In 2002, Kyle and I took a long weekend and traveled up to Four Corners. Since we had the 4Runner, we were able to hire a private guide to go through Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona, near Chinle. Located in the Navajo Nation, the Canyon has been the home of Pueblo Peoples for five thousand years or more. We used to laugh, because, like Table Mesa which merely combines the English and the Spanish words for table, hence naming various places “Table Table”, Canyon de Chelly essentially means “Canyon of the Canyon”. “Chelly” is a French bastardization of the Dine (Navajo) Tséyiʼ which means “canyon” (literally, “inside the rock”).

Our tour guide was a very nice woman who told us stories of the Dine as we wound through the dirt roads of the canyon. At one point, she had me drive right in to the river, and when I stopped with the question of “where am I going?” on my face, she just laughed and said, “Have faith!” I followed where she pointed and we made our way down the river a little way, the 4Runner faithfully clinging to the submerged rock bed beneath us.

When I got back to the Dine Herbology class that I was taking through Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, and told the Dine women about my experiences in the Canyon, they all laughed with acknowledgement of the place through the river. One of the women gave me a little beaded pouch with bee pollen in it. She said I’d earned it.

We went up to the actual Four Corners, where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah all come together with the state lines forming ninety-degree angles. We also went to the Petrified Forest and the huge meteor crater that is located just east of Flagstaff on I-40. It was a great few days, a mini vacation for us, and a time to see parts of the land that we had missed when we had taken our “Big Trip” back in 1992. It was an important thing for us to do together. Jaichima had told me many times that the energy up near the Four Corners is very strong and I wanted to share my discovery of it with Kyle. He was growing stronger in his independence from his father and all that that entailed. I thought that some time out in the open, ancient lands would do us both good.

When we got home, there was a message on the answering machine from one of my private clients in Sedona. She was asking me to call her as soon as I got back, and since she sounded somewhat upset, I called her even though I was tired from all the driving. She had moved in to a rental house while we had been gone; she’d sold her house and was renting until her new house was finished being built. When I called, she was very upset and asked if I could come right over because there was something she needed me to see.

There wasn’t any food in the house, so a trip in to Sedona could include a stop at Red Rock Diner for dinner; that was enough incentive for Kyle to come along with me. We walked in to the house, and as soon as we stepped up in to the foyer from the entryway, I felt a very thick energy wave over me and it felt as though my head had fallen off to the side. I didn’t want to go in any further, but Kyle was behind me and his momentum carried me in the house. As Kyle crossed the threshold, he said he felt as though his head had immediately become disconnected from his body, “like a balloon on a string”. Neither of us said anything to the other right away, and as we were invited in, my client merely asked us to look around the house for a bit. Kyle and I were both drawn to go up the stairs which were to the immediate left of the doorway we had just come through. When we got up to the second floor, there was a walkway that went from the top of the stairs, over the entry hall, and then to the bedrooms. Neither of us wanted to pass by that point. It was then that we shared with each other what we had felt downstairs. We weren’t sure if we should tell my client about it, because we didn’t want to upset her any more than she was already.

We went downstairs, and I asked my client what was going on. She explained that she had been in a casual conversation with her new neighbors when she found out that when the previous owners had the house, the woman had been found hanged from the railing of the walkway above the entry hall. The question that my client had asked me over to answer was whether or not the energy of that death was still in the house. Obviously, it was.

While my client went to a hotel until she could be moved to a different rental, Kyle and I were left with the knowledge that he was growing in to his perception. I knew that he was highly intuitive; he’d been showing that to me since he was very young, but this was a deeper, stronger awareness than he had ever shown before.

I felt that it was my job as his parent to allow him the space to discover his talents in his own time, while at the same time supporting him as he did. It’s an odd place to be in. For his whole life I had been intuiting most of what he was feeling, seeing, and sensing. At that point, I was presented with a different task. It was time for me to learn to be aware and yet step back and allow him to work with it on his own. It became another facet of our intricate relationship. This was not a mother-son phenomenon, nor was it Reiki teacher-Reiki student; this was teacher-apprentice. He wouldn’t recognize it for years, but he was going to learn a lot from me about navigating the unseen world. In the meantime, he would be in his teenage years and deal with all of the associated angst and achievements.