Sedona – A Poem

(Photo by Justin W on Unsplash)

This poem – written for a friend – is about the quirkiness of Sedona, Arizona and people who live there (and my dear friend is one of the quirkiest people I know). Sedona is a unique blend of breath-taking landscapes, New Age energy, and esoteric experimentation. Although I never lived there, I went through real estate school in Sedona at the height of the housing bubble, passed the state real estate exam, and witnessed all the reasons for the housing market collapse. I spent a lot of time soaking up the atmosphere, getting to know both locals and tourists, and hiking among the Red Rocks. If you’re looking to join a cult or expand your mind, Sedona is the place to go. But, beware! Every community has its dark side, regardless of outward appearances, and Sedona is no exception.

Sedona

Tourists think the locals are all wealthy snobs

Who perform yoga contortions on the tops of ruddy mountains

And meditate in the epicenters of vortexes on the Red Rocks of Sedona.

But we know better, you and I, for we’ve known the locals,

And we’ve known the tourists, and it’s hard to say who’s more eccentric.

If they heard the colorful tales about your youthful days

When you protested at Alcatraz with the American Indian Movement

And met its leader, Dennis Banks, who jumped bail

And later went to jail and then prison,

Would they think you were real? Or just another Sedona fantasist,

Gazing into your crystal ball and scrying into a mirror?

You liked to test the boundaries of reality and the rules of society

And thumb your nose at The Establishment, whomever that happened to be.

When burglars looking for money and valuables targeted your neighborhood,

You laughed out loud — shocking the neighbors — when your son,

Dressed up in full Nazi gear, with his Glock fully exposed,

Ran around the neighborhood, after playing his part in World War II re-enactment games.

But, hey, your house was never robbed! And, that’s the joke.

And, remember that lady we used to know – the one who belonged to the UFO cult –

The psychiatrist made a special visit to her house one day, and we never saw her again.

But her son was happy: he got the house and all of her money.

Of course, you knew more than her about the greys and the lizard people,

Having met them in your childhood on your family’s farm in Pennsylvania.

You still remember Bigfoot’s stench when you fed him in the woods.

And you never quite understood why George Romero chose the neighbor’s farmhouse

Instead of yours to make his zombie masterpiece. Even befriending Jason Voorhees’ mom

(Of Friday the 13^th fame) cannot keep you down on the Red Rocks of Sedona,

For your Buddhist heart is too large, your courage too brave, and your mind too active

To bring you back to earth.

~

Dawn Pisturino

August 16, 2022; November 1, 2022

(Revised October 30, 2022)

Copyright 2022 Dawn Pisturino. All Rights Reserved.

Our UFO Experiences

Illustration from History.com. Learn more here: Black Triangle UFOs

My husband is a dedicated Star Trek and Star Wars fan, so I didn’t think much about it when he told me he saw a UFO over our house one night. He described it as triangular with lights, like the above photo, and told me how disappointed he was that the craft didn’t try to beam him up, like Scotty in Star Trek. I told him he was probably too heavy a load. The whole incident turned into a private joke, and we didn’t talk about it much after that conversation.

I didn’t really believe in UFOs then, and I’m not even sure about it now. After all, we only live about a three or four hour drive south of Area 51, and I assumed that any strange things we saw in the sky originated from there. We’ve occasionally seen small objects in the sky that suddenly shot up straight into the air and disappeared. But this always seems to happen around sunset, so maybe it’s the angle of the sun as it goes down that gives us that impression. (I’m trying to be a realist here.)

We’ve watched numerous documentaries about aliens and UFOs, including the recent Skinwalker Ranch series on History Vault. Some sound rational and logical, while others just seem like a lot of hype. If I ever saw one of the mushroom creatures described in Whitley Strieber’s book, Communion, I think I would die on the spot of a heart attack.

The one credible story I’ve seen was the movie, Fire in the Sky. Made in 1993, the movie was based on Travis Walton’s book, The Walton Experience. In it, he tells the story of his abduction by an alien spacecraft on November 5, 1975 in Snowflake, Arizona while logging with his co-workers in the White Mountains. He disappeared for days, and when he returned, people didn’t know how to react to his story. He and his co-workers underwent lie detector tests and passed.

When I worked in Flagstaff, Arizona, I met people who know Travis Walton. They told me he is a down-to-earth, straight up guy who wouldn’t lie about something like that. Snowflake is a small, tightly-knit Mormon town where everybody knows each other, so I believe what they told me. Since then, I have watched several interviews with Mr. Walton, and he comes across as an honest guy.

But, it wasn’t until I had my own strange experience that I began to believe.

A few years ago, my husband was working odd hours and left for work at 02:30 in the morning. I was standing on the front porch saying good-bye to him, and all of a sudden, I saw two red lights hovering above the barbed wire fence across the road. We live in a rural area, and there’s nothing across the road except miles and miles of BLM land. There is no road on the other side of the fence. I took a closer look. The two red lights were fairly close together and looked like the tail lights on an old classic car. As I watched, one went out, and then the other. This all happened very quickly, but as I thought about it, I realized there was no sound and no body attached to the lights. The lights were hovering above the horizon, several feet above the fence, so they could not belong to any kind of vehicle sitting on the other side of the fence. It seemed to me that whatever had been hovering there was invisible except for the lights. And when they went out, all I saw in the distance were stars and the lights of houses, all miles away on the main highway.

My first impulse was to blame it on a drone. I couldn’t explain it otherwise. However, I have never seen anything written about invisible drones. And the pictures I’ve seen do not match what I saw.

So, I’m stumped. What could it have been? And since then, when I asked my husband to describe in detail what he saw, he told me that the triangle-shaped craft was hovering over our house. My daughter and I were asleep, and he had just gotten home from work. It was the middle of the night, and the craft took off as soon as he got home.

Were my daughter and I going to be abducted and my husband’s sudden appearance changed their minds? That idea continues to haunt me to this day.

Or, were they after the cat?

Please share your thoughts!

Dawn Pisturino

September 30, 2021

Copyright 2021 Dawn Pisturino. All Rights Reserved.