River of Stones

In Buddhism, the metaphor of Indra's Net from the Avatamsaka Sutra has been used over the generations to exemplify how not one thing is separate from any other thing even though things are different from each other. At each intersection in Indra's Net, there is a shining and distinct jewel. Sustaining the light from all the other jewels, each jewel reflects all the jewels in the Net and has no real or separate self nature. A single jewel and all other jewels thus exist in a pattern of presence and mutual activity.
—Joan Halifax

Again, from Joan Halifax:  Buddhism, shamanism, and deep ecology are ways for us to understand and realize that this Earth is a vast and rich network of mutual arisings, dyings, and renewings. Seeing this, we experience ourselves as part of the world around us, and the world around us is part of us. It is from this base that authentic harmlessness and helpfulness awaken.

Einstein proposed that the universe be regarded as a field which is an unbroken and undivided whole. Particles are then treated as certain kinds of abstraction from the total field, notably as localized regions in which the field is very intense. As one gets further from the center of such a region, the field gets weaker, until it merges imperceptibly with the fields of other particles.
—David Bohm

Again, from David Bohm:  Einstein’s emphasis on undivided wholeness of the universe in terms of field is carried yet further. For even that which "observes" or "measures" the field can no longer consistently be regarded as something that exists separately from the field.

Wading in to cross the late season river quickly becomes surprising and a sticky muck.  Why even risk sinking?  For me, to sense place — in the two senses — the sensual and the common. And to simply cross the river to the dark boulders — precise petroglyphs active and dense, the stone deeply imbued with water and wind — time slipping by as particles.  To traverse beaver country. To walk the land, clear and compelling.  To listen to what is said.

 

CODA
Perhaps one thing only is of great concern to me: whether I come closer, slowly, by detours, circling here and there, moving away, returning, but always with one aim. Coming closer to what? To a knowledge, though of what kind I do not know, to comprehension.
—Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth (1986)

 

NOTES
—Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness:  Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth (1993)
—David Bohm, The Art of Perceiving Movement (Essay, 1971)

TUFA

Tufas, like mineral flowers, emerge, protrude, and fragment as a lake recedes.  Bud, blossom, seed, left high and dry.  Tufas congeal in crenate patterns, constellated, crystallized, caverned, calcified froth. 

This tufa boulder formed under the waters of a bay of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan in northwest Nevada.  An immersed spring emits dissolved calcium which combines with carbon in the lake water to form calcium carbonate into a sort of crystalline structure, which is then eroded. These deeply carved petroglyphs, vulva-like shapes and linear incisings, are undated.

The petroglyphs on this boulder appear as emblems of desire, as invocations, perhaps entreating sexual fecundity, necessary replenishment. In these landscapes as marvelous, saturated dream-space, I am reminded of Max Ernst’s frottages and textured paintings.  

The boulders' location is proximate to the justly famous, oldest dated petroglyphs in North America, also carved on tufa. Those dated petroglyphs look to the east over Winnemucca Dry Lake, east of Pyramid Lake - both remnant lakes of pluvial Lake Lahontan. The Winnemucca petroglyphs were determined by Larry Benson and associates in 2013 to date to at least 10,500 years ago.

 

Another carved tufa boulder near the spring.

A very hot spring, once at the bottom of a pluvial (Pleistocene) lake, located on the playa near the tufa boulders.

CODA
We all belong not just to our present moment, nor to the place in which we find ourselves at that moment, but to a far greater system of changes which have occurred throughout Earth's history and will continue to occur long into the future. The present convulsions of the planet are the result of the whole Earth system trying, in response to terrible pressures, to shift itself, often violently, into a new set of alignments, and we are part of those changes. We are the weather, and the water; we are the lionfish, too, changing our environment as we are changed by it. This realization can be humbling. and it can be hopeful too. We belong to the whole timescale of history. —James Bridle, from Here Come The Lionfish,  Emergence Magazine, Vol. 5: Time (2024)

Below: Max Ernst: The Gray Forest (1927)

ROCK CREEK NV

AIR AND WATER IN DARKNESS
— Juan Ramón Jiménez  

Pure tenuous streams
run in the darkness
— on the blue a mesh of silver—,
bringing me flowers . . .

— Ah, the eternal water
through the black ground;
the infinite breeze
through the cold shadow! —

. . . Bringing me stars;
and I am in the darkness
like a phantom tree
nourished with worlds.

Rock Creek Nevada at one time considered a public access for viewing petroglyphs as a stop on the Barrel Springs Backcountry Loop. Surprise Valley BLM dropped Rock Creek from its promotion a few years back. The Loop connects from Fort Bidwell, east via Mosquito Lake, down Long Valley to Vya, back west to Surprise Valley and Cedarville. Clearly the petroglyphs (here a loose sampling, click to enlarge) stay their own way as they have for some thousands of years.

A rough hike in shallow canyon goes on forever as Rock Creek drains north to Oregon; eventually these Nevada waters flow via the dynamic borderline stream 12-Mile Creek into the terminal Warner Basin, the sunken expanse west of Warner Peak and Hart Mountain, which tilts to the north - Coleman Lake, Crump Lake, Hart Lake and on...

Indeed Captain Warner the namesake for so much in this Tri-Corners country, a US Army surveyor, was killed in 1849 a few miles from here by Paiutes guarding their home country. To compress a complex story. DB above (B&W) and Bob in technicolor, simply following old trails.

Eerie parallelings of Rock Creek. A couple hundred yards to the east: two power corridors. Bonneville Power Authority (BPA) powerline towers conveying Direct Current from the Columbia River's The Dalles Dam to Los Angeles. Crossing at 12 mile Creek as "it" leaves Oregon going south through Nevada then turning toward LA. Side-by-side for these few miles: The Ruby Pipeline conveys compressed gas in buried 8' pipes from Wyoming to Malin Oregon, where it ties in with the north-south trans- Canada pipeline and PG&E then pressures the gas south, powering California.

Let us confine ourselves to the limited circle of each instant, and let us pass from instant to instant, as if from world to world.
— Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spanish, 1881-1958), awarded the Nobel in Literature in 1956.

Road to Delamar

There is a better way, a truer way, the old way — the proud highway, the rolling road. —Paul Theroux

The desert and the hourglass.  —Albert Camus

 

The highway from Willamette Valley Oregon to Lincoln County Nevada runs about 800 miles. That's if you go by Tulelake, Honey Lake, the reservation of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, the US Army’s Hawthorne Ammo Depot, on to summit at Tonopah. Soak at an abandoned hot spring pool then straightaway down The Extraterrestrial Highway to find yourself — and a few others — in Rachel, Nevada. Some say you've arrived. Others, you are simply beginning.

Natural perspective reestablishes when across sand and dust and out with the boulders, listening to the voices of the petroglyphs. Slowly, turning to witness the silent desert, the hum of duration.

All my life, I’ve lived above the ground,
    car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through concrete,
and still I’ve not understood the reel of this life’s purpose.

— Ada Limón 

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

— Henry David Thoreau

NOTES

—Paul Theroux, from Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads (2013)

—Albert Camus, from Notebook VII, 1951-1954, in Notebooks 1951-1959, trans Ryan Bloom

—Ada Limón, from Notes on the Below in The Carrying (2018)