I decided to visit Canyon de Chelly after my first weaving workshop on the Navajo Reservation. Our workshop facilitator scheduled a trip to the canyon during our weeklong class, but I skipped the trip and stayed behind to weave instead.
Luckily for me, I didn’t miss much. The spring rains flooded the streambed and turned the canyon floor to mud, and the tour never made it to its final destination: Spider Rock, the home of Spider Woman.
What I know about Spider Woman I have had to learn from books and the internet. Even though my great-grandmother was a weaver and traditional adviser, she passed away years before I returned to the reservation; as did my grandmother; as did my mother. My traditional knowledge is borrowed, secondhand.
But here is what I feel comfortable telling you: In Diné Bahane’, the Navajo creation story, Spider Woman is the holy one who gave us the gift of weaving. She gave us the Beauty Way. It is impossible to translate hózhó directly into English, to understand the full weight of beauty. Beauty is health and happiness, balance and harmony, but this feels like an oversimplification. Beauty is a way of moving through the world.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
My friend Abby and I agree to meet at the campground just inside Canyon de Chelly National Monument. We plan to camp one night, then hike the next day.
I ride onto the reservation at sunset. In the east, a harvest moon rises, huge and red, against the great big indigo sky. The sandstone mesas look pink in the fading light.
I roll down my window and blast The Cranberries across my dream apocalypse.
I beat Abby to the campsite by a few hours — her atlas has led her astray. I make our bed by piling blankets over the folded seats of my two-door hatchback and fall asleep listening to our neighbors clean up camp.
In the morning, we catch breakfast at the Denny’s in Chinle. Eggs and toast and hash browns for Abby, Moons Over My Hammy for me.
On the way back into the park, we stop by the visitors center to pick up our complimentary motoring guide. Then we take the South Rim Drive, which travels along the canyon for almost 16 miles, ending at Spider Rock.
We stop at nearly every overlook.
At Tsegi, we watch sheep graze near the rim.
At Junction, we almost miss the main attraction until a Navajo man points out First Ruin: three or four red brick dwellings, tucked beneath an awning of smooth sandstone. They look small through my binoculars. When we seem too uninterested in his paintings, he walks on down the road. The junipers are full of bluebirds, nibbling their pale blue cones.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
I actually signed up for two weaving workshops earlier
that summer. The first, at Richardson’s Trading Co. in Gallup, New Mexico, was a culmination of the cross-country road trip my sister and I took. I stayed with one of my aunties in Window Rock.
The workshop was facilitated by a white woman, Mary Walker, but two of the instructors, Jennie Slick and Lori Begay, were Navajo weavers.
By some brilliant and beautiful chance, Jennie knew my great-grandmother. They lived in Sanders, and Jennie’s mother and my great-grandmother were best friends.
When Lori heard this, she smiled. “It was given to you,” she told me. “That means you will pick it up quick.”
But Navajo rugs are all about tension. Each time Jennie visited my loom, she pressed valleys into my thread. “Don’t pull it so tight,” she said.
It reminded me of being small and trying to learn how to crochet. I held so much tension in the yarn, I could barely slide the hook through a stitch. But no matter how many times my grandmother scolded me, I couldn’t loosen my grip — it felt too much like the yarn was slipping away.
I weave the way I live: obsessively and single-mindedly, from one thing to the next. There are weeks I’ve spent in my apartment, playing video games for weeks on end. Nights stuck on the floor, braiding a rug. At my desk, writing a story. Days and days listening to the same stupid song.
It isn’t a good or a healthy way to live, and it isn’t a way to weave.
There are stories of Navajo women falling sick from weaving in excess, from falling out of balance and harmony.
When I wove, I smiled each time I finished a row, but I was too impatient, too eager to finish my rug. I missed counts, and the lines of my design grew crooked. The walls of my rug caved in.
I left the class after the first two days. My aunt was being crazy. But the weavers, understanding, said I could come back.
When I got home, I picked half a day’s work out of the weave.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
The White House Ruins Trail is the only self-guided path to the canyon floor — a 2.5-mile (round-trip), 600-foot descent. The trail switchbacks down the steepest face of the cliff, but the crows cut easier paths on the wind.
I keep looking over my shoulder, at the rim of the canyon above: the sky so blue, the cliffs so red. I have never seen a sharper division between earth and sky.
Once we reach the bottom, we pass a row of vendors with tables covered in turquoise jewelry and small woven rugs. We smile politely and keep walking.
Beneath the ruins, we perch on the roots of an old cottonwood. We sit quietly. A white stick figure dances on the wall.
Here, a multi-storied structure on the ground once reached the dwellings built into the cliffs. Our pamphlet tells us: up to 80 rooms at its prime, 800 years ago.
A rez dog finds us beneath the cottonwood. He is bony but friendly, and he rests one paw and his chin on my leg. His toes are spotted. His nose sunburned.
I beg Abby to let me take him home, knowing she won’t. Knowing this is his home.
When we leave, he follows us back toward the trail but parts ways to join his brother, another short, spotted dog, curled up by a vendor’s chair.
The walk up the canyon is harder. I stop often — not to enjoy the view, but only to catch my breath.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
I enrolled in another weaving class two months after the first workshop’s end. My cousin-sister had her baby, the tiniest little girl, and I attended class between driving my cousin-
sister to appointments at the clinic and errands at the store. That was why I skipped the trips to Canyon de Chelly and Hubbell Trading Post. I wanted more time with my niece, who was precious, precious, precious. A thing I didn’t want to let go.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
After the White House Ruins, there are only two more overlooks on the South Rim Drive: Face Rock and Spider Rock, the moment I’ve been waiting for.
Though I am beginning to feel antsy, we stop at Face Rock, too. He tells Spider Woman about naughty children, whom she boils and eats, their bones littering the top of her lofty home.
Neither of us are very good at making out the face in the rock. I have never even been able to see the face in the moon.
Instead, we stretch ourselves out on a flat rock near the rim and bask in the sun’s warm rays. The wind is cold here, on the edge.
In the canyon, the cottonwoods are just beginning to yellow.
It is finished in beauty.
When I showed my aunt a picture of the progress I was making on my rug, she held the phone close to her face and asked, “What does it mean?”
“Mean? I don’t know,” I said, defensively. “I’m just practicing.”
Mary Walker told us to think of the rug as a sampler, a practice in technique.
My aunt pointed at the top of my rug, where the bare bones of the warp still showed. “It should tell a story!”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
It is finished in beauty.
In photos taken from the bottom of the canyon, Spider Rock looks small, somehow. A stunted butte. But from the overlook, Spider Rock is an impossibility, a sandstone spire that towers above the canyon floor. It is the world that feels small. It is easy to find beauty in a place like this, where each rock looks sculpted by some divine hand.
On the last day of my class, as I struggled with the last long inch of my rug, I caught Lori watching me. “Nizhóní,” she said, smiling.
Beautiful.