New People, Old Stone.

The Discovery Channel was showing a program one night about how the ancient Egyptians used barges to float their stone obelisks down the Nile on barges. These chunks of rocks would weigh hundreds of tons and would be up to eighty feet long, and maybe longer. I'm more than willing to bet that somewhere at the bottom of the Nile is a very long piece of rock.

Arrowheads made by the natives of this land before the Europeans invaded were once fairly common. As a child, my friends and I would go out to the field behind my house and not even bother picking one up unless it looked very nice. Who knows how many different pieces we collected, and then lost or destroyed out of sheer ignorance? We would take arrowheads to school and trade them for little less than nothing.  Forever the artifact and its place of origin would be forever separated.

Each generation of human beings does this. We take the past and do it irreparable harm in our wonder of it. We always thought there was some terrible and exciting Indian war that had occurred for there to be so many arrowheads in one area, and perhaps we were right. But as each pieces was removed another link in the chain of evidence went missing. Every time the farmer tilled this field we would find new pieces but we would also lose some to the tractor and to time. As houses, like the one I lived in, marched closer and close to the edges of the field, more and more land became permanently sealed. Dirt hauled off contained the past, and dirt hauled in contained some other past. Where I lived became a new place on top of the old, and the place that was there before was taken somewhere else.

Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe the natives and their culture are, and were, nothing more than a curiosity for children to wonder about. I will never know the name of the man who made any of the arrowheads I found. I will never know if there was someone who lived at the exact same place as my house, perhaps the exact same place as my bedroom, who made that arrowhead right there, within inches of where I held it in awe. But if the past is disposable what does that say about a future born of that past?

Who were these people? I wonder that still. I wonder what they ate and what they worshipped. Did they live here a long time or were they newcomers? There were times I would look at the moon in Her fullness, and wondered how many times the arrowhead maker had stood there and gazed at that same moon. There were times I could feel him near me, watching the moon, and wondering about the nature of the new people, and what it would mean in time.

Take Care,

Mike