Yocum Valley: Ancient Carved Stone

Ancient deeply-carved stone with double circles and a mortar lies fallen and half-buried in Yocum Valley.  

This marks a place with a few other old carvings and dozens of bedrock mortars and metates. Below, a nearby boulder with deep carvings and notchings.

Lichen-covered and in shadow, this deeply carved boulder holds a complex of interconnected circles. Swartz in 1960 used aluminum powder to enable a photo for a study published in American Antiquity in 1963.  Later he conceded using aluminum powder is not recommended due to possible damage.

 

The Lorings in their Yocum Valley site entry provided a 1970 sketch that may have been based on Swartz's study.

Photo below shows a detail the bumpy surface and notching of the boulder.

A resource-rich wetland on the border of Oregon and NE California, the wide Yocum Valley is the headwaters of Willow Creek which becomes Lost River near Clear Lake. Lost River, ancestral home of the Modocs, weaves its way to the terminal Tule Lake. 

 

Photos by Douglas Beauchamp from three visits over several years, most recently May 2026. 

Below, boulder with a grinding mortar sits in the open wetland valley.

 

CODA
We are here to become water again,
to dissolve in circles, trillions of unique grails,
on our way back through past lives,
back to algae, froth rot,
the foam of our ancestral future,
the ancient return.
— Carrie Ivy, from her poem QUEEN OF CUPS

Vast emptiness, nothing holy

Wuzu, teacher of Yuanwu who compiled the Blue Cliff Record, said this about "Vast emptiness, nothing holy":
"If you can just see into this vast emptiness, nothing holy, then you can return home and sit in peace."

Return home. Sit in peace. It's vast like the night sky last night blazing with stars, blazing with ten billion bright particulars. 

(All text from Susan Murphy, see Notes below)

And don't be misled by "nothing holy," don't fail to hear the fire running through it.

There is a fire that runs through all things and "nothing holy" is the road to seeing it. 

Curiously if nothing indeed is holy, then everything is endowed with completeness, sacredness; everything matters. 

There is nothing that is not sacred. All is blessed. Everything counts.

 

Can you feel how this is so? 

Where does it leave you in the actual living of your life? 

 

How do you meet this “nothing holy"? 
How do you meet this quality of It is Unknown. 

There is Unknownness, right here.

NOTES
— Susan Murphy Roshi is founding teacher of Zen Open Circle in Sydney, Australia. Her latest book is A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis. Words above from her essay "A Thousand Miles the Same Mood" in the edited volume The Book of Mu (James Ishmael Ford and Melissa Myozen Blacker, eds.)
— Photos:  A small spring and rock rim in SE Oregon’s High Lakes country east of Warner Basin, May 2026, Douglas Beauchamp.   With gratitude to fellow travelers Bryan Andresen and Phil Gordon. Return home. Sit in peace.

A Wall in Modoc Country

I'm living just as a century ends. 

A great leaf, that God and you and I 
have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.  

We see the brightness of a new page 
where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure 
and look at one another, saying nothing.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Plans

Now and then I lay down plans
to solve the world's problems.

My plans eliminate longing from stories,
remove exhaustion from groans,
place full stops in runaway sentences,
rescue even soldiers at checkpoints
along with children
who grow up in detention centers,
mothers who wear their wardrobes
of patience, and also laborers
who commit suicide
off scaffolds. I save the whole world
as a star might in well-drafted screenplays,
with plans that my impoverished
creativity ultimately kills. My plans,

they would have worked,
they would have saved us all.

—Maya Abu Al-Hayyat 

NOTES
—Rainer Marie Rilke (from Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
—Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (from You Can Be The Last Leaf:  Selected Poems. 2022, translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah
—Photos by Douglas Beauchamp, May 2026 (click to enlarge)

The lives and ways of the Modocs of Lost River country, their displacement and anguish, occur again each century, each year, this year as well. Repeated, cycled in and through the many places.  
Rilke’s poetic vision and that of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, a Palestinian writer living in Jerusalem, offer bracing — and embracing — truths. 

This sense of presence stands forth in and of this stone wall near pooling water in ancient Modoc country.

Inyo Rising

The narrating voices that, entwined or in juxtaposition, tell us about the universe are only two. Light and gravity. In the story that emerges, the invisible holds sway. What we can observe is simply an exception.
—Ersilia Vaudo

 

But man cannot master this lesson, 
the lesson of stone: 
he tumbles, his body crumbles, 
his word and voice unravel.

Fire, water and tree 
steal themselves:
dying, they seek a mineral body 
and find the road to glory: 
steady, the stone shines 
like a hard new rose.
—Pablo Neruda  

I want the light 
locked inside to awaken:
crystalline flower,
wake as I do:

eyelids raise the curtain 
of endless earthen time 
until deeply buried eyes 
flash clear enough again 
to see their own clarity.
—Pablo Neruda

NOTES
—Top photo, to honor Earth Day:  Earthrising beyond Moon, from Artemis II, NASA, March 2026

—Photos: Petroglyphs on a rock wall, Owens Valley, Inyo County CA, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp
—Ersilia Vaudo (Astrophysicist with  the European Space Agency), from The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions (2025, trans from Italian by Vanessa Di Stefano)
—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973, Nobel 1971), from Stones of the Sky.
1970/Spanish, 1987/English trans by James Nolan, Copper Canyon Press

Power of a Mountain

 

(Birch Mountain, right, March 2026)

 

When I was still a young man, I saw Birch Mountain in a dream. It said to me:
"You will always be well and strong. Nothing can hurt you and you will live to an old age." After this Birch Mountain came and spoke to me whenever I was in trouble and told me that I would be all right. That is why nothing has happened to me and why I am so old now. —Jack Stewart

 

In 1926-27, in Owens Valley, anthropologist Julian Steward listened to and recorded the life story of Jack Stewart, an elderly Paiute man. His Indian name: Hoavadunuki’.  Jack Stewart born in his mother’s village, tovowahamatui, now Big Pine, and lived there at the time Steward heard his story, noting, “The data presented in Jack's life demonstrate primarily this importance of the vision. he is evidently of a mind predisposed to hallucinations, interpreted as supernatural communications.”

 

Julian Steward continues: 
Although the irrepressible dreamer had many visions, this one which brought him his "power" was the most important. Birch mountain, pa'o'karanwa (pa'o, rocky, karanwa, boulder) or sunuyüsi’, is one of the most magnificent of the Sierra Nevada peaks as seen from Big Pine, rising to more than 14,000 feet, or more than 10,000 feet above the valley. Success in hunting, fighting, traveling, and even in gambling are assured him by his power, Birch Mountain. 

 

 

This petroglyph, a loose drawn style on a sloping crevice on a rock rim facing Birch Mountain.  A rim with dozens of other petroglyphs. Follow along with the possibilities as I speculate.

 

I see a spirit figure. Below two upright ears, which shape a head, two arms extend. One downward emitting or contacting supernatural power through the hand.  The other arm loops down entwining body-like. Upper left, a vaporous cloud of energy animates or is animated by the figure. This is not a logical event. A vision; this description is imaginative representing, I suggest, a quest for contact, or indeed power’s actual arrival.

I do not suggest there's any direct relationship between Jack Stewart's dream of Birch Mountain and this petroglyph. His story provides no account of petroglyphs.  It is an alignment of geography that provokes an alignment of action and belief.  A way of turning toward.       

 

Photos: Inyo County, California, southeast of Big Pine, facing Birch Mountain.

March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

 

The thin snowpack of the eastern Sierras continues to melt away this pivotal year of global heating.

Carbon in the atmosphere is the highest since 30 million years ago.