I chose a chapter from my book, The End of Time, to share with you during this holiday season. All my old friends from the Taos Pueblo Tribe have passed. This story is in honor of them and their great wisdom and strength.
My story ixs no greater than any of yours - we have all had these kinds of adventures, in many different forms. My friends taught me an important lesson. They believed that the harder and more challenging the journey, the more it showed that the path you were on was right. If we are here to help change the world, there may be a lot of
resistance. May we all have the courage to follow our path. I hope you enjoy this story and remember: each one of us has the ability
to help this planet become a more loving place.

Agape,
Ken Page

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Blue Lake
The haunting sound of the words "Blue Lake" chanted over and over that I had heard one night in my backyard at Clear Lake continued to echo in my mind long afterwards. A few months after I heard the chanting, in 1985, I felt compelled to write to the Taos Pueblo to ask permission to take my crystal to Blue Lake. I also felt compelled to enclose another crystal from my collection with the letter, as a kind of a token and as a way for them to experience my vibration. About six weeks later, I got a letter back from the Pueblo. The imposing letterhead read: War Council. The War Council, the letter said, had met to consider my request but for reasons that they were unable to share, they could not permit me to go to Blue Lake at this time. The crystal that I had sent them would be waiting at the pueblo offices anytime that I wanted to come and pick it up. I was disappointed. It seemed immensely important to me to bring the crystal to Blue Lake; I had felt sure that the wise old men of the pueblo would see the truth of this as well. I was weary of presiding over my bankrupt businesses and wanted to accomplish something that would give my life meaning again. When I looked for a silver lining in the cloud that had descended around me, I thought of my Uncle Donny. When I was four years old, my mother moved back to my grandparents' house in Oakland to regroup after her divorce. My grandfather was Donny's father. Donny was nine years old at the time, and I was a nuisance to him, but I followed him around like a puppy anyway. The essential nature of our relationship remained unchanged for many years. I would trail him around just as doggedly whenever our families co-mingled for the various holidays that held meaning for us. Finally, the war in Vietnam sundered us, as it sundered so many other families in the 1960's. Donny was called up early, in 1961, and I didn't know what happened to him afterwards other than that he stopped coming home to Oakland for Christmas. Our lives diverged from that point forward: unlike Donny, who was drafted, I enlisted in the National Guard and eighteen months later I was working my way up through the ranks of General Cable, on my way to becoming a millionaire. Donny's unexpected life after the war, was the fulfillment of a pattern that began when he was born nearly seventeen years after his closest sibling. You never knew what Donny was going to do, was all my grandfather would say. Donny sent them postcards from places like Afghanistan and Tibet, and only my mother, a lifelong Rosicrucian, seemed to have any idea what he was up to. For my part, when I thought of him I remembered his legendary chariots: the new black 1958 Chevy my grandfather bought him when he was 16 and the MG Midget he bought the year after. Washing Donny's MG when I was thirteen was one of my earliest religious experiences. Now, our paths were coming together again. I had an exciting new job running a hologram company, and my vision of creating a hologram of Jesus required me to travel to Santa Fe to oversee the creation of the detailed miniature sculpture that I planned to photograph with laser beams. I knew that Don was living in Taos, New Mexico, and I resolved to look him up. I knew next to nothing about crystals and something had told me that Don was the man that I needed to talk to. I pulled up outside of Don's place in my rented Lincoln Towne Car, nattily attired in one of the many dark three piece suits that I wore like uniforms in those days. He lived in a small one bedroom house, at the end of a long gravel road, next to a weathered converted school bus that he used as a guest house and office. Several cords of wood were stacked up under the eaves advertising the coming winter. The door swung open. A man stood in front of me who had shoulder-length hair and a beard like a hippie. The warm air drifting past him smelled of wood smoke and incense. Was this my uncle? I stuck out my hand. "Hi Don," I said. "It's Ken." Don studied me solemnly as he returned my handshake. "I knew that someone from my family was coming," he replied, "I just didn't know who." He looked at me some more and then I followed him inside. "I need to tell you a story," he said. I sat down and got ready to