At the Loom with
a Navajo Weaver

There is no shortage of spectacle at Amangiri. The resort sits in the high desert of southern Utah, a short drive from the Navajo Nation, and most days are spent in slot canyons, on mesas, or by the pool watching the light change on the rock. We wanted something the view couldn't give us: a way to connect with the culture of this place directly. So we booked the rug-weaving session, a private lesson with a Diné (Navajo) weaver in a craft her people have practiced for centuries. I would sit at the loom, and Rafael would photograph it.

The experience takes place beside a traditional upright loom. Our weaver, Charlene Hunt, began not with the wool but with herself. She introduced herself in Diné, through her clans: the way her people say who they are and where their family comes from. The most important, she told us, is the mother's clan. In her family, it is the woman's line that is carried from one generation to the next. Charlene grew up on the Navajo Nation, lives in nearby Page, Arizona, and was taught to weave by her grandmother when she was eight. Then she turned to the loom and what it represents. In Diné teaching, the Holy People gave weaving to Spider Woman, who taught it to the Diné, and each part of the loom stands for an element of the world: the upper beam is the sky, the lower beam the earth, the warp threads rays of sunlight. Then it was my turn. She showed me how to pass the weft through the warp, press it down with a wooden comb and keep the tension even. A few rows are enough to understand why a full rug can take months.

A Navajo rug is not woven. It is told. Its patterns are where the story lives. The Storm Pattern, with a central rectangle and lightning-like zigzags reaching out to four corners, is often read as the Diné journey of emergence through four worlds into this one. Its corners stand for the sacred mountains that mark the edges of Diné land. Tree of Life designs show a stalk rising from a basket with birds along its branches, a picture of growth and continuity. Other styles speak of place. The deep reds of Ganado, the undyed greys, browns and whites of Two Grey Hills, and the bold outlined geometry of Teec Nos Pos each grew up around a trading post and the weaving families nearby, and an experienced eye can often tell where a rug was made. Within those traditions, each weaver adds something of her own: the landscape she grew up in, a memory, a story she wants to keep. You learn to read a rug the way you would read a letter.

Every rug also carries ch'ihónít'i, the spirit pathway. It is a single fine line woven from the pattern out to the edge, usually near a corner, so the weaver's spirit is not trapped inside her work. It is also an act of humility: perfection belongs to the divine, so every rug keeps one deliberate imperfection, as every life does. I needed to hear that. I had sat down at the loom determined to make something clean and exact, and by the end I could see a couple of rows that had pulled uneven. I was quietly worried about them. Charlene was not. In her tradition, a rug is never meant to be perfect in the first place. That idea stayed with me long after we left the loom. Leaving room for imperfection is its own kind of care: it leaves space to keep learning, and it keeps the work, and the person making it, honest.

I left with my small rug, imperfections and all, but the real thing we took away was a deeper connection. For the rest of the trip, every Navajo textile we saw read differently. We knew how long a single row takes, which story a pattern might be telling, and what the weaver might have left in it. For anyone staying at Amangiri, this is the experience we would book first.

A sumo stable is a training ground, a dining room, and a home. We arrived at 6 in the morning, led through a narrow corridor into a low room that smelled like earth and something almost floral: bintsuke-abura, the chamomile-and-wax oil the wrestlers press into their hair before dawn. The dohyo, the clay ring packed with sand on its surface, was already alive, and so was the silence.

Whatever image of sumo you carry from TV or the movies, set it aside. What you've seen on screens is ceremony: the salt thrown in ritual arcs, the careful posturing, the bout that lasts seconds. What happens inside a heya during keiko, morning practice, is something else. The wrestlers move through their training without hesitation. They have done this every morning since they were adolescents. Shiko to open: each leg raised and dropped to the clay hard enough to travel through the floor and into your own body. Then butsukari-keiko, two men colliding at full force, one driving forward, the other absorbing and holding ground. The sound echoes off the walls in a way that has no equivalent. Not a fight. Not a sport. Something older than both.

What moved us most was not what we saw. It was what we felt in the room.

Each practice match, called moshi-ai, ran without pause: the winner stays, the next man steps in. No celebrating, no expression beyond the next round. It made me think of ikigai, the Japanese idea of a reason for being, not ambition, not recognition, but the thing that makes you show up every morning with full presence. Ken Mogi writes about this in Awakening Your Ikigai, and he uses sumo as his example precisely because of this: these men train with absolute discipline and devotion, not for applause, not for an audience, but because the ritual itself is where their purpose lives. You could feel it in the room.

The wrestlers didn't perform for us, they acknowledged our presence the way you acknowledge a quiet room and kept going, and for one quiet hour we did not feel like tourists. Tokyo gives you a lot: the temples, the food, the neighborhoods that feel like entire worlds. But this one you have to go looking for.

Somewhere along the way, Rafa and I fell into what we can only describe as our cowboy era. So when we landed in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the question was never whether we would find a real ranch experience. It was which one. The Four Seasons Jackson Hole concierge pointed us to Diamond Cross: one of the last working cattle ranches in Teton County, with actual cowboys who live and work the land. Horseback riding, lunch on the open range, and if you wanted, time with Grant Golliher, who has spent his life learning how horses think. We said yes before he finished the sentence.

The drive out takes about an hour from the resort, winding through Buffalo Valley into country that feels genuinely remote. Diamond Cross has been in the Golliher family since 1912, which matters not as a historical footnote but because you feel it when you arrive. The place feels lived-in in the best way. And the cowboys who greeted us made it clear immediately that this was not a set, this was their actual day.

They fitted our saddles, introduced us to our horses, and we rode out. I am not a first-time rider but I had not been on a horse in a while, and within ten minutes I had stopped thinking about it entirely. There is something about being on horseback in open country that clears your head without you even trying. The Tetons were behind us. The wind moved through the grass. For a moment, and I mean this without any irony, we felt like real cowboys.

The experience takes you through the ranch and into its most remote corners. At one point we came across a river. The horse slowed down before I even saw the water, and just went in. I remember the sound of it, the cottonwood fluff floating everywhere in the afternoon light, the way the horse just knew what to do and I let it. For a few minutes there was nothing to think about except being there, completely outside, completely present. That feeling of trusting the animal and letting go of everything else is something you do not get very often.

Lunch was set up on the land by the Four Seasons team, which is the kind of detail that only sounds like a small thing until you are eating a proper meal in the middle of a cattle ranch with the mountains in the distance and nothing around you but grass and sky and the horses grazing nearby. That combination of authentic cultural immersion and effortless refinement is exactly what Four Seasons does well, and this partnership with Diamond Cross Ranch is one of the best examples of it.