Sacred Land and Shelter

I enter into stillness––following in the steps of expeditionary photographers and artists who sought to describe ancient places in the world. I travel the length of the eastern United States down to Florida––finding heaps of earth and shells that were sculpted into ceremonial mounds thousands of years ago. Some mounds are the size of football fields while others sprout hundred-year-old trees like bad hair. Tumbledown rock shelters with secret chambers face east to catch the first rays of morning sun. Prehistoric hunting parties warmed themselves inside as I do now.
I am on the ground. I climb inside. I walk to the top to see the world now and as I imagine it once was. I make pictures in black and white, because the absence of color is more ambiguous in time. The black and white images are like tracings on the paper. They pull together and break apart, persisting and disintegrating, just as the mounds and rocks do. What remains of our early history is transformed by the journey.