listen. I liked stories. Don told me about the year he spent living off of the land in British Columbia in 1971. The story ended when he was poisoned and died. He held me in his steady gaze waiting to make sure that what he had told me had taken root. "Don is dead," he explained seriously. "I am Akbar now." I understood. Akbar was the being that had come in to inhabit his body after Don left. It was like a sublease. I understood subleases. My uncle didn't take his eyes off of me. "Akbar," I said experimentally, trying out the feel of it on my tongue. No problem. Instead of my ultracool Uncle Don I now had the wise and mysterious Uncle Akbar. Everybody should be so lucky. Uncle Don was Uncle Akbar for only a few years. Today he's widely known as Drunvalo Melchizedek. Until I met Drunvalo I had thought that a walk-in was someone who showed up for a haircut without an appointment. A walk-in, I learned, was the name popularized by the writer Ruth Montgomery for a soul who enters a fully grown body without being inconvenienced by the birth process. In essence we are all walk-ins; ours is a fairly young universe and we all came here from somewhere else. I have since come to believe that a walk-in is almost always a higher aspect of the original birth soul, after I went through the process myself. People, I would find out, changed all the time. Once we got past the formalities, I found out that Drunvalo really did have a lot to tell me about crystals. The first thing that he told me was that they weren't just rocks: They were living beings, growing and changing all of the time. He showed me how to glean information from a crystal, by holding it to my forehead while mentally asking it a question. He also explained how crystals could hold immense amounts of energy, either positive or negative, and could thus be used either to hurt or heal people. They had even, he said, found out how to trap all of the energy of a nuclear explosion in a tiny crystal that you could hold in your hand. Now as in antiquity, crystals were still the ultimate weapon. The next day he introduced me to Katrina Raphael, who wrote the book Crystal Enlightenment, and two companion volumes. We spent the day hiking and she told me even more about crystals. By the end of the trip I couldn't think of any more questions to ask about them. On the evening before I left, Drunvalo made me a gift of a crystal he had been holding for a year and a half, and a book, Joy's Way by Brugh Joy. He touched the crystal. "I didn't know where it was supposed to go," he said, "but now I see that it belongs to you, Ken." I had to come back up to northern New Mexico a few weeks later and this time Drunvalo came with me when I went to the offices of the Taos Pueblo to retrieve the crystal that I had sent with my letter. A big barrel-chested man with smiling dark eyes called out to us as we stepped out the building. Drunvalo introduced me to Jimmy, an old friend of his who lived on the pueblo. He and Drunvalo knew each other very well, although there were long spaces in their friendship occasioned by Jimmy's bouts with alcohol. At the moment, Jimmy was on the wagon and bone dry. He nodded seriously when I told him about my failed attempt to get permission from the pueblo to go to Blue Lake. "I was there, man," he said. "They said no because they're worried about witchcraft going on up there. That place is too powerful. Can't take chances." In fact, as I later found out, they were careful enough to post armed guards over the trail most of the year. When I found out more about Blue Lake I was glad that they did. Not only was it a very powerful place, but it was linked energetically to other sacred sites all over the world. The Taos Tribe was right to protect it. I took out the crystal that the war council had returned to me unopened and handed it to Jimmy. It was beautiful, clear, and double-terminated. I knew right away that I had to give it to him, and so I did. Jimmy held it up to the light and admired it. A smile stole over his craggy features like the sun coming up over a mountain. "I'll take you there," he suddenly announced. My heart jumped like a fish after a fly. Drunvalo slapped me on the back and hooted. We were going to Blue Lake after all. A few weeks later, Jimmy called me in California. I rented a Towne Car again in Albuquerque and drove up to Taos. Jimmy lived in an old double-wide trailer that the wind ripped through like cheesecloth. We sat up and talked as the wind whistled all around us and the propane furnace roared ineffectually at it like an old bully. Jimmy told me about Perona, an old man of seventy-six, the Kiva Indian, who was in charge of the spiritual education of the young children on the pueblo. Perona was so knowledgeable that he could spend an entire month just teaching the children about the sun and the moon. Although Perona was Jimmy's uncle, they were as close as father and son, and so it was natural for Jimmy to tell the older man about our planned trip to Blue Lake. Perona was instantly very concerned about what