Tom Freestone, but a working celestial dial, anyway. It is a circle of rocks only about 50 feet across, with a central dead tree trunk. Radiating spokes of rocks go from the trunk outwards to various spots on the horizon. These spokes point towards the rising and setting of the sun at equinox and solstice, the cross-quarter days between solstice and equinox (Ground Hog’s Day, May Day, Lammas, and Hallowe’en), and the farthest north and south that the moon gets in its 18 year cycle.
Very pagan, the nearest approximation to Stonehenge that we have in the Uintah Basin. Very satisfying intellectually, artistically, and spiritually. I don’t remember if Ann ever visited it with me.
 
Of course, the collected liberal intelligentsia gathered there did not think to visualize the wheel as it would be on winter solstice, prior to the trip. That is, covered in 15 inches of snow. We brushed off some of the rocks, and took up positions at the important points. The Ute Nation has officially blessed this site, though it was created by a white Mormon rancher, and we were careful to obey their requests. No one steps into the circle, and we always walk around it clockwise. That means that if you pass the point you were interested in, you can’t go back, you have to walk 360 degrees around to get back to it. It’s kind of fun, like a game.
 
Sally Wither played her Ute flute, which was a really nice sound in those surroundings. Afterwards, she read a poem that an Indian poet had given her just two days before:
 
Solstice 2009
Cynthia Vanderhoop
 
As the sun and the moon renew themselves
and we honor the closing of circles,
Once again we learn that even in the darkest moments:

Health, serenity, and healing are available.

Bless our connections with the ancients
Bless our connections with each other.
Bless our connections with future generations
Bless our connections with the circles of the seasons
Bless our connections with places of beauty and solitude.

Celebration is at hand
Celebrating the renewal of bonds of kinship
Celebrating the renewal of bonds of friendship
Celebrating those who have touched our lives
Celebrate the parts of the earth that bring us joy

Celebrate the return of the sun and longer days

Rejoice

Peace
 
As the sun set, we watched it drop behind the tree trunk, along the (visualized) winter solstice sunset spoke. The low-angle light became golden, though it was anything but warm. I thought about Ann, and how this was the first “new year” (pagan-style) since she passed on. It has been 9 months, and there have been many milestones that were “firsts” without Annie. The first day without her, first church service, first of her birthdays, first Easter, first end of the school year, first of my birthdays, first anniversary, first beginning of school…soon first Christmas, and then first New Year’s Eve. Soon it will be the anniversary of her death, and I’m not sure yet what to do on that day. 
 
We chatted until the sun had dropped to the horizon, and then walked out through a pinyon-juniper woodland, as the temperature quickly dropped into the single digits. We decided to continue to visit on solstice and equinox, using the Wheel as a sort of metronome to life. 
 
Good fortune to all of Ann's friends and family in 2010.

Photos: Click to Enlarge

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