John Wahl was a longtime subscriber and sometime contributor to The Zephyr. His death on July 24 came as a terrible blow to many of us who admired his courage and passion....JS

Late December 2001: I came home one iced-up morning from my foster-land (a one-room shack on a cow-seared acre in an old land scam) to an open front door and all the plants frozen dead. For an instant I thought they might be alive; they were brilliant emerald, more green than they had been in life. Later, they withered, went brown, only the geranium's scarlet blossom holding color. Now, they are all compost. 17, 15, 10, 5 years of water and the attentions of a plant-challenged woman gone; seven windows holding nothing but light.

At times, the plants had seemed talismans---especially the avocado tree. It was taller than I am. Too many nights I lay alone, taking comfort watching its spidery branches weaving Full Moon shadows. I had begun the tree from the seed of a fruit I had once eaten with the perfect lover seventeen years earlier, on the shores of a wild gray Northern Lake.

My friend Roxane said, "Maybe the root structure didn't freeze." I cut the avocado back. The stem was hollow. Still, it took six months for me to carry the stub and withered seed out to the compost. Had I come home that winter night instead of sleeping in the shack, the old geraniums, begonias, avocado and scrawny no-name plant would still be alive.

I would have not walked and slept alone with my oldest companion, Mr. Terror. I would not have taken in the pure hard medicine of Red Butte, the Sacred Mountains, Red Mountain, the un-named acres of pinon-juniper dark against the pale sand---the only medicine with no side effects, the only medicine I trust, the medicine cooked in the great cauldron that contains us. I took loneliness with me and came back a woman beloved. The mountains, the buttes, the silent rock are my cousins, and I am theirs.

It was on the drive home, in the Chapel of the Holy Dove, half-way home, that I let myself know how a few people might be my kin. The little A-frame faces the Sacred Mountains, it's Eastern wall nothing but window, a wall of mountain and sky. The Chapel has burned once. The rumor was vagrants. It stood charred for months. Then, a Flagstaff woman, Kirstin McKracken, and her neighbors rebuilt the place. As I stood in the heart of the new hand-hewn wood, I wondered about the vagrants, the arson. The Chapel seemed so filled with Spirit, it could have been holy tinder. Prayers filled the place, prayers written on scraps of paper. They fluttered in the breeze through the open door like tongues of white flame. Pilgrims had left them: paper prayers, photograph prayers; and on the rough wood tables in the front of the Chapel, prayers that are journals, candles, coins and dollar bills. Jewish. Catholic. Protestant. Pagan. Native American. And, the Plain Song of those who walk the path that is only made by walking. There were wedding announcements. Memorials for beloved humans, animals and places.

Pilgrims asked for protection, courage---a second, third, that undeserved impossible last chance. The oldest prayer was written everywhere, in fluorescent ink, in pencil, in black char from a stick of burned wood. I stood in the perfect silence of the Chapel of the Holy Dove. The Sacred Mountains rose before me---those old, old young volcanoes. All around me, prayers fluttered. Tongues of flame. Tongues of spirit. And then, I left my own prayers: four dollars and thirty-seven cents and the word "whatever" scrawled on the inside of a matchbook.

Gratitude took fire in my charred heart, and I spoke that oldest prayer, "thank you." May 2003: We watched the full moon last night rise over the east end of town. It's already borrowed light was further compromised. By neon and headlights. By the shadow of our earth. There were a dozen of us, strangers and neighbors. Our voices threaded the twilight, our laughter was silvery. A woman and I were transformed from acquaintances to friends by stories of false lovers and true children. The eclipse moved slowly. As it neared what I believed would be completion, I walked away from the group, away from the children racing in and out of the dark pines. I sat on a boulder near the old alligator juniper. The moon floated between the ragged tops of two young Ponderosa. Behind me, mountains no less sacred than this inexorable passage of shadow, rose against blue twilight. It was so quiet I could hear my breath.

The moon persisted. It glowed rust-gray, a crescent of soft light never quite gone from its upper curve. I saw a person crouched in the spring grass perhaps two hundred feet in front of me, white shirt softly luminous against the earth. I felt more peaceful than I had in months, peaceful enough to feel the heaviness in my heart. There was the weight of despair, the immutable separation from a dear friend; the density of new powerlessness, a sense that world events were spinning out of control. Time caught. The earth's shadow moved slow as the Great Blue Heron I had once watched courting a mate, the bird taking forty-five minutes to make two steps toward his beloved. I began to pray---for the furthering of all sentient beings, for the protection of earth, air and water. I remembered the baby rabbit I had seen the night before in the meadow behind my cabin, and the raven that had caught it. Terror. Dark Joy.

The great messy circle spinning around again. I sang an old old song into the dark, a song about fear and power. When I came to the line, "Time is the renewer," I remembered my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother called this the Rabbit moon, and for the first time in a long long while, I knew where I belonged. With my neighbors. And alone. Under light and shadow, stirred by a renewal over which I had no control. August 2003:

I open Mountain Gazette to the letters section. There is a letter from John Wahl, Flagstaff, Arizona. My breath catches. I am spinning in a huge eddy. Two weeks ago, John Wahl, a man whose activism ran deeper than any I have ever encountered, strangled himself with a bungee cord in his tiny apartment. In his life, he was a tax resister, a trail and city street walker, a persistent presence at any demonstration for earth and justice, a man who locked-down at the office of Rick Renzi to bear witness to the U.S. Representative's duplicity and lies. In his death, John sought release from years of inner torment. In his hard choice, a hypotheses and conjecture swirled through our community---and a deeper wash of grief.

For these last weeks, those of us who had known John, who worked with him, who stood along Route 66 with him---holding signs that called for peace, for justice, for manifest passion for the earth---we seemed adrift in a huge cauldron, being cooked, reduced, between old Ponderosa pine and fresh-cut stumps, along the banks of the littered Rio de Flag, on streets that hold mom 'n' pop restaurants and corporate cutiques, under western skies laced with contrails and monsoons. When we meet each other, his name has been the first word on our lips. It has risen volatile as snow falling into the cauldron's fire. John Wahl. We have spoken it as the bereaved and questioning might risk a prayer. Mary Sojourner lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.