Not all trips lead to impressive finds. Sometimes the only thing you find is solitude and the time to actually have thoughts and time to turn over all kinds of ideas and stories and memories in your mind, examining them from all angles and allowing them to run around freely in your head for a while and enrich you in some small way.
Here’s a little interlude of a small find in a full day.
We’re off again, exploring volcanic ridges in hopes of finding traces of the past. We’ve been at it for a while, walking along a pretty low-slung ridge, but we’re about to be rewarded. You can see what made me stop in the middle of the picture.Just one single, solitary petroglyph, all by itself on a lonely, unimpressive little ridge. As always, I wonder … why here? Why just one element? This leads me to explore around to see what else I might find.I don’t have to go very far before I find a housing circle. Well, wow! One single petroglyph, one solitary housing circle. There’s a story here.A view of the circle from ground level. It is on the eastern side of the low outcropping, somewhat sheltered from prevailing winds. It is somewhat close to known habitation areas, but not particularly close. Maybe this housing circle once belonged to an individual or a family who just liked solitude. Or maybe it was part of the greater whole, a place where those who needed solitude — for ritual or any other reason — could go.I have a good look around after this but aside from a rudimentary grinding slick there is nothing else. Any secrets this little site holds is now out of the reach of our understanding, back in a past that memory and written word does not remember.
And … that’s it. I spent a while hoofing it across the Tablelands to make this little find, but it was time well spent. Out in the fresh air, with blue skies overhead and silence all around, you can find some time to settle your thoughts and reach out again to what life is – navigating yourself across this planet on your own two feet, and taking each experience as it comes.