we were doing. The night after he talked to Jimmy, he placed two crossed eagle feathers across his chest and asked for a medicine dream to show him the truth of what we were attempting. The dream brought good news for all of us. Perona told Jimmy that what we were doing would change the world, and he insisted on coming. By that point, we were all very excited. Neither of us thought for a moment that the journey we were attempting might possibly be dangerous. The only sign I had that anything was amiss was the unseasonably cold weather and the fact that Jimmy told me they were having trouble catching the horses. The next morning we drove up to Jimmy's "ranch" in his old pickup truck. His ranch was really just a lean-to and a corral on the land where he kept his animals. Perona was already waiting there for us with only two saddled horses. There were three of us. I looked over at Jimmy in shock. He shrugged. It was a famous shrug that many native people affected. The shrug contained the entire history of his people. It was a shrug that acknowledged the theft of everything they owned, the murders of their grandparents, the pain of seeing the daily rape of the earth by men who cared nothing for it. It was a shrug that put one missing horse in its proper perspective. Perona greeted me warmly, and made a few jokes about the weather. I could tell right away from looking at him why he knew so much about the sun and the moon: The three of them had obviously spent a lot of time together. His gray hair was pulled back in a braid, and had deep laugh lines around his mouth from a lifetime of smiling. It was plain that losing a horse meant even less to him than it did to Jimmy; they were both as tough as tempered steel and would have walked barefoot if they had to. Both of them were wearing just jeans, cowboy boots, and light plaid wool jackets, even though it had been raining since before dawn. I was completely charmed by their refusal to be ruffled by the most adverse of circumstances. It was shining evidence of their faith in the Creator. Being charmed didn't stop me from handing out the two rain ponchos that I'd stuffed in my pack at the last minute. Jimmy's girlfriend pulled the truck away in a cloud of blue smoke. I watched the heated cab and the taillights recede down the snow-covered road and wondered what I'd got myself into. A few moments later we were off, with me hanging grimly onto the saddle behind Perona like somebody in a western who had lost his horse in a poker game. Things didn't look too bad, at first. The rain gave way to huge wet flakes of snow that floated down slowly like cinders from a great fire somewhere beyond the clouds. The trail, which led to a picnic ground by the side of a river, was wide and well trodden, and a little ways down it a great snowy owl flew across the river in front of us, its majestic wings beating with hypnotic slowness. We exchanged knowing glances. We all knew that owls were powerful medicine animals. What I didn't know was that the Lakota, believe that the owl, which they call Hinhan, represents death, calling the name of those whose time it was to die. The owl spirit, Hinhan Nagi, guards the spirit road that leads to the milky way. Those travelers that weren't ready for the journey it hurled back down to earth to become wandering ghosts. Before the day was out, this story would acquire a kind of uncanny resonance for me. Once we passed the snow-blanketed abandoned picnic site, the trail all but disappeared. I looked between Jimmy and Perona for clues but they continued to impassively urge the horses forward. We were following a river up to Blue Lake rather than taking the usual trail because of the weather. Plainly, no one else had taken the river route in quite some time. The trail was blocked over and over by blown-down pines that had obviously been there since the previous winter. We had to cross and recross the river over and over to get around them, and each time we did it got harder and harder to pick up the trail again in the snow. My down jacket was turning into an expensive feather sponge and Perona's jeans were dark down to his knees from the melting snow. The banks of the narrow defile we were in rose up gray and foreboding on either side of us like the walls of a prison as the horses clattered from one side of the shallow river to the other. Finally, the trail seemed to completely disappear and we paused in the riverbed to confer like thwarted bloodhounds. The breath of the horses steamed faintly. I thought about the water that coursed around their ankles and how it was propelled upward by their energy and how it would fall again as rain and eventually find its way back to its mother the sea. My reverie abruptly ended as I felt the back legs of the horse buck hard underneath me. I peered upwards. The trail, it seemed, went straight up the embankment. I couldn't see Jimmy anywhere. I stared apprehensively around Perona's poncho, my knuckles white around the edge of the saddle. A ragged line of gray circles in the snow broadcast