We walked through the cemetery this morning – it was closed for the winter – and I saw that we were walking on a red gravel road, and I felt a chill run through my body.  Maria was reading the messages on the tombstones, as she always does.

Red saw it, he felt it, he ran to me. This morning, my friend Pamela Rickenbach had just messaged me about another red road, about the Roadrunners. I thought there must be a connection there, a sign. Pamela is a mystic, the spirit lives in her, it draws people and animals to her.

She was writing about my heart surgery and she told me of a Native-American belief called the Red Road, which is a road we take to remind us and restore a deep sense of belonging to the animals and the earth that most of us have lost in our rush for money and security, our orgy of conflict and confrontation.

The Sundancers on the Red Road have their chests pierced and opened to let in the light from the Creator in order to serve him and the world.  The light enters their body and awakens them. Pamela said it came to me and my opened heart, another stop on the long and winding hero journey for me. And what is the hero journey if not the Red Road? In open heart surgery, my heart was stopped, I left the world for some time,  and I traveled to the other side, a transformative experience.

It is hard sometimes to talk about this or even write about this – writing is rarely difficult for me – but the people who run the world have trivialized and ridiculed Mother Earth and true spirituality, they have forgotten the animals and the earth and call us to our darkest sides. On the new Facebook Page to ban me, I thought it was telling that the first thing the creators of the page did was to jeer at  my Native-American mumbo-jumbo and also at Maria for showing her emotions in tears. The Native-Americans warn that our time is running out. We can choose harmony or we can choose ruin.

They say the horses have come to warn us.

What could be more threatening to the prophets of darkness and the guardians of the old order than spiritual mumbo-jumpo from the Indians and from ranters like me, all talk of harmony and the earth and the haters and the war-makers?

So we are at a crossroads, we each will have to decide who we are and who we want to be, and what road we just to travel.

The lessons of modern times teach us that the people with the most important messengers are driven to the edge of life and ignored and trivialized, the people preaching anger and greed and division get to speak for the world, get to be heard. It is the ones who are ridiculed, the ones on the margins, that have the messages we most need to hear as our world begins to crumble around us and the animals are driven away by the people who would save them.

That is the nature of the Red Road.

I would have done that myself a few years ago, I have much cynicism and anger in me,  jeering was a song of mine. I am changing my song.  Anger and disconnection  was my path in life until my world came apart and I was forced to see the world anew.  I don’t believe that I can or should become a new person, just liberate the one that is already there. I don’t have to throw my soul into the trash.

I love the story of the Roadrunners and the Red Road. I am so grateful that my heart was pierced, and the light began to come in, and penetrate my soul and open my eyes.

I will be honest with you, it was the horses in New York who did this for me, who started it. They began speaking to me, and I began hearing them. Do not let them forget us, they said. Do not let them lie about our lives and our people. Do not let them succumb to their ignorance and blindness and greed and take us away from people and from the earth.

I believe the road was paved for me by the animals I have lived with. By Simon, the dogs, the other donkeys, even the chickens. By Red, a guide to the Red Road. This, say the Native-Americans, is the great song of life, of the people, plants, stones and animals. And by Maria, and her deep love of the natural world and it’s mysticism and spirituality. I have always sought a spiritual life, every day of my existence for as long as i can recall. The animals have things to tell us, if we can learn to listen, if we can keep them among us.

We are not different things, we are all a part of one thing.

I have been on the path to openness a long time now, it began when I came to my cabin on the mountain at the turn of the century and answered the call to change, to live in nature, to find love, to talk to the animals. I am happy to be a Roadrunner on the Red Road, and hope to walk it to the end of my days.