In the Rusty Womb of the Kachinas in the San Francisco Mountains

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The wind moved like an animal with an old soul, brushing against the pines of the San Francisco Mountains as if testing the ribs of a sleeping world. Up in the high thin air, where breath grows thoughtful and sound becomes strange, there was a hollow in the red stone, curved like the inside of a great drum. The elders called it the rusty womb of the kachinas, where breath once turned into voices and dust once learned to dance.

Inside, the air tasted of iron and snowmelt. Light filtered in cautious strands, pale gold, gently touching the faces carved into the stone. They were not human faces, nor quite spirits, but something in-between, like the pause between a heartbeat and the next. Their mouths were shut, yet language gathered silently around them, an invisible storm.

A traveler came there, not seeking answers, only a place where the weight of the world loosened its fingers. He stood still within the chamber. The ground seemed to pulse softly beneath his feet, like an old drum tapped by a hidden hand. The walls leaned closer in their ancient patience. Wind outside howled, then hushed, as though something vast listened.

Then the kachinas stirred—not in motion, but in presence. The air thickened with unseen ceremony. Pine resin, volcanic ash, the copper tang of unseen roots. The mountain was no simple body of stone; it was a sleeping constellation pressed inward, dreaming itself into earth. The traveler felt small, yet threaded into something immense—woven into the mountain’s vast inward breathing.

Outside, clouds drifted like slow ships. Inside, the chamber held quiet power. No revelation, only a widening of the soul, like a doorway opening onto deep desert night.

When the traveler stepped back out into daylight, the wind greeted him differently, as though it now carried his name in a language older than sound. The mountains did not speak. They did not need to. The kachinas remained within their rusty womb of stone, patient, eternal, holding the world in silent ceremony while snow blew across their hidden threshold.