Nearly a year ago, when pandemic adjustments were still in full swing and "Zoom" suddenly became a skill to master, I was asked to be the guest teacher for a series of three Sunday morning classes at the First Presbyterian Church of Deerfield in Illinois on the subject of "Spiritual Practice in the Pandemic." My first reaction to the invitation was sheer PANIC--what on earth could I possibly offer on the subject? I'm so non-religious I'd be at risk of smiting from on high! And so on... But after some deep breaths, I finally took some of my own advice to others, which is when the Universe hands you an opportunity, SAY YES!! And so for three marvelous Sunday mornings, in tandem with the wonderful Reverend Suzan Hawkinson, we had some lovely Zoom classes where we talked and shared about life, and kindness, and creativity, and art, and being in the present, and finding God in small things. And at some point in each class, I would share something that I had written in connection with that week's topic, and this is what came out on the subject of Art, after I had wandered through a nearby forest with its mysterious and haunting effigy mounds
Who knows, in the dawn of our ancestors, if we had words before we had cave paintings? What drove or inspired those people, dressed in animal skins and working by flickering torch light, to paint horses and deer and bison in motion on dark cave walls, side by side with figures of hunters and of their own hand prints?
Were these vast panoramas formed first in someone’s imagination and then turned into a project with collective planning, or did they arise for singular reasons to create and to inspire and to make a record of life around them?
Did music come before song? Or did the need to share an experience or a thought lead to grafting words to strings of notes and melodies, with drumbeats echoing the human heart?
It is insatiable, our need to communicate, to exalt, to explain, to show, to share with one another.
There are effigy mounds near my house, raised images in the landscape of deer and panthers. Some were tombs, others were not. They were created by nomadic people more than a thousand years ago, but they still evoke mystery and wonder in their presence.
The language that would have been spoken as they were being built has long been lost but the effort and the artistry remains. Squirrels scamper above them and acorns fall and seasons change as the mounds lay, immovable, under covers of grass and wildflowers and pine needles and branches.
Forest giants—trees a hundred feet tall and more—have sprouted from seeds among them, and grown, and fallen and yet these mounds endure. There have been no live panthers prowling these parts for many years, and yet still they are here, underfoot, if you just imagine.
We are hard-wired and driven in our need to share what we have seen and felt and dreamed. And so we build and we write and we see and we listen, bound together with those that came before us and the ones who will follow, celebrating the human and divine in us all.
Who knows, in the dawn of our ancestors, if we had words before we had cave paintings? What drove or inspired those people, dressed in animal skins and working by flickering torch light, to paint horses and deer and bison in motion on dark cave walls, side by side with figures of hunters and of their own hand prints?
Were these vast panoramas formed first in someone’s imagination and then turned into a project with collective planning, or did they arise for singular reasons to create and to inspire and to make a record of life around them?
Did music come before song? Or did the need to share an experience or a thought lead to grafting words to strings of notes and melodies, with drumbeats echoing the human heart?
It is insatiable, our need to communicate, to exalt, to explain, to show, to share with one another.
There are effigy mounds near my house, raised images in the landscape of deer and panthers. Some were tombs, others were not. They were created by nomadic people more than a thousand years ago, but they still evoke mystery and wonder in their presence.
The language that would have been spoken as they were being built has long been lost but the effort and the artistry remains. Squirrels scamper above them and acorns fall and seasons change as the mounds lay, immovable, under covers of grass and wildflowers and pine needles and branches.
Forest giants—trees a hundred feet tall and more—have sprouted from seeds among them, and grown, and fallen and yet these mounds endure. There have been no live panthers prowling these parts for many years, and yet still they are here, underfoot, if you just imagine.
We are hard-wired and driven in our need to share what we have seen and felt and dreamed. And so we build and we write and we see and we listen, bound together with those that came before us and the ones who will follow, celebrating the human and divine in us all.
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