Monday, March 02, 2015

Wee Bit of Green (California Rock Walls)

     Out in Northern California and Oregon, it was just the warmest February on record. My friend Alyssa has been walking along rows of stones that some Elders call Spirit Paths which lead up into some High Places - and taking photos. The one above is quite near what she calls Pyramid Peak which has appeared on these pages (see: http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2012/01/photos-to-compare.html or at Waking Up on Turtle Island - http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2012/02/following-smokefish-forests-fire-and.html ) before, as in the image below: 
   More green:







 
And I have to include this from a different spot (Howling Wolf Ridge):

6 comments :

pwax said...

Really powerful pictures. #7 foreground seems to have some vague alignments. And way beyond them, I see another wall on the horizon. Did someone say astronomy?

Tim MacSweeney said...

Well, yes indeed, I see that distant row of stones too - it's just like here, and just like Doug Harris says, one thing leads to another and another and another. My eye is drawn to that stone with the concave depression in the center, possibly a "scooped out" "medicine basket," where an offering of maybe angelica root, sage, and/or maybe Coyote Tobacco would have been burned, an equivalent of what's called kinnickinnick around here - someone's personal mixture. It's a High Place the row of stones, the Medicine Trail, leads to, aligned to the the entire universe perhaps, maybe in ways that could be plotted, maybe only in ways known to whoever came there to Cry for Luck, seek Medicine. Could #11 be another Basket, in an early stage?

Tim MacSweeney said...

A bunch o'bowlders or stone baskets - Tommy Hudson: ever noticed any of these down south? http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2012/04/medicine-bowlder.html

Louisse said...

beautiful pics in a beautiful place..
Orgone

Tommy Hudson said...

Great pics! The small stones stacked on large boulders are similar to what we have in north Georgia. Why do that? Is it to enhance the larger boulder for some reason? It also looks as if none of the stone constructions are on the very top of the hills, similar to almost every site in Georgia. Why?

Tim MacSweeney said...

If you tickle the web just right, you end up with ethnographies comparable to Mooney and others in the south (where the photographer's Cherokee roots come from), such as Cry For Luck; Sacred Song and Speech Among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians of Northwestern California by Richard Keeling http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8g5008k8&brand=ucpress