Words don't always say it all

Sometimes pictures don't do it either. How do I explain what happened during the last week? I guess I should just state it as follows:

I will never be the same:

After catching the first and second and 30th peak at the Grand Canyon;
After seeing the sun peak through the clouds as the sun rises and the rain falls;
After seeing Condors soar ;
After watching a tufted squirrel with a white belly eat a pinion nut knowing that it's brother on the other side of the canyon has a black belly;
After seeing an elk just grazing ;
After seeing the eroded mesa in all the dusty purple, red, yellow and grey that the world could want;
After eating Navaho Tacos ( fry bread with chili and cheese and lettuce);
After seeing cloudy water from the tap;
After seeing a 100+ bent over Grandmother, weighted down by turquoise and years of hard labor;
After seeing a group of "Rez" dogs wagging their tells, knowing someone will open a package and feed them, eventually;
After seeing beautiful horses and colts on the side of road, with no cares and lots of good grass in the high desert;
After seeing the formations in Monument Valley, and feeling so small and realizing our time on earth is miniscule;
After seeing a Hogan next to a new house;
After seeing poverty and happy children playing, side by side;
After getting up into a jeep and going deep into a canyon to visit the abandoned homes of the Anizasi on the clift sides;
After seeing the kids playing on the bottom of the canyon under the cottonwood trees;
After hearing about how the US government cut down 3000 peach trees because they could;
After hearing how the Navajo love their land, barren and windy and desolate as it is;
After seeing the little head of a baby peak out from a cradle board;
After seeing the dirt floor of a Hogan with the medicine man sitting in the west,
After watching the buffalo robe, mountain lion skin and deer hide being made ready for Mary-Elizabeth;
After watching the making of a sand painting of a long life line with sand and corn meal and corn pollen, a path for her to follow;
After hearing everyone's clan being recited;
After watching my daughter leave and being led back in to sit on the robes that will give her strength;
After being transformed to another time and placed with chanting that touches your heart and sole and resonated with each syllable;
After watching the corn pollen being sprinkled and rubbed on all the right places;
After putting my hands in the medicine bag, with it's smooth cool rocks and corn pollen, placing the healing substance on my tongue, top of my head and dusting it towards the East, to honor the Dawn Spirit;
After talking with the medicine man as he told us of Winter Stories and more than a 1000 such ceremonies;
After hearing M-E explain what she saw and heard during the ceremony;
After joining in the drinking of the blue corn meal mush and feast of lamb and Navaho tortillas;
After chasing away endless flys that were hungry too;
After searching for rocks to send to Seattle, each more beautiful than the last;
After heading out into other parts of the Navaho Nation and seeing the big sky and rocks, and endless beauty;
After experiencing the kindness of others from a different world;
After visiting with young men that honor their traditions and tell the stories with their art;
After returning to the "real world" and knowing we have to make the journey again;

I still hear the chanting, the deep resonant sound that so profoundly changed us all.