Mississippian Era Mud

The earth is still very alive. Early this morning slipping outside and pissing in the overgrown grass before spreading a cup of bird seed on the little wooden platform. Mowing late this year and offering free brunch has attracted more birds than usual. A Rose-breasted Grosbeak couple has recently nested in the neighborhood. I came back inside, turned on the 'puter when Dechen leaned over the railing above and asked if I'd felt the earthquake. Really? I hadn't felt a thing. She awoke at 4:37 a.m. with the bed shaking, the rod iron design on the wall above her pillow rattling. She wondered if the roof was going to blow off from a low pressure cell, (not an uncommon feeling around here) and then realized it wasn’t a storm at all, maybe density waves from helicopter blades? Recognition that the entire house was moving gave rise to a transcendent sense of place. She was feeling the release of great pressures deep in the earth's crust in a fault zone associated with the New Madrid earthquakes of 1812. Turtle Hill rises about 200 miles SSE from the epicenter 7.2 miles below the Wabash Valley of southeastern Illinois, but the shift woke her up. Tenkar felt it too, thought it a hellacious wind and drifted back to sleep. A harmless earthquake is a bit like a good entheogenic opening; a powerful reminder that things are not as solid or permanent as they may appear.

I was fast asleep for this one and have not experienced a good temblor for nearly thirty years. We were living in the hills above Lake Atitlan in Guatemala experimenting with soybeans and amaranth. In nearby Nicaragua, Sandinista Rebels had recently deposed the intolerably corrupt second generation dictator Anastasio Somoza. An electric surge of emotion accompanied this news as it spread through the highlands with the poor in good humor and the rich sweating new fear. The ongoing civil conflict in Guatemala was about to enter its most violent years. Tenkar was pregnant with Zoe, our third child. I was digging a hole for an outhouse. Progress stalled in the subsoil, where a layer of highly compressed volcanic clay required an initial breakup and loosening with a pick before filling buckets with chunks of tal-petate to deepen the hole. I was on my knees in the rubble a few feet below ground level, filling a tin when a wave passed which seemed to turn the ground to jelly beneath me, lifting and dropping one knee and then the other as the earth rippled like a snake and folks came tearing out of the main house hollering.

As the unquestioned abstraction of a solid earth persists in spite of the occasional quake or gamma ray blast, mind tends to casually equate a reality and stability to objects they do not possess. Basking in the seeming permanence of life, paying easy homage to idols of worldly happiness and counterfeit spirituality, the worship of fabrications, the fruit clinging to a seed of assumed existence; the separate self located within the infinite multiplicity of a world machine. We do not refer to real objects but deal in psychic artifacts, relative classifications of phenomena, manufactured according to user needs with no real borders; adopted and abandoned at will. Mind looks to relations and things, rituals of seeking through knowldege, friendships and possessions -- for keys and fulfillment, clinging to familiar forms and habits, reference points to continually recreate and identify a center of control, to re-affirm a sense of self-existence.

Inseparable from all of that, Mayapple groves simply appear on the lower slopes of Resistance Ridge and tulip poplars climb straight up toward the clouds. An old bearded friend who favors a beret lives up top, his movement and conversation hidden behind a thick grove of dark green bamboo. It is the same way on this side. This great hillside mass of organic silence and resistance between us offers vision and privacy and most years, hosts the play of barred owls.

Dechen, Tenkar and I walked further up into the hollow this afternoon, past magnolia, down the road below unimaginably pink redbuds afloat in the understory, an intensity long natural to this forested place, nameless hollow in these low hills of southern Tennessee. The gray gravel path runs beside a thick mat of watercress thriving in a spring called virtue. Further up red road identifying leafless trees by bark alone hackberry, sycamore, sweet gum, cherry and beech growing down out of small islands in multi-braided creek. The path leads around the biggest white oak on the land curving upon a ledge, creamy narcissus looking civilized among old foundation stones where the blacksmith's family settled long ago. Small pale yellow-green flowering dogwoods tweaked contrast under overcast skies at catkin time, a thousand baby junipers showing promise, chickweed, purple phlox and coils of fiddleheads laughing on mossy paths with a dozen other kinds of wildflowers blooming everywhere through the woods transforming clear light above into multi-color life below before the canopy mosaic fills in warm green summer shadows. A lizard scampers up a drain pipe and two black snakes, one coiled with head lifted and tongue flickering in bamboo, another gliding across dry leaves as we pass through a scattering of deer bones. "A charnel ground," I mutter as satin gray slithers off into a brush pile.

