Animates: The Lives of Stone

I have pictured sets of photographs, finite
and free
—Anna Moschovakis

Center: classic lizard-anthropomorph. Upper: sketchy bighorn sheep. Lower right: faint figure grasping a waving line of power. Far left: Ambiguous possible birthing figure.

Below: Context of the 1st figure. A split boulder.

Minimalist figures ecstatic in the landscape.

Below: Detail.

Unusual man-figure, on a boulder in the playascape.

Above:  Petroglyph as a six-toed grizzly bear paw print. Six-toed, a strange and not uncommon appearance.

Below:  Lizard-toadmorph petroglyph in crevice.

Animates:  Figures in stone in motion. Along a desiccated playa lake in southeast Oregon.

Note:  Descriptions arbitrary;  these beings animate their own lives, before and after our fleeting appearance. Enjoy these moments...

Night of Stone II

An environment eternal:  this place of water in the desert attracted travelers, seekers, through thousands of years of solidity and change… Seeking resolve, resolve in seeing with the night of stone.  A mineral landscape of erosion, adherence and deposition.  

Then, the cutting through, the exposure of the light in the stone. The old atomic knowing.  The night of stone wavers, shadows the inevitable departure.  

Sparks, marks, made, signaling to and from, to and fro, involute, the universe, Indra's jeweled net.

CODA

The Tao is infinite, eternal.

Why is it eternal?

It was never born;

thus it can never die.

Why is it infinite?

It has no desires for itself;

thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;

that is why she is ahead.

She is detached from all things;

that is why she is one with them.

Because she has let go of herself,

she is perfectly fulfilled.

TAO TE CHING

—Translated by Stephen Mitchell

NOTES

—Photos above from the rock rim pictured in the July 21 2026 post:  The Night of Stone.  Harney County, Oregon, with good fortune for fellow travelers, photos by DB. 

Hands, Reaching

Consider the splayed human hand, dipped in ochre or paint and pressed against any firm surface-cave wall, church wall, school wall, rock wall. … this universal hand mark … presented at full stretch … is radiant, reaching out from its singular base to establish the eternally mysterious space of just where it is. It confirms presence while not engaged or proclaimed in directing or manipulating anything at all. It is empty-handed presence.
    —Susan Murphy

How can it be that we only live once— 

the body constantly wishing for 

what only the hands can do: reach 

and grasp, reach and grasp. Something 

like the foaling of eternity, born 

and reborn on spindles. 

    —Keetje Kuipers

NOTES

—Hand prints on stone, Owens River Valley, Inyo County, CA. Photos: DB, 2026

—Keetje Kuipers, from the poem For All The Dead Lovelies from her collection The Keys to The Jail (2014)

—Susan Murphy, an Australian Zen teacher, from A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis — Teachings on Earth, Mind & Not Knowing (2023). 

—Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944. From Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, 1944–1959 (trans from the French, 2026)

CODA

When someone has a soul, they tend to call what frustrates them lucidity, and what eludes them, truth. But that lucidity is just as blind as anything else. There is only one type of clairvoyance: the kind that wants to grasp at happiness. And I know that, even though it might be short-lived, endangered or fragile, happiness awaits us, if we reach out our hands. But we must reach out our hands. 

    —Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944.

(Maria Casarès and Albert Camus met in Paris on June 6, 1944, the day the Allies landed in Normandy. She was 21; he was 30. His last letter to her was December 30, 1959. On January 4, 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car accident on his way back to Paris.)