‘at some moment as I sat there’

If we are gods, all things are absolute. If we are not, all things are relative.
I climbed down the ladder into this kiva, having walked down into the gorge with a guided Park tour in winter and waiting for the first rush of people that had climbed in to climb out. There were people who followed me in and left before I left. I saw them move and heard them talk. This kiva was probably restored. The roof and ladder were likely new but this was a place and the very walls were where people very much like myself lived millennia ago. These were their living places, maybe warm in the winter, close to saved food under the edge of the gorge rim sheltered from weather, and near to a seep at the head of the gorge. Above the gorge was flat land that was farmed where buildings had stood. They lived without a mechanized world of moonwalks, aeroplanes, cellphones, grocery stores, and central air and their view of the universe, their world, might seem bizarre were we required to live in it. Yet they lived, creatures of this place. They lived connected to this place.
There is found in these kivas a small depression, a small cylindrical hole in the floor a few inches around and several inches deep. The hole was assumed to be a foundation for a pole, maybe the place to anchor the ladder. One day a visitor, a native American: Hopi, was there with a Park tour and this hole was explained. He explained that it was not. That it was, so to speak a navel, a way that spirits travel to and from the earth.
At some moment as I sat there, quite suddenly, this placed seemed quite familiar, quite comfortable. I stayed a while and then climbed the ladder and walked back to the parking lot and drove the truck back to the central heating and the electric range.
When I was young, children of a friend of mother came to visit. They lived not too far away but in very different circumstances. We lived on two and a half acres with an oak woods next to farms in a rural neighborhood. They lived in an urban neighborhood on a lot that was forty foot wide in city stretched for hundreds of miles along Lake Michigan. Among the curiosities for them of rural life was the vegetable garden. Mom took them to the pea patch and there the conversation might have been like this. "These are peas.", she might have said pointing to a row of peas. "Those aren't peas. We see no peas.", they might have said. "Oh, they are.", she said. She picked a pea pod and handed it to them. "This is not a pea.", they said. “Where are the peas?", they asked. She picked another pea pod and split it and shucked it and handed the peas to them and said, "Here are the peas." They admitted that this seemed to be peas but none the less would not eat them. I suppose outdoor peas seemed unsanitary to them, for peas came in a can and milk in a bottle (another story all together).
We live in a world that seems to be wholly of our own making unaware of the foundation on which that world stands.