the spiral on the rock

 

the reach for pattern

I stand before a rock wall in New Mexico,

a serpentine spiral has been carved into the desert varnish,

in Chaco Canyon such a spiral centered the Sun Dagger,

a thousand year old way to mark

equinoxes, solstices, the Moon's 19 year cycle,

and I wonder . . .

sometimes it seems as if a word creates a thought,

pulls it out of the haze and gives it form,

more commonly, some words are like "apple,"

a word that expresses a reality we already clearly know,

nevertheless our brains are much more capable of complexity

than just the naming of physical realities,

we need to expand ourselves by somehow collectively creating words,

those words that help pull us up into ways to view the world,

and our interactions with it,

ways that we might know in our intuitive wisdom

but that elude our conscious  mind,

we see the glimmer,

we reach for the idea

just beyond our current grasp,

and then we can learn a word that nails it,

and our consciousness leaps to a new place,

I was just listening to a podcast on Science Friday,

and I heard a word new to me, pareidolia,

this word speaks of the mind's drive for coherence,

to see the world's expressed realities in a new way,

our mind reaches to find pattern in what is before us, 

maybe a human faces coalesces within a tree's branches,

we can reach toward a deeper truth

that the clumsiness of our perceptions easily misses,

many seem to see such patterning as mistakes, a glitch,

a seeing an order that isn't really there,

our course, the literal mind can reject the figurative,

it can embrace the concrete, the materialistic, 

the denial that a muse from beyond

has anything to whisper to us that we should hear,

I have long pondered petroglyphs, pictographs,

images imposed on the rock by Indigenous peoples

hundreds to thousands of years ago,

how much were such images from their experience

like the apple or the animals they hunted, 

images of the physical world around them?

and how much from how the sacred came at them?

spirals carved in stone have long intrigued me,

so I call up: snail shells,

a leaf fluttering to the ground,

water into a whirlpool,

a snake,

but I also wonder about what was not in their experience,

the shape of the Milky Way, a hurricane from above,

the miracle of pi controlling a vine up a tree,

the images usually called Kokopelli have also intrigued me,

a flute-playing trickster god in the stories of current Indigenous cultures,

but not a flesh-and-blood reality they would have seen outside their village, probably,

on the podcast I listened to yesterday

the term pareidolia was mentioned

as a potential window into those anonymous carvers so long ago,

I wonder if what they put on the rock

came from within their generative soul,

I wonder if what they felt the universe manifested

morphed into the images we now see,

that these were the best sense of the revelation they felt,

visualized into these forms,

and left on the rock to help others learn the new idea, like a new word,

I believe that there is an impinging order within the universe,

order that the best within us might perceive, 

that might spiral forth,

order that our writers can reveal

in the hard-crafted stories that 

seem to spring full-blown onto the page, from somewhere,

I also believe that there's

a part of us that surrenders to the reptile brain,

more stimulus and response than a building of order,

so that we flee or fight,

and forget to seek to comprehend 

and to express the ineffable.

by Henry H. Walker

March  26, ‘25