THE EARTH IS MY MOTHER

      In early Spring, when there is still snow on the highest peaks, Magic Canyon seems most like its name, a magic place filled with the sound of water, falling from great heights, bubbling merrily over smooth stones, collecting in deep, quiet pools. Hidden trails and passageways lead in and out of the canyon, but they are hard to find. The Indians knew them all. So did Sarah.
      She looked at her watch. Late. She should have started for home half an hour ago. But whenever when went out wither her camera, time seemed to evaporate. Especially in Magic Canyon. Luckily she knew a short cut, a secret passage between two huge boulders. She put the lens cap on her camera, put it away, and squeezed through the ancient crack, a short-cut her mother said was a million years old.
      Sarah Star Stewart was eleven and as long as she could remember she had loved Magic Canyon. As a tiny baby she went there almost daily, peeping out from under the sunshade of the special backpack her mother had designed for carrying her. The backpack was pale blue canvas and on it Sarah's mother had embroidered Indian symbols for sun, moon, beauty and courage. Sarah's father had been amused and puzzled. Sun, moon, and beauty, he could understand. But courage? For a girl?
      Especially for a girl, Sarah's mother said.
      The backpack had outside pockets for camera and film and straps to hold Sarah securely upright when her mother left the trail and climbed up or down steep slope to get the perfect photograph. Sarah's mother was Abigail Stewart, the photographer, and she never tired of photographing Magic Canyon.
      "It's my Giverny," she said. When Sarah was old enough to understand, her mother had told her about the French painter, Claude Monet, and the corner of his garden in Giverny which he painted over and over again to capture the changes of light and the seasons.
      "I thought I wanted to be a painter," Sarah's mother told her, "until I discovered that the camera sees things that I don't."
      "What do you mean?" Sarah had asked.
      "Well, it doesn't happen all the time," Mama said, "but sometimes when I take a photograph, it shows me a different world, the one that exists just the other side of the fine line that separates body and spirit. "Your father says I photograph shapes and colors and patterns that my eye takes in without being aware of it. He says it's science. The Indians say it's magic. I think it's both."
      Whenever her mother mentioned Indians, Sarah begged for a story. She wanted to hear again how the fawn got its spots, how grandmother spider named the clans, why possum has a naked tail, how the Great Mystery planted the whole earth in the blink of an eye, a blink that lasted half a million eons of creation time. Some of the stories were in Mama's book: Circling The Spirit, Text and Photographs by Abigail Stewart. But Mama knew other stories, dozens of them, because she collected them the way other people collect stamps or dolls or baseball cards.
      Sarah also liked Mama to tell stories about her life. About her childhood in Utah where her best friend had been an Ogala Sioux Indian girl. About teaching kindergarten at an Indian school. About winning a prize for photography and going to Los Angeles to take a job as a staff photographer for a magazine. Mama love the job but hated the city, but everything turned out all right because when the magazine asked her to photograph Native American dances and ceremonies, Mama looked up her childhood friend, regained her sense of wonder, and began what turned out to be a lifetime of study.
      An article in Image Magazine said, "Abigail Stewart uses her camera to shine a slight on ancient and joyful ways to live in harmony with the earth."
      When Sarah was born, Mama continued her work, but instead of traveling all over the southwest, she began photographing Magic Canyon in greater and greater depth. It's fun to travel," she said, "but this canyon is older than time and filled with marvels."
      Sarah and her mother talked often about Magic Canyon, what it hid and what it revealed. They talked about the Indians who lived there long ago, about the petroglyphs on it rock walls, about songs and ceremonies that drifted and echoed in the air, about ancient truths that never stop being true no matter what's on television or the Internet.
      Magic Canyon was the best place to tell stories because in the canyon word turned into birds and animals, flowers and wind and gold leaves fluttering from the cottonwood trees singing, and dancing and before they knew it Sarah and Mama were . . . .