A Stone Age Place of Gathering

My imagination elevated the setting into a prehistoric assembly ground, a Stone Age place of gathering. Later, imagination was overtaken by reality. The path—little more than a dusty memory in the landscape—led us between bizarre, jagged rock walls. At last, the narrowness opened. We arrived at an oval plain bordered by juniper, yew, and basalt.

The air seemed denser, charged in a way that resisted easy explanation.

It was a sacred place for the local population. Over generations, councils had been held here and the connection to ancestral spirits carefully maintained.

Petroglyphs testified to the persistence with which culture had been sustained. Spirals, animal tracks, sun wheels. Stories told with tools of obsidian. A memory older than any language still spoken today. Here, art was not an expression of individuality but an act of devotion to the divine and the community. Every firm incision a prayer, every symbol an anchor in the cosmic order.

We stood on a ledge of Permian limestone, deposited in a shallow sea some 270 million years ago. Millions of years of compaction, displacement, and tectonic uplift lay beneath our feet. What was visible obscured schist billions of years old.

The scale of time exceeded my imagination. What we saw was young by comparison—an instant of extended geological presence, a fleeting shimmer. The schist had formed when hot, mineral-rich sediments and volcanic deposits settled on the floor of an ancient sea. Pressure and heat transformed clay, ash, and sand into crystalline rock. The Earth pressed its earliest chapters into these dark tablets.

Together with granite—which once pierced the schist as a glowing mass—the schist forms the geological foundation of the canyon. It is Precambrian. It comes from a time before complex life existed. No plants. No insects. No birds. Only fire, water, pressure.

The forces that shaped it persist in titanic fault lines. I studied folded, fractured, polished surfaces. They were the black foundation of everything.

The roaring silence of beginnings: we made camp at the edge, where the skin of the world had split open. The stone vibrated like an instrument struck long before we arrived.

“Touch it,” I whispered.

You did. Your fingers brushed the rock with reverence.

“This is where forgetting begins,” I said, “and remembering as well.”

You wanted to speak, but I interrupted you.

“No. Not thinking now. Just sensing. Let the stone speak.”

I loosened my shirt and let it fall from my shoulders. I lay down on the warm rock where two plates overlapped—a tectonic scar, a geological crossing.

“This is where the world opened.”

I drew you closer.

“You are young, as I am,” I said, “but what speaks through you has known me for a long time.”

You were deeply versed in many things. With you, every destination became a summit. History on the avant-garde ridges of decolonial discourse, geology, geography, hydrology. Added to this was an almost shamanic perception. Effortlessly, you reached the visionary plane where phenomena overlap.

“Stay with me,” I said. In that moment, I was also thinking of the river and its stones, of wind lifting dust. I thought—or rather, I felt—lyrically.

Oh time, great potter, shaping us in the clay of life.

Your understanding required no words. Your presence found its rhythm. Your hands read the world as one reads stone: layer by layer, year by year. I was eruption and poetry. You were gravity and patience.

Held within your attentiveness, I found rest. I wished to offer you the same care you gave me.

“What do you wish for?” I asked. In my imagination, boundaries between body and rock, time and prehistory dissolved. I felt myself suspended in a threshold between worlds—those spaces allotted to humans, territories of limited perspective. I thought of the river, its language of loops, curves, and cuts. You touched me, but you were not alone. At least one ancestral presence seemed to surround you.

Through me flowed knowledge and being, like Vishnu Schist itself. The canyon elders say the river is their memory, that it determines human fate. I heard drums from another time. We belonged to the ceremony of life. The rock floor lost its character as mere landscape. It became body. Temple. Ancestor.

Suddenly I understood: my walkabout was not over. Perhaps I was meant to spend my existence within mytho-poetic spaces.

In the understanding of the initiated, the canyon is an opening to the underworld from which we come. Creation begins in the basement of the Earth.

I turned toward you again. Now I was fully present. Quietly, I made amends for my digressions. With you, the encounter was not only spiritual but initiatory. I opened myself without reservation, more easily than ever before. I sang the song of longing in your favorite key. And when the moment passed, I felt gratitude—for what had been shared, and for what could never quite be repeated.