Say, perhaps you’ve noticed a relationship between pools of water and pools of stone and without the colonial notion of gravity to steer your understanding of cause and effect into the patterns of contrapuntal music…

…you start to look around further. This rock stuff is pretty fine for sure. What’s to separate it from the flesh blooming inside the cup, or tide pool, of a skull? Nothing at all.

Working up to yourself from where you find yourself rather than working down to find a place from traditions of placelessness and universality, the great power of the desert religions, you start with rock. Obviously,  it takes on bodily form. You can see that.

Heads and body parts and stuff, all tangled up with water. You can see that it wears away and flows. That’s what you have. Little else. So, you begin with that.

And pass that understanding on to your children. Century after century, they trace bodily forms in the rock.

The sea wears them away. They become a part of the water. You, or rather your ancestors yet to be born, trace them again. In this touch, you are all one.

In the traditional of contrapuntal music and mathematics, this is called magic and superstition. Actually, it is acknowledgement that the power of old things, and the ability to connect with them, continues with our effort, and so you trace the oldest forms again: fish that are leaves and vaginal lips, faces that are eggs and moon and pools in the tide. Just as you live in the world all at once, separating these things makes no sense.

Of course, in the language of contrapuntal mathematics and individualized, realized individuals who have melded thought and perception into the unity of an image …

… this all-at-once is a flow of time, with a beginning and an end, and not the tides, whose cycles are so short as to be a form of breath. So it is to live inside the image, and reach out of it into thought: note the natural shaman in the stone above Iupper centre of the image), and the human repetition on the left below. Who wouldn’t trace them both? After all, the sea does.

And, out of the power to do it without stone as much as with it.

You want to find connection, and be energized by it, you can make it. Or can be made by it. The simplest shape will do. The stone will hold it for you. The entire stone.

The hammer-and-chisel work of individual identity misses the point entirely and displays itself as poverty and ignorance.

Over and over, we must begin again, patiently, making the forms for the children, and leading them to them.  Tracing the pathway into a world of energy with a stone, as someone has done below, is not the way.

By doing it with your finger you become stronger than the rock and become the rock just as the rock becomes the sea. Note the skull in its nest below.

These are old paths. Anyone who says they are forgotten is not on the path.

The path is complex as science and has its own music, even far, far from the sea.

~

Ozette Beach; last image Bella Vista Hills