A Flute, the Desert, and a Different Way of Seeing: A Spiritual Health Investment

A reflection on presence, culture, and a massive spiritual health investment

Some experiences do not ask to be captured.
They ask to be entered.

Adria and I didn’t go to Monument Valley to see it. We went to be with someone who belongs to it.

We spent time with Garry Holiday Jr., owner and operator of Navajo Spirit Tours. While phones were part of the trip, there were moments when they were intentionally put away. No cameras. No documentation. Those moments were different. This was not an experience to be captured, but one to be carried inside us.

At one point, Garry drove us deep into Mystery Valley. We sat together against the canyon wall as the sun lowered itself into the desert. He took out a handmade flute and began to play.

The sound did not travel forward. It moved outward.
The notes echoed off stone that has held memory for longer than language.
The canyon didn’t amplify the music. It held it.
No one spoke. There was nothing to add.

This was not entertainment. It was not explanation. It was ceremony without spectacle. A traditional Navajo spiritual experience that asked only for presence and respect. To sit. To listen. To allow.

Over time, a quiet orientation toward life emerged. Not something taught, but something felt through presence. A realization that the path forward becomes clearer as we release the emotional tethers we carry. Old fears. Old stories. Unexamined attachments. The work is not adding more, but letting go.

That night, as we parted ways, the sky offered its own closing ritual. Shooting stars crossed overhead, one after another, uninterrupted by light pollution. The Milky Way revealed itself in full clarity, unapologetic and vast. A white horse crossed the road slowly in front of us, unhurried, as if time itself had softened.

None of it felt symbolic in the moment. It simply was.

Days passed. Something settled. When we returned home, the noise that had been living inside me grew quiet. The problems I had been wrestling with came into focus, not because I worked harder on them, but because they no longer felt complicated. I simplified. Life became less crowded. Far more peaceful.

This is the part that is hard to explain in a culture that demands proof and productivity. Nothing tangible was produced. No content. No footage. No artifacts. And yet, the return on this experience has been immense.

I often say people change people.™
Garry most certainly changed us.

Not by instruction.
Not by persuasion.
But by allowing us to fully lean into someone else’s culture without extracting from it. To be soaked in it. To be guided, not led. To witness what happens when wisdom is offered patiently and without demand.

Garry Holiday was born and raised in Monument Valley. He is an artist, a flute maker, a storyteller, and a teacher. His work lives in places like the Smithsonian, but his real legacy is quieter. It lives in the way he invites people from around the world to slow down enough to listen. To understand that land is not a backdrop. It is a living archive. That culture is not a performance. It is a responsibility.

Some investments do not show up on balance sheets.
They show up in how you breathe.
In how you simplify.
In how gently you move through the world afterward.
This was one of those investments.

Ryan Travis Woods