Jimmy's progress, longer streaks telegraphing where his horse had slipped on the slick wet rock beneath the snow. He had already gained the ridge over the river and was lost in a bend among the trees but our horse was balking. Jimmy's horse had slipped and it had carried a balanced load of only half our weight. Perona grunted and urged the horse forward with his legs. It trembled beneath us, drawing every muscle as taut as a bowstring in an effort to stop us all from sliding backwards as we jerked and lunged our way up the side of the embankment. I glanced nervously back at the dark outline of the river where it scissored through the snow thirty feet below. Perona spoke reassuringly to the horse, encouraging him forward again. Then all hell broke loose. The horse lunged desperately as it started to slide backwards. Perona hollered at it. The horse kicked backwards and then my head slammed into Perona's back as the horse's hooves flailed desperately at some unseen beast in the air in front of us. The next thing I knew the ground was a white blur rushing up at me and then I was rolling down the side of the defile. I fetched up hard against a stump. Still in one piece and anesthetized by adrenaline, I jumped quickly up to see if Perona was okay. He wasn't. I saw Perona twenty feet above me, bent low over the horse's neck as it trembled and shook beneath him. The slope beneath them was as steep and as slick as a wet slate roof. Perona clung to the horse's neck and whispered in its ear as it snorted and blew steam out of its nostrils. It jerked forward spasmodically like it was electrocuted and then started to slide backward in earnest, scrabbling helplessly against the black wet rocks beneath the snow until it slid backwards into the carcass of a big blown-down pine that we had crossed on the way up. They stayed there for a moment-the horse, the rider, and the tree-all balanced together like some improbable circus act. The dead tree creaked and shifted like an unruly sleeper. The horse panicked and reared up. I saw it teeter on its great trembling back legs like a movie stallion, and then horse, rider, and tree all parted ways. Perona flew backwards through the air like he was shot from a cannon, landed hard in the rocks, snow and gravel ten feet below me, and somersaulted out of view. The horse, twisting in midair like a leaping dolphin, landed on its side with a sickening thud and rolled, flailing helplessly down the embankment to finish up thrashing and screaming in the river. I heard a low rumble and the sound of splintering wood above me, and turned just in time to see a dark greasy slick in the snow like it had just been plowed and to feel the impact as the dead pine tree slid into the backs of my legs and pitched me forward. I saw myself throw my hands out just in time to stop me from opening my head up on the gray rock that jutted cruelly up in front of me like a shark's dorsal fin. I felt nothing. I had left my body to watch the whole thing from a safe perch far above the creek. I knew right away that I'd died here before at this very spot, on that very rock, in a past life and I had fled my body before I had to relive it a second time. I saw myself struggling. My foot was pinned behind the stump, leaving me hanging face-down over the side of the gorge with my leg at an impossible angle. Perona was on his hands and knees in the river, shaking his head while water streamed off of him. The horse had just struggled to its feet and was staggering around in shock like a foal that couldn't find its mother. I heard a muttered curse from Jimmy who had ridden back to see what all of the crashing and screaming was about and then I was right back in my body, suspended helplessly over that killer rock, trying to stem the pain in my leg by holding onto a dry branch over my head. Jimmy ran up to me and tried to shift the tree but it was hopeless. It was as long as a telephone pole and the roots were jammed down in the riverbed. Perona was on his knees in the water, holding onto his hips and grimacing with each breath. Jimmy slid down to the river to check on him and when Perona nodded something to him he splashed over in his cowboy boots to the scraggly root end of the tree that pinned me. He surveyed it for a moment and then dropped to his knees in the icy water to get his shoulder underneath a branch. He grabbed the tree under the water and put everything he had into lifting it. I felt the tree shift, not much, but just enough to work my foot out from behind the stump. I lowered myself gingerly from the branch that I was hanging onto. My foot hurt like hell but I could put my weight on it. I waved at Jimmy, who was already leading Perona out of the river. We looked like the survivors of a war, but we were alive. We regrouped on the other side of the river. Perona moved slowly, holding his side. The horse was still shaking. Exhilarated by what I saw as my triumph over death and numbed by the excitement, I was bruised all over but still ready to lead the charge to Blue Lake. I felt the