Category Archives: On Integrating Word and Image

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

The Heat Has Broken

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High on the rocky hillside, an Ancestral Puebloan scoria trough metate, smashed.

It had been a huge thing, about two feet long by a foot wide. No idea what it must have weighed. It lay downhill from the jumbled stones of a long structure, surrounded by shattered pottery from decades of meals.

Who hauled that thing up the mountain? Who smashed it, and why? Scoria metates are so often found in pieces; were they broken ceremonially at a woman’s death? When a settlement was abandoned? Or is that imagination?

The sand is pecked with raindrops. Fall, rain, and cooler weather, all so welcome, have arrived together. The desert is green, and the asters are in bloom.

On Creativity, On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

There’s a Mouse

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It’s much too hot to hike in the desert. We’re hiding out, like this mouse.

There is a mouse. I promise.

Find the mouse:

I mean it. There’s a mouse in there.

Hint: Look for the invisible but hopeful thought balloon that reads, “You are mistaken. There is no mouse.”

Another hint: The mouse is about the size of a pecan.

Mouse!

On Creativity, On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Serious Kitchen Equipment

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On one five mile hike, about twenty metates. Most were the simple Archaic type, but did even the Ancestral Pueblo use that casual style when hunting and traveling light? The materials were always to hand.

Nine of them:

Also one Ancestral Pueblo type, broken. So often metates are broken. Were they perhaps broken ritually to mark some event?

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Manners

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Lately the temperature has been perfectly reptilian.

On a sandy mesa-side, Hosteen Cheii. Proper behavior is to give him water; if you don’t have water, use spit.

And cooling it in the shade of a juniper, a pretty prairie rattler. Proper behavior is to back off in a hurry.

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

What Is It?

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It stands in the middle of one of the linked plazas of a remote, dusty, fallen Pueblo complex that was abandoned, probably because of drought, sometime about 1200 C.E..

It’s not a grave. Ancestral Puebloans didn’t do graves with headstones.

It looks shrine-ish. The unassuming shrines of the Pueblos are often a careful pile of stones.

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

One Hike…

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...three metates. Archaic, given their location, on earth once much wetter than it is in these times of drought.

Each is pecked to roughen its grinding surface. Use has rubbed the first into a bowl that exposes the thin strata of its sandstone, now spalled by frost and rain. All are broken.

The third in situ in a messy prehistoric living room, now cross-trodden by cows: