Artifacts

 

Hamshamstsas Mask ~ Wood, cedar bark, baleen, red cloth, 1901

Hopewell Pipe Bird Effigy - Carved Catlinite

 

American Indian Life Early Woodland Period - Susan A. Walton

Ohio Historical Society

Artifacts left by the Hopewell Mound builders depicting the transformation of humans into animals and the reverse indicate a form of shamanic religion where the wearer or holder of the object becomes imbued with the qualities of the animal depicted. Animal images of birds, wolves, bears and deer were common. Carved tubular pipes indicate offerings of smoke to the spirits and probable use of hallucinogenic substances used to alter consciousness.

Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance

Hopi Katsina Ewoto
Chief of Katsinas Controls the Seasons

Rainmakers From the Gods - Hopi Katsinam

The Hopi word Koyaanisqatsi means, “crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living.”

It seems likely this is what happened to the Anasazi. After a millennium in the social, political and spiritual center of the entire San Juan Basin the great houses of Chaco Canyon were abandoned. No one knows what really happened but consider what we do know.

First, sophisticated architectural plans that took generations to construct in consistent precision alignment to the cardinal directions and seasonal rotations of the sun would have required both a high level of oversight and a large labor force. The great houses served as ceremonial centers to the entire region making it likely that a priestly class oversaw building construction, food production and seasonal rituals.

Then, a high arid desert culture dependent on agriculture was also dependent on rainfall and mountain snow. If the seasonal rituals were performed to induce rain for a century they worked. Then, around 1100 AD. A period of drought set in. Within fifty years the whole system collapsed, the great houses were abandoned and the people dispersed.

Undoubtedly drought would have caused the people to be discouraged and hungry. Did some form of human activity effect climate change? When the rituals performed to induce rain failed did the priests lose credibility and power? Did a state of Koyaanisqatsi cause the people to seek simpler lifestyles of greater harmony? It would seem so to me.

Earthenware Seed Jar, Anasazi Culture, 1100-1300 CE.

"I'm Your Spirit Animal."
The New Yorker 

  

A Hymn to God the Father

(from the series Homage to the Square, by Josef Albers,
1888-1976, German-born American painter, writer, and
theorist of color)

 

CONTEMPLATION

Sooner or later, serious contemplation involves an examination of oneself.



“To contemplate,” writes the poet Denise Levertov, “comes from [the Latin] ‘templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur.’”


She goes on to say that “to meditate is ‘to keep the mind in a state of contemplation’; its synonym is to ‘muse,’ and to muse comes from a word meaning ‘to stand with open mouth’ — not so comical if we think of ‘inspiration’ — to breathe in.”

 Poetry can aid contemplation and meditation. Rhymes and rhythms and rhetorical tools like similes, metaphors, and alliteration elevate words that would sound merely mundane as prose and turn them into music as poetry. Because poetry is not quite natural speech, it makes the reader pause and invites him to reflect.

In the verse below, it is precisely the poetic expression of what would otherwise be a prosaic truism that lends itself to contemplation.

http://ghpoetryplace.blogspot.ca/

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RE-REVELATION WHILE MOVING TO VANCOUVER ISLAND

“All our lives we work for that
which at the last gate

we simply give away.”

~ Charles Van Gorkom, Canadian poet (to visit his blog, please click here)



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 BOOKS

Ralph Harper, Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfillment in the Modern Age

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Henri J. M. Nouwen, A Restless Soul: Meditations from the Road

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Robert Waldron, Poetry as Prayer: Thomas Merton

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George Hail Free Library in Warren, Rhode Island

• http://www.georgehail.org

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Vermont Spring

(Spring on the Oxtongue River, 1924, by Lawren Harris,
1885-1970, Canadian artist)

“We need the tonic of wilderness — to wade sometimes in the marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wild and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed. and unfathomed by us, because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

~ Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American writer and naturalist, from Walden

VERMONT SPRING

Walking in spring
never far from the sound
of rushing water
I came to a clearing
in the woods.
A silver birch stood
with me, silent.

A woodpecker beat time,
momentarily,
with my pounding heart,
and, in a marshy pond,
swollen with liquid snows,
something small, unseen,
broke the surface
to breathe the air.

Back in the brittle city,
where voices and corners
are sharp,
the surfaces concrete-hard —
important —
and silence is a memory,
something small, unseen
within me
breaks the surface
to breathe the wooded air.

~ Letha Elliott, American singer and poet 

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Poets, especially, know how to point out apparent contradictions that reveal a truth, as did Emily Dickinson when she wrote, “Who never lost, are unprepared / A Coronet to find.”

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(Red Plum and Moonlight, woodblock print by Utagawa
Hiroshige, 1797-1858, Japanese artist)

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Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight
also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

~ Izumi Shikibu (circa 974-1034), Japanese poet

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“There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and where kindness . . . is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object — we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. . . . It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms; with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.”

~ C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), English writer of essays, poems, and novels, including The Chronicles of Narnia, from The Problem of Pain

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