Descending out of the woods toward the soft dirt around the edge of the pond we come upon plenty of deer tracks. As beautiful and attractive as such open places can be, the water hole is notoriously dangerous. Nobody but human beings and their dogs drink at ease here. Dechen calls me over to look at a large footprint and what certainly appear to be bobcat tracks. They usually walk with their claws retracted so this one must have been on the move. First time I've seen those in these parts. I’ll bet I know what he had for dinner.

Bobcat track next to deer hoof print in soft Mississippian era mud (shot by Tenkar). According to Wiki, "The Bobcat's range does not seem to be limited by human populations, as long as it can still find a suitable habitat; only large, intensively cultivated tracts are unsuitable for the species. The animal may appear in backyards in "urban edge" environments, where human development intersects with natural habitats."

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Pinson Mound

The largest Middle Woodland Period (200 bce - 400 ce) archaeological site in the Southeast. Twelve mounds, a geometric earthen enclosure, and ritual activity areas cover four hundred acres. Five large rectangular platform mounds (ranging in height from 7 to 72 feet) of Middle Woodland age underscores the unique nature of the Pinson Mounds site.

A tornado hit Lawrence county yesterday morning, passing about ten miles south of our house. With cloud tops above 45,000 feet high winds approaching from the southwest destroyed four homes and damaged at least 100 more. Five people were injured but fortunately, nobody was killed. That makes 16 tornadoes touching down in our county in the past 18 years (1990-2008).

Memucan Hunt Howard, (1807-1856) expressed a familiar assumption about the lack of indigenous settlements in this part of the country. "I have heard it said that the Indians, when asked why none of them lived in West Tennessee, replied that it leaked too much. For a time, after I first went there I thought it rained, hailed, thundered and lightened with more wind than I had known elsewhere."

At 14 years old, Howard was working as a surveyor in the woods of western Tennessee when his crew came across evidence of 'the one's who came before'. Howard describes the scene of the discovery. "Each party had a trumpet or horn by which we could generally find each other and the packmen, the more readily - The Trumpets were carried at our backs to prevent it from interfering with the with the compass needle. On emerging from the swamp of the middle fork of the Forked Deer River, about a dozen miles above Jackson when going south-to high land we came to a large bold spring of water and camped between it & a mound some six or seven feet high, and extensive enough for Houses & a small yard, and a large body of beautiful rich level heavy timbered land adjacent to it, with which Pinson was so much pleased that some one of the Company proposed to call it Mount Pinson; we did not see or know of the large Mounds two or three miles further South for months afterward, (...) I saw the large mound a year or two later supposed it to be about 70 or 75 feet high, and was nearly four hundred yards in circumference-near it was a square Mound (I think it was square) about twenty feet high smaller Mounds dikes etc. abounded thereabouts."

These earthworks are some of the oldest evidence of human communities in North America. The park where they are located is often empty and silent, a good support for walking meditation best visited between autumn and early spring while the forms of the hills are revealed and the bugs are dormant. Like the monolith in 2001, the mounds present an existential gravitas that plunges the mind into a deeper consideration of our evolutionary origins and cultural patterns. Sir Arthur C. Clarke who passed away last winter gave the monolith the same ratios as the UN Building on the East River in Manhattan. On the most basic level, such consecrated mass evokes a sense of the inherent order of the universe including the ability and obligation to come together and conduct this energy in a pure way. The ultimate artifact has been communicated in various ways throughout history, but beyond all drama and formal expression lies the primary mandala of contelligence, the truth of interdependence. Earthen altars invite participation in the great process of cosmic alchemy, bringing together elements both sentient and non-sentient, bridging past and future, spontaneously harmonizing the aggregates, as loving friends, couples, families, communities, and natural systems in expressing what is already whole by nature.

Built up by manual labor, one basketful of dirt at a time, the mounds contain burials and like major complexes in Mexico and Guatemala, reflect an awareness of astronomical patterns framing yearly agricultural and ritual events. Pyramids, medieval cathedrals, stupas and sun temples the mounds embody subtle signatures of the essential, unchanging reality of radiant being at the heart of all change, an invocation of the sacred nature of space and time, the non-duality of life and death, bridging the world above with the one below.

