After my dream-led ceremony, I returned to the Cultural Center for dinner. If I ever had a lot of money, I would like to start my own Hopi Foundation called “Help Hopi Hope.” I finished dinner and went to bed around 10:30 PM.
At 4:30 AM, I received a wake-up call from the front desk. I jumped out of bed, put on my clothes, got in my vehicle, and returned to the mesa’s edge, where I had performed the first part of my ceremony twelve hours earlier.
After I exited the vehicle, I stepped into complete darkness. All I could see were countless stars. There were so many stars that it took me a moment to locate the red, eclipsed moon. The view of the Milky Way galaxy was spectacular. Suddenly, I felt very much a part of everything. There was no possible way to capture it in a photograph.
With a rattle in each hand, I completed three additional trips around the diagram that I had sketched into the surface of the mesa twelve hours earlier. After spending a few more minutes with the stars and the moon, I returned to my room at the Cultural Center.
I performed my invocation and prayer again, then went back to bed.
On April 4, 2015, at approximately 9:00 AM, I visited my friends Ahote and Tuwa. It was Tuwa’s birthday, and I arrived with gifts. The three of us spent the next couple of hours catching up, and I was finally brave enough to share my dream with them and the ceremony I had performed the day/night before.
After I revealed all the details, Ahote looked directly into my eyes and said, “You did everything perfectly!” and gave me a huge smile. He then informed me that his village was also having a ceremony while I was having my ceremony on the mesa’s edge. I didn’t know what to say. Dumbfounded, I just smiled back at him.
Several minutes later, Ahote turned to Tuwa and said something to her that I couldn’t quite make out. I assumed he was speaking to her in their native tongue. That’s when she presented me with two new rattles. As she handed the rattles to me, Ahote informed me that the first rattle was a wolf, and the second rattle was a badger. I instinctively knew that both were viewed as powerful animals, the badger being the most honorable. Tuwa was from the Badger Clan.
I felt incredibly honored to have received these rattles. I left Ahote and Tuwa’s house around 11:30 AM and began my trip back to Phoenix. As I was driving across the mesas, I saw the figure of a pentagram, or a five-pointed star, in the sky on the southern horizon.
With that, full moon ceremony No. 13 was complete.
Although I still had several more ceremonies to perform to complete this chapter, I felt like full moon No. 13 was the most significant. I sensed that something amazing had been initiated, and everything beyond this was just a matter of showing up, doing the remaining prayers, and then letting go.
I still had one final blood moon meditation to perform several months later, on September 27, 2015, so I continued my journey. I was curious to see if anything else would happen.
It was time to prepare for the next new moon, scheduled for April 18, and the next full moon, scheduled for May 3, 2015.