energy from the crystal in my knapsack urging me on. It wasn't until we discovered that Perona had broken several of his ribs that I realized we'd been defeated. As the adrenaline wore off, the cold came stealing in. We rode back down the gorge for what seemed like hours until we came to a small clearing where we could build a fire. Perona collected moss from beneath the trees while Jimmy scouted around, breaking dry dead wood from the lower branches. Much to my surprise we soon had a roaring fire going and we sat steaming around it like baking potatoes, trading stories and tearing into the french bread and cheese I'd brought up from San Francisco, the only food we had. I was concerned that our accident was some kind of omen. Jimmy and Perona shook their heads at the same time. They saw resistance as a positive sign, like the spring in a sapling. What we were doing was very important, they asserted. Otherwise, why had the Creator seen fit to test our resolve in this way?
Perona walked most of the ten miles back to Jimmy's ranch, claiming that he was starting to stiffen up. When we got there at eight 'o clock it was raining and bitterly cold. There was no sign of Jimmy's girlfriend or his pickup truck. We turned the horses out and started out to walk the three miles back to the Pueblo. Jimmy's girlfriend skidded up in a cloud of blue smoke a mile later.
I packed up quickly back at the trailer, wary of getting snowed in at Taos, said good-bye, closed the big door of my rented Lincoln and then I was instantly back in the world that I had left behind, a world that Jimmy and Perona had never known. I drove through Taos listening to soft music on the radio, while the heater clicked and whirred, and the wipers chased the huge flakes of snow back and forth across the windshield.
I had no idea what had gone wrong with my mission, or why it had nearly cost us our lives. I still don't know today. Perhaps the owl spirit, Hinhan Nagi, had found us wanting and hurled us down the mountain for our impetuousness. Sioux men wore secret spiritual tattoos on their wrists which were said to secure Hinhan's blessing as they journeyed to the Milky Way. All that I had was my determination. I knew that I would return to Blue Lake, until the time came when I heard that owl call my name if I had to, and I was taking that crystal with me.

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The Owl's Blessing A few months after my first trip to Blue Lake, I noticed that I was having trouble sleeping. I had started to hear a kind of a hum between my ears. I tried to ignore it at first, thinking that it might be some early sign of mental illness-the failure of my businesses was causing me no small amount of stress at the time. I tried playing music when I went to bed, a solution that my wife didn't appreciate and when that didn't work I tried unplugging my clock radio instead. When I suggested that we try turning off the power at the meter my wife looked at me as if to say that clearly I was on the brink of insanity. Perhaps I was. "You're right," I averred. "Let me just go look in there one more time." She rolled her eyes. I'd already treated her to the spectacle of me crawling around on all fours in my underwear pressing my ear to the walls and the furniture like a restless dog. I sat on the bed like I'd seen TM people do and cleared my head of extraneous thoughts. Instantly the humming became louder. Clearly, if I washearing the sound, I was also perceiving it on other levels. The more I focused on it, the louder it became. I opened my eyes after a few minutes, and walked straight to the glass display cabinet that held the crystal I'd nearly died for. The crystal itself was creating a kind of a low, pulsating hum. I reached for it, and then yanked my hand away in shock. The crystal was hot. I sat down on the bed to think about this for a moment. Unable to reach any firm conclusions, I retrieved a pair of gloves and a shovel from the garage, dug a shallow hole under a tree in my backyard, and buried the crystal, point downward. That took care of the infernal hum, but the crystal itself remained stubbornly lodged in my consciousness. I thought about it often, and at inappropriate times, like an old flame or a forbidden love. I wanted to get my mission over with so that I could think of something else, but there were still more obstacles to overcome. In the first place, Blue Lake was still snowed in. The river route was nearly impassable at the best of times, and the only alternative was a 14,000 foot pass between two mountains. You couldn't get up there with a dog team. Then there was the fact that the War Council plainly didn't want me to go there. It was nothing personal: They didn't want anyone to go there who wasn't a member of the tribe. The Spirit of the North watched over the lake all winter but when the snows melted, armed guards took over. They stood watch all summer long, until the snows returned to relieve them, and they would shoot intruders on sight. The lake was guarded on other levels as well.
