Dream Weaver - NYTimes.com Start up the quirky dream machine in your head," is how the horoscope read. I scanned it one cold March morning at a Denny's in Gallup, N.M., the one off Interstate 40, where the highway elbows above Route 66. As I looked out toward a red anvil mesa, patched white with snow from an overnight storm, it struck me that the quirky dream machine had not kicked over for some time. Wasn't that why I'd come here? For as long as I can remember I've headed to the desert southwest whenever my head felt unlevel. And after a winter of sudden and permanent departures and grief that hung around like a stubborn fog, I'd booked a flight to Albuquerque and a big S.U.V. that sat high and rode so silently you barely knew you were doing 90 until you checked the speedometer. For much of my adult life I've made pilgrimages to Navajo land, an area encompassing more than 25,000 square miles, a landscape formed as if from a John McPhee reader: slot canyons, cap-rock plateaus, sandstone escarpments, cartoonish buttes and peach colored sand deposited in the Paleozoic era in a vast desert of Pangaea, the supercontinent. It is a place where, in modern terms, the corners of four states (Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado) were surveyed to fit together like puzzle pieces; a region of five-store towns and a population so widely dispersed as to seem invisible; a territory where the unobstructed heavens widen vision, open the mind. Tucked into this landscape are hidden canyons, plunging declivities formed by water and wind, spots the novelist Denis Johnson once referred to as the "secrets of the horizons," and today I am heading for one. Since 1931 Canyon de Chelly (pronounced "d'Shay") has been a National Monument. For centuries before that, it was a sacred place and one of refuge for the Diné - or "The People," as the roughly 300,000 Navajo call themselves. Archaeological evidence shows that it has been a place of human habitation for nearly 5,000 years, and the reasons why should be clear to anyone. It is no mystery, either, why this extensive canyon system figures importantly in Navajo mythology. Cut from the earth, it swallows the sky, its high plateaus serving as a threshold between the two. Like the seminomadic Navajo themselves, their gods are in constant motion, and their rituals and myths are hectic with the passage of deities through underground realms before their emergence into this, the White or Glittering World. Once on Earth, the Holy People established the four sacred mountains forming the boundaries of Navajo country. They, the land, sacred plants (corn) and animals (butterflies) and symbols (lightning) all turn up routinely in Navajo weaving, probably the best known and most elevated expression of their art. And among the reasons I've made this trip is to visit again a Navajo rug auction held in a school gym in semi-remote Crownpoint, N.M., every month for the past 44 years. I've bought various rugs in the past, but this time I bid on and win a small Storm Pattern weaving by a woman called Dolly Morgan, a textile whose crisp lightning zigzags lead from a central water beetle medallion to motifs that signify the four cardinal points. Rolling the rug, I carry it with me to my room at the Thunderbird Lodge in Chinle, Ariz., laying it out on an unoccupied twin bed. "Stare at it," an architect friend from Albuquerque had advised me. You'll never stop finding new balances and new symmetries. Balance was what I came here after, and what the rug won't provide I expect will develop in its own way after cold days spent hiking with a local guide. Kenneth Etsitty and I will clamber down from the canyon ridge on the ribbed rock Bare Trail hundreds of feet to the valley floor, wandering there through fallow bean fields and orchards, pressing into a southwestern wind that knifes through our clothing, crossing streams that run fast and bitter with snow melt, the water so cold it renders our bare feet inflexible blocks. At all times we give wide berth to the cliff dwellings of the ancient Anasazi, who spook me as much as they do the ghost-fearing Navajo. The two of us will talk little because, as a handout at the visitor center explains, "the general exuberance many cultures define as friendliness is not considered such by the Diné." The flyer is an aid to newcomers who might interpret as rudeness what for Navajos is deeply observed natural courtesy. I am well accustomed to Navajo silence, to softly touching handshakes and a deflected gaze. The truth is, I come here partly to escape the din of more populated places, the wearying abrasion of what passes for civilization in a technological age. I also come because, whenever I lose track of the quirky dream machine in my head, it is here that I find it again.