Ovoid as Vulva, Abstracted

Will our life not be a tunnel 
between two vague clarities?

Or will it not be a clarity 
between two dark triangles?
    —Pablo Neruda

Georgia Lee considers the pecked ovoid:  “a type of petroglyph, like the pit and groove, is found in many other areas. They are generally believed to be abstracted vulva signs.”

Two photos above:  Death Valley. 

  Two photos below:   Mono County.  

Lee notes: “According to McGowan, they probably are the most common and most universally recognized female fertility symbol.  Not all vulva signs are pecked ovoids; they take other forms, such as horseshoe shapes, wedge shapes, and bisected ovals.”

And further, citing Lee:  “Such symbols were more than simply ‘sexual’ depictions. As Marshack pointed out, depictions of the vulva became, over time, isolated, abstracted, and loaded with symbolic meaning. … Thus, rather than a narrow symbol of eroticism or anatomical study, vulva symbols had a more comprehensive aspect; they stood for concepts, stories, myths, processes.”

How does an image abstracted bear such a weight of symbolic meaning?

First, an embracing definition of abstraction:  The result of mentally abstracting an idea; the product of any mental process involving a synthesis of: separation, despecification, generalization, and ideation in any of a number of combinations. (Wiktionary)

Two photos, above and below:  El Paso Mountains 

Second, Charline von Heyl, a German abstract painter, emphasizes, almost Rilke-like, the force of thing itself:   “the ability of an abstract image to function as a fact—not as an illustration, representation, or evocation but with the force of the thing itself, be it a feeling that comes on sharp and sudden, an emotion that seeps in and aches, or an idea that generates an entire architecture of forms to be understood, and then only fleetingly, as the scaffolding falls away.” —Artforum

 

NOTES
—Pablo Neruda, from The Book of Questions, trans William O’Daly.
—Georgia Lee, "The Rock Art of Soxtonocmu, an Inland Chumash Village" in the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 1981 3(1).
Available:  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8pt4v2wk
—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reviewing Charline von Heyl, Nov 2013, in Artforum.
—Also:  https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2025/01/tufa.html
—Photos:   Douglas Beauchamp, Mono and Inyo counties, Eastern California
—Above: Charline von Heyl painting. Oil/acrylic/charcoal on canvas; 82x78 inches. Blacksmile: “An abstract painting characterized by layered shapes and surface tensions rather than direct representation.” 

Solstice Dreaming

I dreamed among the ice caps long ago,
Ranging with the sun on the inward slope,
Down the wheel of seasons and the solstices.
                —N Scott Momaday from Prairie Hymn

Summer Solstice 2026: A watery dream accelerates as the ice melts. This Earth, a place of stone, knows molten density. Knows solar intensity. Thinking to and fro, this boat rocking through gateless sky. What do we know?

 

Photo: Petroglyph, detail. High Lakes, Lake County, Oregon. Douglas Beauchamp. 

 

CODA
What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.
            —Louise Glück from the poem Solstice

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.