FELDSPAR :: EARTH DAY

The earth as it has always been
is saying it's goodbyes. Another world
will overrun the emptiness,
but I love this one.
— Chase Twichell

Time collapses. This basalt is different. Harder. Darkly brown. Rounded water-smoothed boulders thick with feldspar crystals sparkling in the desert air.  Petroglyphs emerge ghost-like, yearning, dissolve as the light shifts, from 3000 ybp +/- 2500 years.

Coarse-grained, plagioclase porphyritic basalt, boulders rounded from millennia under the lake's Pleistocene high-stands, a southwest edge the multi-layered Columbia River Flood Basalt Province.

Along US Highway 395 north to Canada south to California 19th century geographic imaginings. Margins alive. Lichen cattle shrimp avocets bighorn. Saltcrusts fences bones placed stones. Wave cut road cut clay bed tar bed.

Lake Abert. Pleistocene Lake Chewaican remnant, a very near blurred future-time collides toward this place. Too soon geo-logically: a stark dry slope, a dusty valley. Asphalt road bed black cracking tilting sliding into white salt. Trace chemicals congeal and bind the changing times. Patina darkens petroglyphs rock circles stacked walls. Wind carries the sparklings the longing crystals on through the curve of time.

NOTES
—  Earth Day.  Consider: Plagioclase is also a major constituent of rock in the highlands of the Earth's moon. Analysis of thermal emission spectra from the surface of Mars suggests that plagioclase is the most abundant mineral in the crust of Mars.
— Plagioclase: from the Greek plagios - "oblique" and klao - "I cleave" in allusion to the obtuse cleavage angles of the good cleavages.
— Chase Twichell, from her poem Touch-me-not in The Ghost of Eden (1995)

CODA
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025):   I chose rabbits as an art icon because there is a cultural universality to them throughout the world. Standing rabbits not only appear in petroglyphs in the Americas, but in petrogylphs around the world as well. In educational institutions in this country, reference is often made to the age of America as being two hundred years or five hundred years, but because we still live under the aegis of colonial thinking, its never taken into consideration that some of the world's greatest cultures and cities were here in the Americas for thousands of years—and are still here. (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2002)
Artwork:  The Long Shadow (2013), woodcut

BASALT::High Lakes

Three following photos, details of above

Below, detail of above

Below, detail of above

Photos: Selections of petroglyphs carved-abraded-pecked-incised on an east-facing rim of fractured basalt located in what-is-now Lake County, Oregon — high lakes country east of Warner Basin. These petroglyphs, as with the thousand of others in this region, placed-made during seasonal rounds, crossing boundaries over incalculable centuries.

Looking is not seeing; seeing not knowing. Time elides moments; layers confound time. Present in parallel universes — who are you?