Tikal, Guatemala

Some Native Americans are requesting that the mounds be returned to their original state, free of trees. Tom Kunesh, activist and founding member of the Advisory Council on Indian Affairs (ACTIA) writes, "Mounds are the single most enduring physical legacy of Native American people who lived in what we now call Tennessee. When they were created the people were reminded daily of their passed relatives and leaders and their relationship to the earth and sun. In the past they were kept clean and visited. Now new gods, both foreign and domestic, have replaced the old ones, and the mounds are covered in trees, testimony to their religious and cultural insignificance, proof of the atheism of their descendants."

Pinson Mound, TN

The Back Way

Rose early to sit with the ladies, to share coffee and some of the best conversation of the day, before they drove north to work. I processed some email, strapped into the old vandura and cautiously lumber south. A 20 year old GMC, with 160K on the engine and she never breaks down.

Before hitting the asphalt, I pass Zoe's trailer which they were going to move today but recent rains have made the ground too soft. I turn onto an old paved railroad bed which parallels the creek, passing a stretch of white-flowering trees. I decide to cross on the first bridge and climb out of the Saw Valley and take Buffalo Road into town. This is one of many 'back' ways into Lawrenceburg, about 14 miles south in any case. The two lane road dips and climbs through a rural setting over the headwaters of the Buffalo River. Shamefully, I lived in Tennessee for many years before knowing that this was not just a good strong name, but that big hairy buffalo, technically bison, were actually common in this area for over three hundred years, having crossed the Mississippi around 1500 CE. I doubt that the Big Muddy has ever frozen over, so they must have swam. Abundant pasturage springing up on the eastern banks in the wake of intentional burns may have attracted them to make the crossing. These controlled fires were used by Indians to drive and trap animals against a wall of flame. Buffalo herds in the east were smaller than their counterparts on the plains, often numbering 50 -100 individuals. Although never as popular as white-tailed deer in the pantry of woodland tribes, the great beast was soon over-hunted by settlers from Pennsylvania to Florida and so disappeared from the east by the 1820's.

My regard gravitates toward familiar references. The shady hollow with the dangerous curve where Dechen's cousin rented a trailer before his fatal accident. The border of pine trees we planted on the Maxen's pricey spread at the top of the hill, and the little wooden house next door that some younger friends used to rent. Once on Buffalo Road itself, I am extra careful. It is very curvey, there is so much to look at this time of year and I don't drive often. Slow moving vehicles such as tractors are common and there is no shoulder. A glance over the hedge at the right moment reveals the house of an old friend still sheathed in blackboard with no permanent siding. They are poor old hippies. About 15 years ago they were forced to leave the community they had lived in for the previous twenty years, so I helped salvage their old house and then rebuild a few miles down the road. Ivan is an interesting if eccentric fellow and used to come visit me once in awhile, but it has been many years as I don't get on well with his wife, who accompanies the old boy everywhere.

I slowed to pass a few Amish men, one walking on roadside gravel, two out doing business in black horse drawn buggies. Two barefoot boys in an empty wagon emerge from a side road, one holding the reins. Everyone waves back. I am driving through the best farm land in the county. The forest opens up and fields stretch from horizon to horizon, interrupted only by a few white houses. The Amish settled here in the 1940's and their busy homesteads occupy these plains. Men wear beards and hats, women long skirts, sleeves and bonnets. They all dress in dark colors, avoid internal combustion engines, electricity and military service. They do however own a diesel generator to run a large carriage saw and provide truckloads of cheap slab for firewood as a byproduct. It keeps us warm through most of the winter.



Purple and blue chromatics from some dewey wildflowers give way to new greens. Are they more or less brilliant because I do not know their names? Patches of earth near the houses have been freshly turned for gardens. An emerald field of winter wheat, thick and headless rises above the bank. At this time of year, passage on Buffalo Road is like driving in a Grant Wood painting.

Made it safely into town, stopped by the library where I picked up a few books o the Indians of the southeast before heading home the 'front' way; Highway 43, formerly Jackson's Military Road, but that my friends, is a topic for another post.