A True Home Run

Baseball immediately comes to mind when the words "Home Run" appear. However, there is no such thing as a "true" home run in the game. Either it is a home run or it is not a home run.

This "true home run" set of words was called to my attention as our DSL line was being repaired recently. After considerable detective work by several technicians it was discovered that we did not have a true home run. In other words, the wires connecting the outside world with our computer equipment were compromised. When the wires were consistently in order they became a "true home run."
Those wires enable the writing of these words.

This process helps me in understanding the place of petroglyph's and our efforts to decipher what is being said. At the moment we do not have a "true home run" for transmission of information.

So much is missing and we have no self evident way of completing the connection. The task of both science and religion is to persistently investigate the evidence that we do have and to imagine the evidence that we need to find. I do believe imagination has a place in an otherwise material world process. The mental equipment that humans have is filled with more programs and potential powers than we know. It appears that certain programs of the mind are turned on when situations arise that trigger a switch of some kind.

We are working on establishing a true home run in regard to the Jeffers Petroglyph's.

Blue Lines in the Snow

On an afternoon walk today I observed lines and numbers sprayed on the snow with blue paint. They mark the location of some underground utilities. The temperature is a few degrees above zero so the message is legible for the moment.

When temperatures rise the snow will melt and the blue paint will dissolve and be gone. Hopefully the people who need that diagram will have made use of it by then. We who live in Minnesota are accustomed to snow and ice. However, they are not a normal message transmission medium.

Ten thousand years ago this place was under a glacier according to geologists. When another glacier period comes everything including the Jeffers Petroglyph's will be scoured away and gone.

We live in the brief time when the petroglyph's are legible in what seems like
rather permanent quartzite. Actually the time is brief in the geological time frame.
This is our opportunity to read the messages and absorb the ideas from our ancestors.

Whether we can match their technological skill in preserving our messages for future
observation is yet to be proven. I would like to think that we will do better than blue paint on snow. It will certainly take some creative work.

Getting Beyond the Struggle for Existence

When the world is primitive, daytime struggle to find food and shelter coupled with a nightly struggle with fear leaves little time for leisure, reflective thought or artistic expression. The account of the end of the Roman Empire in Europe tells us that some fourteen hundred years ago, barbarians arrived and their violence led to the Middle Ages when disorder ruled, literature was destroyed, and social systems failed. It took some time for people to recover and again create social order and intellectual endeavor.

When viewing the Jeffers Petroglyphs it is possible to envision a life in which there was enough safety and leisure time to create artistic symbols that would have a continuing presence. A civilization of some kind would seem to be a safe assumption. We can say that the glyphs are set before us as human creations linking civilizations over millenia.

We find a window into society some 5000 years ago in mid continent when we observe these petroglyphs. An observer recently said that in looking at the picture at the upper right corner of this site, she feels as if she is looking at kind of map of the earth. The lichens can be imagined as continents. The turtle glyph can be thought of as representing a land mass. In Native traditions the turtle is of thought of as a symbol of the earth. Perhaps our minds can connect with people across vast reaches of time.

Funeral at Highwater Church Tomorrow

She lived going on the century mark. On a cold and snowy Monday the spouse of a cousin will be remembered at Highwater Church just a few miles from the Jeffers Petroglyphs.

She joins the host of people who have lived all or part of their lives on the quartzite ridge that hosted glaciers not so long ago. A few thousand years is not much in geological time. Going on a hundred years is remarkable for a person with a biological time clock.

Tomorrow the family will gather to give thanks for a life well lived. At a moment in time every person present will be aware of the brief scale to time that we humans inhabit. The religious ritual will offer dignity and comfort to those who live on for now.

My guess is that the near by petroglyphs were partially religious in nature. Perhaps they were part of a ritual that marked the lives of individuals and announced a sense of meaning that escapes the bounds of historical time.

Highwater Church will for an hour or so be inhabited by family and friends who live in time. In that hour of worship they will glimpse the infinite landscape of the universe. The Lord Gives. The Lord Takes. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

Diving Into Time

The memorable phrase "diving into time" is used by Teillhard de Chardin in his book: The Vision of Time - 1966. He suggests that we can likely learn more from paying attention to time than we can from journeying into space.

I do not know if he is correct about space journey but I do know that we discover amazing new territory through the agents of geology and other scientific methods that enable us to view and analyze the traces of what has been in what is.

There is a remarkable refreshment of the mind in exploring the past. There are new horizons, new climates, and new creatures in the wonderland that comes into view.

In setting out to view the past we unexpectedly discover the future. What can be called a stream of time connects seamlessly the past and the future. In the philosophy presented by Tielhard, the light in which we travel converges toward the future.

Human interest in the future is one explanation for petroglyphs and other artistic creations that we today discover. Orientation toward the future would appear to be a characteristic basic to the human organism. In the words of Teilhard, the ruins, fossils, glyphs whisper to us an essential word regarding construction of the future.

Wild Roses in Full Bloom

On Tuesday, June 21, 1838 an exploration party led by Joseph N Nicollet was a few miles to the north of the Jeffers Petroglyph's site. They were following the Cottonwood River heading toward the Pipestone quarries to the west. The Little Cottonwood River is very close to the petroglyph's site. On this June day thickets of wild roses were in bloom in the region. A southeast wind was blowing with a clear sky and the air was perfumed by the wild roses.

The explorers noted a plateau area toward which they were moving. Looking to the south they would have seen over a valley to another plateau where the petroglyph's could be found. But they were not aware of the site and did not take that route.

As they continued they noted an elevation about 1/3 mile long and 60 feet above the green plain of the prairie and near the river. It was just about 8 years before that Indian people came there to watch herds of buffalo arrive in the area. The place was called "Indian Lookout Mount". It was near present day Lamberton, Minnesota.

Nicollet says that the Cottonwood River at that time was a clear flowing stream with sand bottom. The prairie was undisturbed by cultivation, railroads, roads, communities or any other permanent sign of human presence. Indian people led a nomadic life much in harmony with the natural scene.

I include this information to give evidence of the nature of the Minnesota prairie and the grandeur of the scene greeting Nicollet's team. The information comes from the Journals of Joseph Nicollet translated from the French and edited by Edmund C. Bray and Martha Coleman Bray. This 1976 publication by the Minnesota Historical Society is entitled "Joseph N. Nicollet on the Plains and Prairies: The Expeditions of 1838-39 With Journals, Letters, and Notes on the Dakota Indians."

Personality of glyph artists

One thing we can claim to know about the people who did the Jeffers Petroglyphs is that they had a genetic predisposition toward social domination. The basis for this opinion lies in contemporary studies of neuroendocrine mechanisms.

William Anderson and Cliff Summers of the University of South Dakota present a paper in the November, 2007 issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences arguing that stress coping strategies and social dominance are based in neurochemical biological foundations.

All we have to observe are the glyphs themselves at Jeffers and other sites. The fact that glyphs were created tells us that the creators not only were dealing with meaning in life but that they had personality traits enabling them to think wider than the tribe or family. In thinking beyond their own immediate interests they display what would be called "leadership" in any society - ancient or contemporary.

Worthy question include: "Can we claim close kinship with the glyph people? Is it possible that ideas expressed in the glyphs are available to assist us in solving human problems in our time?
Can the array of present world religions be enhanced by ideas from another era that we access only through glyph symbols?"