Metaphysical Crack; Archaeology
How does this move you?
This should be the question you ask yourself every day.
How does this inspire your sense of awe? How does life excite you?
How does each day transform you?
What takes your breath away?
Is it art? Music? A sport? Building, designing, discussing, learning, reading, cooking?
Creating something with the work of your hands or hearts or minds?
The question is--What, to you, is truth?
What makes you try to grasp your own collarbone or heart with the beauty and agony of it?
What is real, and hard, and sweet, and violent?
What gives you passion? What gives you fire?
Excitement. Enthusiasm. Intensity.
Energy. Fire. Passion. Emotion. Sensation.
Life.
Trust me, you need to try this stuff.
It's like metaphysical crack.
In archaeology yesterday, we passed around Clovis and Fulsom spearheads, flaked stone points approximately fifteen thousand years old. I held it in my hands, traced it: the cold stone, the crescent markings. I felt such a connection--I can't explain it. I just thought,
This is a fragment of the life of somebody I never knew. This is a fragment of someone from thousands and thousands of years ago, someone with a craft, a livelihood, a family. Someone with stories. Did they get up every morning and crouch outside in the grass, chiseling these points from dusk till dawn? Were they male, or were they female? Did they trade these things, or use them to hunt the mastadont and ground sloth? Did they have a husband or wife, and did they love them? Small siblings, or maybe children? What was it like to watch the sun rising over the high grasses while they worked? Did they notice the thin veins of gold over the landscape, or were they too absorbed in their work? What mattered to them? The next hunt, the fire, the safety, the family? What did they believe in?
It's hard to comprehend, in a way. In my palms I held a remnant, a bit of evidence not of history or of foreign culture, but of someone's being, someone's story, someone's entire world. I held what may be the only evidence that such a person existed, the only mark they left in the world--proof they were real, they lived, they laughed, they struggled, and they died. It's an enormous realization.
Often, we think of these ancient cultures--Paleoindians, Bering Straight wanderers, Ice Age peoples--as masses, as groups. But here is one solitary object made by one solitary craftsman in one solitary corner of the world. And he had a life, and a childhood, and an adulthood, and a mind, and a heart, and a soul. And he had experiences we can only dream of, experiences we will never understand--stories completely lost to us, acknowledged only by a stone spear point.
That's heady stuff.
*bamf*
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This should be the question you ask yourself every day.
How does this inspire your sense of awe? How does life excite you?
How does each day transform you?
What takes your breath away?
Is it art? Music? A sport? Building, designing, discussing, learning, reading, cooking?
Creating something with the work of your hands or hearts or minds?
The question is--What, to you, is truth?
What makes you try to grasp your own collarbone or heart with the beauty and agony of it?
What is real, and hard, and sweet, and violent?
What gives you passion? What gives you fire?
Excitement. Enthusiasm. Intensity.
Energy. Fire. Passion. Emotion. Sensation.
Life.
Trust me, you need to try this stuff.
It's like metaphysical crack.
In archaeology yesterday, we passed around Clovis and Fulsom spearheads, flaked stone points approximately fifteen thousand years old. I held it in my hands, traced it: the cold stone, the crescent markings. I felt such a connection--I can't explain it. I just thought,
This is a fragment of the life of somebody I never knew. This is a fragment of someone from thousands and thousands of years ago, someone with a craft, a livelihood, a family. Someone with stories. Did they get up every morning and crouch outside in the grass, chiseling these points from dusk till dawn? Were they male, or were they female? Did they trade these things, or use them to hunt the mastadont and ground sloth? Did they have a husband or wife, and did they love them? Small siblings, or maybe children? What was it like to watch the sun rising over the high grasses while they worked? Did they notice the thin veins of gold over the landscape, or were they too absorbed in their work? What mattered to them? The next hunt, the fire, the safety, the family? What did they believe in?
It's hard to comprehend, in a way. In my palms I held a remnant, a bit of evidence not of history or of foreign culture, but of someone's being, someone's story, someone's entire world. I held what may be the only evidence that such a person existed, the only mark they left in the world--proof they were real, they lived, they laughed, they struggled, and they died. It's an enormous realization.
Often, we think of these ancient cultures--Paleoindians, Bering Straight wanderers, Ice Age peoples--as masses, as groups. But here is one solitary object made by one solitary craftsman in one solitary corner of the world. And he had a life, and a childhood, and an adulthood, and a mind, and a heart, and a soul. And he had experiences we can only dream of, experiences we will never understand--stories completely lost to us, acknowledged only by a stone spear point.
That's heady stuff.
*bamf*
Click here to be added to the Friends-Only Filter in order to read daily entries.