It all makes sense

This is not the Sedona I remember from 27 years ago when my cousin Bevie and I flew here to celebrate my milestone 40^th birthday. It was my first Destination Birthday, a splurge; I felt called to be in a place I’d never been before, a place that was grounding, uplifting and spiritual. Sedona is still that, only garnished with hundreds and hundreds of multi-million-dollar homes. 

If you’ve never been here but been to Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim, driving into the City of Sedona is like riding the 90-minute-long-wait “Cars”’ Radiator Springs ride. The colors. The towering ancient red, orange, and peach sandstone sculpture-scape, the crystal blue skies contrasted against the green ponderosa and pinyon pine trees, are otherworldly, breathtaking. 

Being in Sedona is like being an extra on a movie set. 

However, and but, and yet, and too bad, it’s packed with shops and shops and shops and cars and cars and cars and cars and buses and buses and buses. Roundabouts that were supposed to solve the traffic problem but didn’t. Many, many, many, many people, just like Disneyland, and pink jeeps and guided tours and short sleeves and tourist shorts and 86-degree temps mid-October. Personally, not my jam, but lots of other people, better than I, dig it. For hotel-ers and spa-ers, downtown Sedona is a mecca for turquoise-buying and Southwest cuisine-dining and chilling-out in an environment I daresay is vastly different from home. 

Glance at the license plates, Mississippi, Maryland, Washington, Maine, and a European plate, and it’s clear, we’re not in Kansas anymore. 

To me, the City of Sedona is a drive-through on my way to Safeway to restock, mail some postcards, find a laundromat, and see what’s changed since the last time I was here with my cousin. Decades ago, Bevie and I were into New Age readings and alternative health. We were lured by Sedona’s reputation for healing vortexes and muslin-garbed, shepherd staff-carrying sages we figured we’d see roaming the streets. Even back then, we actually had to hunt one down eventually tracking down a sage-type at a Spiritual Circle we saw advertised on a coffee shop flyer. 

“What the heck, let’s check it out!” we both agreed and opened the door to an in-progress session held in nondescript office strip mall. 

OK, it was odd. The robe-guy offered to read our auras, so we let him. I have no memory of what he said, but when we left, we both giggled and wrote off the $20 per seeker fee as an adventure. 

When the session ended around sunset, Bevie insisted on treating me to birthday dinner at a famous fancy resort miles outside of town.

“So, this is how the other half lives?” I remember thinking as I bit into the first purple potato I ever tasted. It was, I declared, the best meal I ever ate! 

Happy and grateful, I told Bevie on the drive back to the budget hotel, “We need to do this more often.”  As one does while driving down a pitch black road, I glanced back at the rear-view mirror and noticed lights up in the sky. They appeared to be following us. 

“Bevie, do you see that? What is it?”

They were a set cigar-shaped lights that appeared to be getting closer and closer to our rental car. 

It’s important to note that neither Bevie nor I believe(ed) in aliens or UFOs. We didn’t expect or want to see extraterrestrials in Sedona. But we saw what we saw. It was real all right and we were worried and actually scared. Still, I knew as a former journalist that it was important to document the sighting with my Nikon (this before mobile phones and drones). So I stopped the car, snapped a few photos, then quickly jumped back in and we sped away toward the city.

The lights faded back into the hillside, then vanished.

The next day, we went to the newsstand in front of the same Safeway I just visited to see if there were any news reports of UFOs or other unusual sightings. Not a word. I asked locals if they had seen or heard anything about lights in the sky or military activity. Nothing. 

When we got back to the South Bay, I gave the film to my photographer and UFO-believing husband to develop. The nighttime images were blank, while the day’s adventures were vibrant and whimsical.

We had no proof we saw what we saw. 

Almost three decades later, as I sit along the creek at Manzanita Campground seven miles north of downtown Sedona, I think about our crazy trip and all the time that’s lapsed between then and now. What we both experienced couldn’t be orchestrated or replicated. It just happened. 

A few days ago, I re-routed what was going to be a southern journey westward toward Sedona. Not because of the shops or hotels or spa treatments. But because of Sedona’s magic. It can’t be bought, captured in a photo, although I try. Sedona’s magic is the Arizona Sister Adelpha butterfly sunning on a rock along the creek and the dozens of hatching gnats dancing in the sun. It is the spring-fed swimming hole that’s too cold to swim in, but you do. It’s the baptismal water-tingle that continues to jolt one’s circulation even when warm and toasty-toasting with new friends around the campfire. 

The air, the smells, the sounds, the tastes, are different here, healing. 

What I was drawn to at 40—and at 67—is grander than human wizardry. It’s vibrational, symphonic, a masterpiece of jarring and seamless senses that somehow all makes sense. 

Is it really this place, Sedona, or an open heart, or the warming sun or the thunderous chorus of gurgling water that sound-proofs the speeding tourists? 

As the world goes crazy, I sit here in reverence, in Grace: I am the red rock and the cool creek that feeds the willow and alder trees, the wild mint and lazy Fall grasses, and the cinnamon black bears that call this their home. 

Two nights ago, my camp friend, Sarah, and her two children, heard a hypnotic Native American melody coming somewhere downstream. When they went to investigate the source of the forest music, it was gone. 

“It was real,” she said, “I swear, we all heard it.” 

I have no doubt.