Ceremonial Time

Dear Diary,

Along with my Thoreau biography, I am reading John Hanson Mitchell's wonderful book, Ceremonial Time.  It traces the history of one square mile of land about 35 miles west of Boston, not far from Thoreau's Concord, through 15,000 years of its history.  It has gotten me interested in the geological history of my own square mile.

This is a cleft stone.  You can find them here and there in the woods and along the roads around here.  When Scott and I married back in 1998 we stayed at Cleft Stone Manor in Bar Harbor, Maine which had a huge one in front.  They occur naturally when water seeps into surface cracks and expands as it freezes.  The process can take hundreds of years.


The indigenous population around here, mainly Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and Micmac, saw these stones as gateways to the underworld and sometimes filled the space with smaller stones.  There are also Indian stone structures around, snake walls being the prize to find.  They are undulating stone walls with large boulders at one end to represent the snakes head.  My friends Ken and Olga have some Indian mounds on their property up on the mountain and I hope to explore them next year.

The landscape holds ancient stories that we are seldom aware of as we add our recent history to its surface.  The indigenous peoples called what we now call North America, Turtle Island.  I think I like that name better.  Here is a site which is a good start if you are interested in learning more about indigenous peoples stone structures in the landscape.

November is Native American Month.  It is a time to recognize and honor the ancient history of our country, before European settlers changed it forever.  Long before the white man built their homes and stone walls the native peoples lived and hunted these same hills that surround my little farmhouse.  It reminds me that we only see the surface of things, the most recent history of the land.  The story is much, much older…