I had talked to Jimmy a few times over the winter, and he assured me that he was as gung-ho as ever to help me bring the crystal home to Blue Lake. So was Perona, but he was still mending from his experience as the Taos Pueblo's only human cannonball. We both believed that what we were doing was in accordance with the divine order and flow of things, and that a gateway would thus be opened for us, but that the timing could be crucial. Late in the Summer of 1987, Jimmy finally called me. It was time. The entire Pueblo trekked to Blue Lake once every year for one of their most important ceremonies. We would have a small window of opportunity just after they left. Jimmy had checked and the way was clear. The flight to Albuquerque wouldn't have been fast enough for me if it was on the Concorde. I wanted to speed all of the way to Taos too, but I remembered the fireside discussion I'd had with Jimmy and Perona about resistance and listened to loud music instead. Soon the highway rose out of the desert like the back of a great stretching cat and I could feel the vibration change as I moved into the mountains. Santa Fe came and went and then I was in Taos, and thirty minutes after that I was seeing Jimmy's weathered mobile home growing large in my windshield. Jimmy shouldered the warped door open from inside like a police raid in reverse and we were two old friends again, trading war stories and our dreams of the future. Jimmy told me about a friend of his, Fred Hopper, who in turn had told him about three shamans who'd come all the way from Mexico. The shamans, Jimmy said, had built a medicine wheel on the side of a hill overlooking the pueblo. Fred had been there, and had told Jimmy that it was a beautiful ceremony, that they'd all heard sounds and seen dancing lights over the crystals that the shamans had used. The purpose of the medicine wheel, the shamans had said, was to prepare for the arrival of a crystal. Jimmy lowered his head slightly to fix me with a significant look. I nodded. He hadn't told anyone about what we were doing but it seemed that somehow these old men who barely spoke English knew.
They all came around to the trailer that night. The shamans were delightful human beings, ageless and yet very old. They wore elaborately beaded buckskin robes, smiled often, and listened very carefully. I unwrapped the crystal and held it up to show them. The sunset spilling in through the windows made it look like I was holding a flame between my hands. The old shamans' eyes were as wide as saucers. This was the crystal, they explained to me in broken English. This was the reason that they'd traveled to the Pueblo. I could feel the crystal throbbing as I held it. It had brought all of us together. All of us had traveled thousands of miles thinking we were traveling alone, but we had been together the whole time. My spirits fell a little bit when I checked my watch. I had planned to go into Taos that night to provision myself for the trip to Blue Lake. I'd heard stories about Jimmy's cooking and I didn't want to take any chances, but by the time that all of our guests left it was too late. Jimmy pushed his chair back and stretched. "Better check the grub," he said grinning. I made a show of stretching and yawning, and then I slowly made my way into the kitchen. I found Jimmy staring into a steaming pot of what looked like swamp water. He stuck a big fork into the water, and then pulled out something like an enormous gray eel for my approval. I stared at it, trying not to look horrified. Jimmy dropped it back into the pot with a splash. He shook his head slowly, audibly sniffing the steam to show me how good it was. All he said was: "Beef tongue. Good." My stomach drew itself up into a tight fist like a cornered porcupine. I thought about the bread and cheese I had planned to get in Taos, where it would have fit my knapsack, and what it would have been like to tear warm french bread apart at 14,000 feet. Obviously, I rationalized, the seriousness of my mission demanded that I fast. We were up before dawn the next morning. Perona would only be with us in spirit this year, as would my Uncle Drunvalo. This time we began by following the river route, and then departed from it to climb to a steep pass at close to the 14,000 foot level. Even though it was a beautiful day, and the only snow we saw was at the very highest levels, I tried to stay as aware of my surroundings as possible, in case we encountered any more "resistance." Soon the juniper and pinyon pine gave way to quaking aspens which gave way to nothing at all as we climbed above the treeline and finally gained the saddle between mountains that divided up from down. Below us was Blue Lake, so far below that it appeared no bigger than a coffee cup, shining a beautiful iridescent blue as though it had been poured full of liquid turquoise. The path down was so steep that we had to dismount and lead the horses. The lake slowly enlarged ahead of us and with it my anticipation grew. I was on the verge of completing something that all of us had risked our lives for, and it didn't appear that anything short of an earthquake could stop us now.
When we reached the lake, I was immediately struck by a massive flat-topped rock, which jutted out into the lake like a small island. It was the perfect place for us to perform a ceremony, and once we secured the horses I immediately started setting up on its broad surface. First I pulled out the crystal itself and carefully unwrapped it. Perona had made us a gift of feathers from all types of different birds, wrapped in corn husks, and Jimmy had wrapped all of the feathers and corn husks around the crystal. Over this he had tied a piece of leather with leather laces. I placed this beside the white buckskin pouch that my good friend Mary Schlosser, whose pueblo name is Cradle Flower, had given me. The pouch was filled with sacred corn meal, sacred because it was ground by virgins. I made a circle with various fetishes, Perona's feathers, other crystals, with the smoky mountain quartz from Clear Lake in the center. Then I sprinkled a pinch of the corn meal in each of the four directions in the way that Mary had taught me. After I had finished my ceremony, Jimmy sang traditional Pueblo songs and danced. We followed that with about an hour of prayer. After the prayer we looked at each other. It was time.
Jimmy stood out on the tip of the rock and I stood behind him with my hand on his left shoulder. The lake, which had been as smooth as glass when we started our ceremony, was now rippling. The ripples spread in broad circles from a central vortex. The hum that I'd heard back in my bedroom in Clear Lake, was audible again now, and growing steadily louder. Jimmy cocked his arm and threw the crystal. It arced over the water, catching the sun for a fleeting instant before falling directly into the center of the vortex. Instantly, Jimmy and I were hit by a blast of energy that felt like a hurricane force wind. At the same time, I could feel a change in energy within me. It felt like I was being tuned up an octave, like a piano. I could feel the energy in my heart chakra move up to my throat chakra. I heard coughing behind me and spun around. Jimmy had fallen to the ground and was rolling and holding onto his throat. I made to move toward him but he waved me off. Whatever energy shift that I had felt, had triggered his asthma. I turned back to the lake. The ripples that we'd seen when we started were now small waves and the hum that I had heard was much louder. I decided, foolishly, to try and move the energy up even higher, to the level of the third eye. I knelt down and hummed a tone equal in frequency to the sound coming from the lake. Then I slowly raised the frequency upward. The next think I knew I was lying on the ground next to Jimmy. As soon as I had tried to raise the pitch of the sound, I felt a sudden intense pain in my third eye. It felt just like someone had thrown a knife at me. I raised my head enough to look over to Jimmy. He looked at me from the corner of his eye and grinned as he gasped for air. We both looked as though we had just fallen off a train. I just lay there listening to the lake hum, feeling the good hot sun on my face, and listening to Jimmy trying to suck in enough of that rarefied mountain air to get his voice back. Finally we both recovered to the point that we could pack up everything and head back. Jimmy said something about stopping to eat but to be honest I was kind of hoping that he'd forget-I could live without seeing him slice into a big cold gray beef tongue. Once we had gotten back over the pass, we turned off of the trail that we had taken coming in and followed a shallow creek to a clearing where the people from the pueblo camped on their visits to Blue Lake. Like a magician, Jimmy gestured to a big green garbage bag, hanging from ropes between two trees. It was the pantry that the native people used to keep their food safe from animals. Jimmy unknotted the rope and lowered the garbage bag to the ground. Reaching inside it, he handed me a foil-wrapped package. Inside, I found a loaf of bread that his mother had baked the day before and a block of fresh cheese. I was ecstatic. It was exactly what I had wanted. As I tore into the bread I knew that despite all of the