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 above 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...

 

CODA

 

Wake up.

The wind is not for seeing,

neither is the first

song, soon half-

way gone,

and the figures,

the figures are not waiting.

To see what is

in motion you must move.

—Susan Stewart

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)

Solstice Dreaming

I dreamed among the ice caps long ago,
Ranging with the sun on the inward slope,
Down the wheel of seasons and the solstices.
                —N Scott Momaday from Prairie Hymn

Summer Solstice 2026: A watery dream accelerates as the ice melts. This Earth, a place of stone, knows molten density. Knows solar intensity. Thinking to and fro, this boat rocking through gateless sky. What do we know?

 

Photo: Petroglyph, detail. High Lakes, Lake County, Oregon. Douglas Beauchamp. 

 

CODA
What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.
            —Louise Glück from the poem Solstice

Yocum Valley: Ancient Carved Stone

Ancient deeply-carved stone with double circles and a mortar lies fallen and half-buried in Yocum Valley.  

This marks a place with a few other old carvings and dozens of bedrock mortars and metates. Below, a nearby boulder with deep carvings and notchings.

Lichen-covered and in shadow, this deeply carved boulder holds a complex of interconnected circles. Swartz in 1960 used aluminum powder to enable a photo for a study published in American Antiquity in 1963.  Later he conceded using aluminum powder is not recommended due to possible damage.

 

The Lorings in their Yocum Valley site entry provided a 1970 sketch that may have been based on Swartz's study.

Photo below shows a detail the bumpy surface and notching of the boulder.

A resource-rich wetland on the border of Oregon and NE California, the wide Yocum Valley is the headwaters of Willow Creek which becomes Lost River near Clear Lake. Lost River, ancestral home of the Modocs, weaves its way to the terminal Tule Lake. 

 

Photos by Douglas Beauchamp from three visits over several years, most recently May 2026. 

Below, boulder with a grinding mortar sits in the open wetland valley.

 

CODA
We are here to become water again,
to dissolve in circles, trillions of unique grails,
on our way back through past lives,
back to algae, froth rot,
the foam of our ancestral future,
the ancient return.
— Carrie Ivy, from her poem QUEEN OF CUPS

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.

Groundhog Day: In rock rim country

 In those days there was lots to eat, but they destroyed it. They used to get game easily, but Coyote and Wolf made it hard to get food. Wolf went hunting. He was going to hunt groundhogs. He went and stood under a rock cliff. He said, "Rocks, come after me,’ and all groundhogs came down to him. Then he killed what he thought would be enough for a meal and went home. Coyote was his brother. He was home, and he asked him, “How do you kill so many like that? Then Wolf told him how he did it. Coyote thought he would try. He did what his brother had told him and got many groundhogs. Then he ate them, and afterwards he stood there and said the same thing again. Then all rocks rolled down after him. That's how Coyote spoiled easy hunting.

—Daisy Brown, told in her Northern Paiute language, Summer 1930, Fort Bidwell, Surprise Valley, CA. Interpreter: Nora Henderson. [1] [2]

In the Northern Great Basin, Groundhog seeing Shadow is not a concern. Survival — and the good life — compel action and hibernation. Basic, yes? A lot like Human — and Wolf and Coyote. Yet, an ontological issue complicates. One of identity. Is Groundhog actually a groundhog? Wildlife biologists say no, there are no groundhogs (Marmota monax) in the Great Basin. Oh yes, they concede, there is a cousin — Yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventris).

Have Wolf and Coyote been let astray? No, it's common out-West for these high-rock marmots to be called groundhogs. Something to do with whites from the East occupying country and translating Gidü or Kidü to how they remembered. Yet, I believe Groundhog and a groundhog hold close in the mythic realm of the real. As Coyote is ever-greater-than-and-the-same-as a coyote.

At times, when I am studying rock rims in high country for petroglyphs, a small furry head and nose will pop up over the edge, curious. Stare at me, an intruder, quickly disappear. Yellow-bellied marmot prefer to be near rocks. Rocks shelter burrows. Wolf and Coyote know this. Too, I’ve seen Coyote out there, loping along, hungry, going somewhere. Above photo: Marmot top center, dot petroglyph far right.

Shadow? Yellow-bellied marmot has Shadow, as do we all, however until emerging from hibernation in late Spring it lingers in dreams.

Rock-dreaming

NOTES

Photos by this blog's author at a rock-rim-place in the Warner basin watershed, SE Oregon. Click to enlarge.  (Note:  This is a re-post from five years ago, in the spirit of deja vu... )

[1] An excerpt from a longer story about two brothers, Coyote and Wolf, going hunting. This story is one of six variations of this theme each by a different Northern Paiute speaker. Five contain a groundhog sequence. In some versions Coyote is killed by the rocks (and of course comes out alive); in some his tail is cut-off. The stories were solicited and transcribed, with some grammatical corrections, by UC Berkeley graduate student Isabel T. Kelly and published in Northern Paiute Tales, The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 51, Oct-Dec 1938.

[2] Daisy (Limpy) Brown was born in the Warner Valley about 1870 according to Kelly. She provided many stories in Kelly’s Tales and was an important source of knowledge in Kelly’s 1932 Ethnography of the Surprise Valley Paiute. Brown was the aunt of Nora Henderson of Alturas who served as her interpreter.

[3] Gray wolves living in North American today came from Eurasia between 70,000 and 24,000 years ago; https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.12765. Wolves were extirpated in the Northern Great Basin by the 1920s; efforts to repopulate remain contentious.

The Stone Verdict

And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.

And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

—Seamus Heaney

Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode,

Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store

Witnessed itself already taking place

In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.

—Seamus Heaney

NOTE

—Petroglyphs, stone, lichen, stains, rock varnish — discrete galaxies in constant change.  Eastern backslope of Abert Rim, Lake County, Oregon.  2025

Seamus Heaney selections:

—top: from the poem Lightning in Seeing Things (1991)

—above: from Settings, XIV, in Seeing Things

—below: from The Stone Verdict in The Haw Lantern (1987) 

Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was awarded the Nobel in Literature in 1995.

CODA

from The Stone Verdict

Let it be like the judgement of Hermes,

God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts

Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him

Until he stood waist-deep in the cairn

Of his own absolution: maybe a gate-pillar

Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence

Somebody will break at last to say, 'Here

His spirit lingers,' and will have said too much.