Tracking

 

  

  

Rim: Upper left, track (detail below); Lower right, one/two tracks.

Seeking, imprinting gesture on stone.  In these pictures of petroglyphs only stone. Tracks reveal a presence, the before sense of arriving.  The beyond sense of departing.  Movement through transitory moments.

Caution advised.

 

How to place side-by-side our hope, desire, caring, with what we know happens daily?  An existential question: Over eight billion humans now on the planet. Multiple billions of caged, farmed, slaughtered animals. The thinning herds and flocks and solitaries, the adapting and yearning natural animals. Grizzily extinct from Oregon. The Wolf.  Where to, how now, in the tracking? In the old stories what were they telling?

 

This side of now, the nowhere of the 2020s. The image: Machining the earth. Gleaming extraction demands compacting deposition. Landfilling waste. Seeping, streaming. Filtering odorless tasteless into living streams. River steams. Blood streams. Streaming bombs shatter and splatter screams. 

 

These tracks here, quietly of stone, weathering, testifying, reminding -- simply of what-is in the curve of seasons, as we wonder.  As we all go forth along the way.

 

...

Three pictures, to return to the beginning. To an ending. The basalt rim. Cleaved. Lichened. Patinated. Sky depthless. 

Lower edge, approaching shadow: Track! eluding.

 

Moving closer, tracking track. The sag of basalt, stone flow, mineral yielding.  Lightly marked dots. How do we know anything?

This track, the first track, the last track. A returning cycle? A timeline to infinity?