millions that I had lost I would never lack for anything again. The bread and cheese, forty miles from anywhere, was to me absolute proof of my powers of manifestation. Jimmy and I wolfed down our lunch, giggling like two children drunk on mayhem. Something very big had just happened at Blue Lake. Unfortunately, neither of us had any idea what it was. We followed the river back to Jimmy's ranch, instead of the steep trail that we had come in on. If anything, it seemed ever more overgrown after a season of winter storms than it had been when we tried to make our way up it the previous year. Nobody had been down it with a chainsaw in a long time. Blown-down trees were everywhere, necessitating constant detours. After about three hours of bushwhacking our way back down the mountain, we came to the spot where the accident had taken place the previous year. There, almost exactly over the rock where I had nearly been killed, I saw a big cow skull in the branch of a tree. Whether it had been there on our previous trip I couldn't say, but it looked like it had been there forever. I stood up in the stirrups and tried to wrench it loose from the tree as I rode underneath but it wouldn't budge. The more I pulled, the more nervous my horse got. I looked down at the rock below us, let go of the skull, and rode on. Another lesson about letting go, I decided.
By about seven o'clock we had made our way back to the picnic ground where the trail widened out to a jeep trail about a mile away from the trailhead. It was at that point that I saw something that nearly made me fall off of my horse. The trail was lined on both sides with the ghosts of hundreds of Native Americans. They stared up at Jimmy and me, their faces shining with joy and gratitude. I felt my own heart singing, in resonance with them. I knew what we had done was big, but now I knew that it was really big, big enough for a parade even. My eyes brimmed with tears as we rode slowly past them. Both men and women were there and all of them were wearing ceremonial costumes. They looked up at me like I was somebody, like I had purpose in the world, like I wasn't the chalk outline of man that I thought I had become.
In the ensuing years I would be given more and more information about what really happened at Blue Lake that day. The last piece of information came on my last visit to Taos. For the last several years residents of Taos have complained about a mysterious hum. A congressional inquiry, and a number of scientific investigations later, the "Taos Hum," as the newspapers have dubbed it, continues to frustrate residents. I looked Jimmy up in August of 1995 and our conversation turned to the subject of the noise that everyone seems to be able to hear but that no one has ever been able to record. "You know what it is, don't you Ken?" Jimmy said significantly. I thought about it for a moment. Then I looked at him. Hard. "It's the same noise, right?" he said. I nodded slowly. He was right. It was. Exactly.
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These men and women gave everything to follow their paths. They never asked: What's in it for me?
Mary Schlosser, some eighty year ago, was the first woman to marry outside her tribe. She was asked to leave; for 15 years she was not allowed to go to her home. Following one's heart seems to be one of life's greatest challenges. If you find resistance, look inside yourself to see what it is. And remember: there are many different paths that come back to the same place - our own inner truth.

LOVE AND BLESSINGS FOR THE NEW YEAR!

In honor of the new Millennium, Ken will be posting his entire book, The End of Time, on his web site. Look for it in the new year!
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My good friend, Aluna Joy, has a monthly newsletter. If you would like to receive it, you can contact her at : alunajoy@1spirit.com
Visit Aluna's web site at http://www.1spirit.com/alunajoy

Thank you for forwarding this letter to your friends!

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If you would like to know more about Ken Page and his work, please look up his web site
http://www.kenpage-mch.com