When faced with deciphering the markings left by our ancestors less than ten millennia ere, we invoke sympathetic magic for the hunt, the thirteen full moons of some solar years, and other fantasies that pretend at the truth. And so, a rock face that greets the southron Sun day after day is perhaps a harbinger of our First Contact with a starfaring civilization. How will we converse with an alien civilization descended from the stars if we cannot speak the language of our ancestors? How will we decipher that first message, even if it’s a simple pictograph? Photographed July 2021.
We are strewn among the rocks, each of us surveying a swath of sky on the lookout for Lyrid meteors eager for their milliseconds of fame. It is a moonless night, and the desert stillness is a perfect reflection of the soundless fireworks in the skies above. The sodium glow of the horizon is a gentle reminder that most the inhabitants of our planet will never witness the Milky Way stretching across the sky, will never feel the oneness with the Universe that we feel here. Photographed April 2017.
Oh to be grounded by the simple act of moonrise... But for the fact that we walked beneath an ocean of air on a balmy autumn afternoon, the rocks around us could have easily been born of the magmas of Tharsis on Mars, or shaped by the subtle volcanism of the Moon. But then, like clockwork, the Moon rose, and there was no doubt. The textured crags, neatly stacked like cookies in a giant’s pantry, were formed not by the long lost fires of distant worlds, but in the cauldron of the living planet we call home. Photographed October 2007. Nominee (finalist), 5th Annual Black and White Spider Awards (2010).
