The Night of Stone

Rock rim exposes, shadows, faces south.  This place of water in desert attracted travelers, seekers, in thousands of years of solidity and change.  I slept once on this rim. A rough and lucid night as I dreamed of the ancient ones in visitation. An allowance emerged from their wisdom.
To make pictures of the glyphs, the markings, aims to respect the deep intent of their presence. As they — the makers and the markings — invoke the spirit of place. Perhaps seeking resolve in seeing with the night of stone. In the light of day.

 

This collection of images considers one section of complexity of rock and petroglyphs at this place of power.  Moving in closer, then moving away.   

CODA
From the Chilean master Pablo Neruda:
 
To harden the earth
the rocks took charge:
instantly
they grew wings:
the rocks
that soared:
the survivors
flew up
the lightning bolt,
screamed in the night,
a watermark,
a violet sword,
a meteor.
The succulent
sky
had not only clouds,
not only space smelling of oxygen,
but an earthly stone
flashing here and there
changed into a dove,
changed into a bell,
into immensity, into a piercing
wind:
into a phosphorescent arrow,
into salt of the sky.

—Pablo Neruda, from Stones of the Sky. 
(1970, trans James Nolan 1987, Copper Canyon Press)

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.

Inyo Rising

The narrating voices that, entwined or in juxtaposition, tell us about the universe are only two. Light and gravity. In the story that emerges, the invisible holds sway. What we can observe is simply an exception.
—Ersilia Vaudo

 

But man cannot master this lesson, 
the lesson of stone: 
he tumbles, his body crumbles, 
his word and voice unravel.

Fire, water and tree 
steal themselves:
dying, they seek a mineral body 
and find the road to glory: 
steady, the stone shines 
like a hard new rose.
—Pablo Neruda  

I want the light 
locked inside to awaken:
crystalline flower,
wake as I do:

eyelids raise the curtain 
of endless earthen time 
until deeply buried eyes 
flash clear enough again 
to see their own clarity.
—Pablo Neruda

NOTES
—Top photo, to honor Earth Day:  Earthrising beyond Moon, from Artemis II, NASA, March 2026

—Photos: Petroglyphs on a rock wall, Owens Valley, Inyo County CA, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp
—Ersilia Vaudo (Astrophysicist with  the European Space Agency), from The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions (2025, trans from Italian by Vanessa Di Stefano)
—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973, Nobel 1971), from Stones of the Sky.
1970/Spanish, 1987/English trans by James Nolan, Copper Canyon Press

Time, Opaque

And so the days go by here, without incident.
    Even the occasional memorable event is soon erased without a trace under time’s huge, opaque mass. 
    —Han Kang

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations," Mary Austin wrote, "deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars ... wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls.” ...

 ... To be like the lean coyote is a comfort beneath a sky that is full of fog or full of sunlight and either way impenetrable. Such comfort is not a reason for carelessness. Precisely because you might not know everything — because the night answers but not with words you can understand, and the stars swing above you, moving, as Austin tells us, as if "on some stately service not needful to declare,“ you must accept certain responsibilities — among them the task of taking care.
    —Kendra Atleework

 Click photo, zoom in for detail

What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may? In the darkest night, there is language that asks what we are made of, that insists on imagining into the first person perspectives of the people and living beings that inhabit this planet; language that connects us to one another. 

 

Literature that deals in this language inevitably holds a kind of body heat. Just as inevitably, the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life. I would like to share the meaning of this award, which is for literature, with you – standing here in opposition to violence together. 
    —Han Kang from her Nobel Prize speech (December 2024, translated from Korean by Maya West)

NOTES
—Han Kang, top: Greek Lessons: A Novel (2023). Han Kang awarded the Nobel in Literature, 2024
—Kendra Atleework, Miracle Country: A Memoir (2020)
—Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)
Both write of the country east of the Sierras, the Owens Valley, Inyo County, California
—Photos:  Inyo County, California, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp