Sunrise on the Medicine Wheel

Change is no stranger to this place we call home

WE’RE CAMPING on the shortest night of the year in northern Wyoming, our tent pitched in a spot that must have lain beneath snow no more than a week ago. A few yards away, a meltwater freshet chatters and rushes toward pussy willows that haven’t even begun to leaf out, though they’re fat with soft-furred potential. A Wilson’s warbler works the branches, flitting about and feeding.

Five miles southeast is Medicine Mountain and the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, our destination for the solstice sunrise. A monument of rocks laid thinly on the landscape, the medicine wheel lacks the vertical reach of the great standing stones of Stonehenge; exposed to the sky at an elevation of 9,642 feet, it is accessible and visible only during the brevity of snow-free months in summer, so lacks the history of architectural inhabitation one admires in the great houses and towers of the Ancestral Puebloans. But according to solar astronomer John Eddy, the wheel calibrates the summer horizon in a variety of ways, lining up with the solstice sunrise and sunset in June and, at different times throughout the weeks of summer, at least three different star risings in the predawn dark, just before they’re lost in the sun’s glare (“heliacal risings” is the term for these). Like most other scholars, Eddy remarks on how well preserved the medicine wheel is, and how monumental in its dimensions, which are attractions enough to make me want to see it with the sunrise washing across the pattern of its cairns and spokes.

There’s one other party arriving in the campground, two men and a little boy. They park their camper near our tent and step outside to stretch. The boy hurries back inside, then re-emerges having traded his shorts for long pants; soon, all three are lobbing snowballs at one another while the boy shrieks with enthusiasm. I watch them, then watch Dave following the warbler with his camera, trying to get a good shot. Wilson’s warblers are impressive migrants; most spend the winter in Mexico or Central America, then hustle northward to their breeding grounds — the Yellowstone area on up to Alaska, or across the Canadian Shield to Labrador — before the snow has melted. Their bodies carry records of these great migrations: each feather holds an isotopic signature of the latitude at which it grew. That signature is a kind of watermark, since, as Dave explains — he researches this process in prairie birds — rainwater varies in its isotopic composition, or the proportion of deuterium present. And what determines that variation is time (the season) and place (the distance from the Earth’s equator); the heaviest vapor falls first, as you might expect, while the lightest travels the sky’s currents toward the poles. If you drink melted snow above the Arctic Circle, you’re drinking some of the lightest water on Earth, and its specific identity is laid down in your hair, inscribing on your person where you’ve been. And if you are a prairie dweller in the rain shadow of the Rockies, your hair will record the changing seasons, as moist warm air swirls upward from the Gulf all summer, with its greater molecular weight mottling the thunderheads, while the sleet or snow or plain old chilling rain of midwinter has likely swept down from somewhere farther north.

In the Wilson’s warbler all this is recorded in black and yellow plumage. This one probably wintered somewhere in northern Mexico. Warbler feathers show that the individuals who winter farthest south also travel farthest north come springtime: the symmetry of their migrational arc is more important, it seems, than any equivalence of distance. And what sets those tiny travelers out on their seasonal journey is the sun — photoperiodicity, the length of daylight, as gathered in the bright round eye that, morning to evening, turns its perky attention outward to the world. The inner workings of the avian body-clock announce that it’s time, and hormonal changes shift the bird into breeding season: his plumage, his behavior, his defense of whatever handsome patch of landscape will become his territory until that summer’s young are fledged and ready for the long trip south. Sitting in the evening’s cooling air, drinking beer from the cooler packed with snow, I marvel at their receptivity to the season’s signals, as the year turns and turns again.

THE WHEEL LIES on the northwest shoulder of Medicine Mountain, at the southern end of a bone-shaped, treeless meadow. It’s draped like an enormous tatted doily of white stones above a high saddle overlooking the dry basin lands below. Today a visitor can reach it by hiking a mile and a half of broad dirt road up a gentle incline from a parking lot, as we intend to do in the morning, to see the sun begin to cast its longest day of clear, mountain light across the landscape.

In the early years of the twentieth century, when some scholars sought contemporary interpretations of the monument among the local tribes, the symbolic nature of the wheel was explained as a Medicine Lodge or a traditional Sun Dance Lodge. Naturalist George Bird Grinnell relates that a Cheyenne man named Elk River, who was born early in the 1800s, told him: “The outer circle of stones . . . represented the wall of the Medicine Lodge; the lines leading toward the center, the rafters — or, as he called them, the lodge poles — of the Medicine Lodge.” In the mid-twentieth century, Chief Robert Yellowtail presented a different explanation of the wheel’s symbolism with no uncertainty: “It is very plain to me that the Medicine Wheel is a large replica of the Sun Dance as it existed among the Plains Indians of this area.”

But excavations in 1958 and 1973 revealed that the impressive wheel-like pattern on the ground today doesn’t represent the monument’s form as it was first built. The structure is a composite, with a large central cairn and some additional cairns at various positions around the outer rim laid down far earlier than the spokes or rim itself. Exactly how far earlier remains undetermined. There are interesting possibilities, though, beneath that record of sequential renovation and addition. Archaeological remnants indicate that the immediate area was seasonally inhabited for millennia: along Crystal Creek on the mountain’s southwest flank, a Paleo-Indian point dating to ninety-five hundred years ago was found, and other artifacts, including pottery shards, indicate the site was used as an intermittent campsite for more than four thousand years.

So there’s a lithic scatter of continuity that drapes the landscape of Medicine Mountain. Try to imagine the gathered pool of time that has not yet been drained into the linear flow of the “historic period,” as well as the people who followed the seasons from low elevations to high, from grasslands through the wind-tossed aspen shade and into the aromatic cover of evergreens and back down again. In a stationary culture (the agriculturists, say, who measure the unfolding pattern of time as it plays out on familiar land), time perhaps comes to one. Place remains the known constant, while the mutability of week or season casts a variable light on the known terrain. In a migratory culture (the hunter-gatherers who must arrive in a particular ecosystem when the bounty is best and be ready to move on for the next destination), the emotional value of greeting the landscape — taking one’s leave and making one’s return — enters, and time and place both vary, though in a close association. Or, more surprisingly, perhaps both time and place are the constants, and in a shifted sense of planetary perspective, it’s the people who are variable, who arrive and depart, always in the continuous present, while the sweet specificities of fruit or game resolve themselves in their expected confluences. Of course, this is conjecture, my own attempts to glimpse other ways of locating the self, and the self’s social world, in the conceptual territory that one might call geochronicity — adopting a term from the realms of Earth sciences, and adapting it for more philosophical contexts.

But even if we were to stand atop Medicine Mountain well before dawn, we wouldn’t see Aldebaran rise as observers might have once. Epochs ago, it would have risen early in a still-dark sky; then, ages later, it would have lifted only briefly, like a sudden signal, into the northeast sky before disappearing in the glow of dawn. It is the Earth’s own motion, torqued between the competing pulls of sun and moon as it spins on its axis, that leads to these slow changes. That wobble in the planet’s rotational axis is often described as “like a top’s,” but for the Earth, this precession, as it’s called, is top-dwarfingly slow, taking nearly twenty-six thousand years to complete a single wobble. So discussions of these sky-markers of another age are all in the subjunctive mood, almost as if the past is some alternative universe, a hypothetical possibility whose point of intersection with actuality’s sweep is anchored here in a pale stone pattern in shortgrass and the brief flares of wildflowers. But speculation, possibility, those are the rays along which we can train our gaze, to see whether they connect us with anything greater than ourselves.

WHEN THE SUN FIRST SLIDES above the horizon I see the alignment, as if the spoke were a narrow cobbled pathway leading into the crescent of light. Then the glare becomes far too intense to continue close scrutiny, and as the sun lifts, already inscribing its arc toward the southeast before it’s fully cleared the ridge, the spokes of the wheel stand out in exaggerated relief. The visitors — about twenty of us — look at one another, some smiling.

A couple dressed like ranchers, wrapped in a western blanket, is silent. A Northern Cheyenne man talks quietly with a younger white man, who seems to be a sort of student under his guidance. The young women who work for the Forest Service as interpreters all stand together, beaming.

There’s no practical purpose for our presence here: none of us will hold today’s solstice against our personal tally sheets to correct our sense of time. None will now be better able to plan when to plant, or harvest, or pursue any portion of our daily business; even if any among us are farmers or hunters or, like me, zealous seekers of springtime morels, the certainty we gain that today is the standstill of the sun, the very midpoint in the annual cycle we understand to be a year, won’t figure in our material well-being. I have no idea whether there’s a religious motivation behind anyone else’s presence here, but the private air that seems to hold sway over us all doesn’t imply the sense of group cohesion that lies behind so much of religious ritual.

“Right relation” is the term that comes to mind for what we’re after. It’s a handy pair of words that can be called on variously to help identify the hinge function of the knee or the Christian’s personal connection to God through Christ or the metaphysical realist’s observation of the world unfolding. “Alignment” is central to this concept, though I know it’s partial since few of us will be around in the coming months to watch the sun reverse its northward course. For us, this is just a single point in time, abstracted from the full cycle.

Still, we’ve glimpsed the wheel in its best light, before full daylight can begin to shrink the suggestive shadows. From the Buddhist mandala to the archetype of the Jungian self to the Native American sacred hoop, a circle suggests the elegance of wholeness, of complementarity. And with its center point marked, it maps a possibility of belonging: one could place one’s self there, in the direct center of completion’s curve, time circling the body with certainty and light.

TWO DECADES AGO Bill McKibben described what he called the aesthetic response of his sadness at our brave new world with carbon-flooded skies. We have since crossed the threshold into the new millennium and begun to see signs of greater unpredictability in the weather as well as what biologists call phenological mistiming: birds whose migrations no longer calibrate precisely to the seasonal availability of food sources, for example. Some now arrive too late to feed on their accustomed caterpillars, and their young go hungry. And we all talk about the changes in our local experiences of weather. Back home in Kansas, the rains seem to have shifted slightly from their accustomed arrival in early summer toward something more like the monsoons of the Southwest, in late July or August. But I’m not sure we have discovered what McKibben called “the irrelevancy of the past.” I’m not talking about particular forecast models that will no longer work, but rather the larger sense that haunted McKibben — that the great sea change is how we understand the world. “The end of nature” meant that sublimity no longer pertains, that the daily phenomena of the weather itself, and the global climate that drives it, are now within the sphere of human activity rather than outside. This insight is still perceptive, sobering, and saddening, but there may be an additional truth here, in the shadows of our understanding.

For most of the time the various species of Homo have lived on this Earth, climatic change has been the order. The brief stability we’ve called the Holocene has been a geologic oddball, although it’s been within this period that Homo sapiens has domesticated the world, from corn to cows to combustion engines, and that we’ve reproduced so successfully as to colonize the planet. Change often takes the form of that nineteenth-century geologic theory, catastrophism, in which rupture shakes the sleeping landscape from its bed and leaves the dream of uniformitarianism — slow, elegantly steady alterations to the landscape’s features — scattered across the uplifted hillside. But what happens in the aftermath is still change: adaptation or extinction.

Rick Potts, of the National Museum of Natural History, seems cautiously optimistic about the coming decades under climate change. Discussing what he calls “the evolution of adaptability” — that is, what circumstances led to Homo sapiens’ development of enormous flexibility, our astonishing adaptability that allowed the species to spread across all continents except Antarctica, and make them home — he notes that periods of rapid climate change throughout the past few million years tend to coincide with some of our ancestors’ major evolutionary changes: upright posture, tool use, migration out of Africa itself.

To call what may befall us “change” will be no comfort to the people whose villages or cities are destroyed by flood or rising seas, nor to those who die from malaria or drought or famine. It will not lessen the despair should the grimmest predictions come to pass and stark extinction shroud each hilltop. And my comments should not be construed as neoconservative denial of the data, nor smug assurance that in our technological cleverness we’ll invent our way free of our own responsibility, build an exclusive little ark, say, in which we’ll float above the sea change of our own making.

But perhaps it can be useful to understand the changes from a different philosophical or psychological perspective: this is the resurgence of the sublime and its honest shiver of fear, not its disappearance from our lives. It’s a return to an even older past, one in which abrupt, disruptive change trumps stasis. None of today’s cultures are shaped by that world, but it is the one in which our bodies and brains evolved. We don’t have any idea, yet, what will be demanded of us or how we’ll respond. But it’s worth remembering that the current world — modernity — is not the only one our kind has thrived in.

We may have come full circle. Even now we’re standing at the threshold of our own, or our next, beginnings. O

 

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Elizabeth Dodd’s work explores relationships between the human and the more-than-human worlds. Her most recent publication is Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, co-edited with Simmons Buntin and Derek Sheffield. She is the author of three collections of creative nonfiction, Horizon’s Lens; In the Mind’s Eye (winner of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s Best Book Award), and Prospect: Journeys & Landscapes (winner of the William Rockhill Nelson Award). Her poetry collections are Archetypal Light and Like Memory, Caverns (winner of the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award). She has been a resident at artists’ colonies (Yaddo, The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow), a research station (Mount St. Helens), and a national monument (Chaco Culture National Historical Park). At Terrain.org she is the nonfiction editor.

She was born in Colorado and grew up in southeast Ohio. She lives in the Flint Hills region of east-central Kansas and teaches at Kansas State University, where she is a distinguished professor of English.

Comments

  1. Hello, Elizabeth,

    Thank you for the excellent, thoughtful article. I will have to read it several more times, I think, in order to get the full benefit of your perceptions and efforts.

    In the meantime, I’d like to mention several points that struck me as unusually important.

    (1) “. . . there may be an additional truth here, IN THE SHADOWS OF OUR UNDERSTANDING.”

    This is a crucial insight at a time when we are still apparently so bedazzled by the bright light of our knowledge that we think WE can “solve” the very problems WE created. You rightly suggest that we have to explore the “shadows of our understanding” to find what we seek. In other words, we have to consult a different dimension of our being if we are to “unwind” the fate we are spinning for ourselves.

    I recently had what was to me a stunning dream that touches on this. The dream simply said: “New Age = The Coming Birth of the Unconscious.” I take it that the “ coming birth” refers to the advent into consciousness of new awarenesses, which can only come from the “shadows of our understanding,” i.e., the unconscious. Paradoxically, these awarenesses are both “new” and “old” at the same time. You hint at this in your comment regarding the world “in which our bodies and brains evolved.” We have to re-connect with the deepest “genetic-coding” of our evolutionary past, in order to meet the evolutionary demands of our future. In other words, we have to attend consciously to the Birth of the Unconsious.

    (2) “But speculation, possibility, those are the rays along which we can train our gaze, to see whether they connect us with anything greater than ourselves.”

    To see speculatively and imaginatively, and thereby to discern the future possibilities that are embedded in the present, is one of our greatest tasks. Without it, how can we possibly hope to fashion a vision adequate to the challenges we face?

    One could almost say, without doing injustice to your fine article, that our biggest challenge is to return to the deep imagination, which is, after all, the well-spring of creativity.

    Thanks again for the article.

    Paco Mitchell
    http-//heronnotebook.blogspot.com

  2. Elizabeth, Thank you for reminding me of what is in my back yard so to speak. I’ll offer a little prayer for you as I watch the sun rise over the medicine wheel at the summer solstice.

  3. Elizabeth – I enjoyed being with you at the site of the Medicine Wheel and the awareness it brings of the limitless universe being intimately connected to our individual personae. Of course the knowledge and discussion you develop from your starting point deepen this realization of the interconnectedness of everything.
    So interesting that our bodies record forever atmospheric conditions!

    Just staying out all night star gazing helps us transcend limitations we place on self.

    There is always change: catastrophic or almost unnoticeable. Humans have been able to adapt. But will an immense change in a short time period cause another mass extinction of many life forms including us?
    The resilience available in the past in the form of uninhabited lands and much less population is no longer there.

    We don’t know. Although perhaps our human awareness is unique in the universe (could that be?), we of course know very little universe wise. You are right. New things have developed out of tragic circumstances.

    So I shall continue to look out at the Milky Way and like the indians feel that it is a path to greater things.

    I’ll still work to try to stop the build-up of green house gases that WE ARE CAUSING in the hopes that it can lessen the effects of a global warming.

    Thanks for the excursion. Marge Streckfus, Salina.

  4. Dear Paco, Richard, and Marjorie,

    I thank you for the care and enthusiasm with which you read my piece! Marge, it’s very true, that “resilience” of diverse, intact habitats is degraded at best, gone at worst. That’s simply a fact, a deeply sobering one. I don’t mean at all to imply that simply changing our attitude or outlook can rectify the physical damage we’ve done. But I think, with Paco, that the “deep imagination” allows us access to aspects of our humanity that precede the settled life of agriculture city-building, and we’ll need to draw on responses–emotional, creative, intellectual–that are different from the ones we relied upon to cause this mess. Even then, there’s no guarantee. But there is possibility.
    –Elizabeth

  5. Hi Elizabeth,

    Thanks for the reply. Curiously, I’ve just been reading a 30-year-old book by Theodore Roszak called Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (1978). Apparently, he was way ahead of his time, since collectively we still haven’t “gotten” the message. But all we can do is keep trying and, above all, working on ourselves.

    I want to offer an extended excerpt from his book, because I find it so cogent today and still eloquent:

    “Can a few generations of urbanization and a century or two of scientific skepticism really be enough to cut us off forever from the sense of vital reciprocity between ourselves and the planet that was once the universal knowledge of our race? I think none of us who have experienced even a glimmer of that living continuity should find it hard to accept that our destiny is tied to the need and the will of the Earth. Perhaps what we lack is only the courage to speak what we know.

    “How, then, could we now pass into an era of acute ecological emergency, as terrible an emergency as the planetary biosphere has ever known, and not feel the tug of that recip0rocity upon us — a deep organic remembrance, a warning, an instruction? But how would we expect the Earth to issue such an instruction? Would we expect it to roll down from the skies — or be proclaimed to us by a goddess who rose from the sea? Surely, we know that the web of nature is spun more subtly than that. The instruction would come to us in the one language most capable of transforming our conduct: not as a command from above or beyond, but as a moral idea realized from within. Just at the planet thinks through us, so we, in our thinking, may draw upon themes and images as ancient as the planet’s own star-burst birth.”

    I think his perspective follows yours closely and, as it turns out, mine as well. I’m sure there are many others working in their own way along similar lines, all over the world.

    Will it be enough? And soon enough? I myself don’t know. I try to follow my (nighttime) dreams. From them I glean certain flashes of insight and sparks of hope. But on a planetary scale the outcome remains very much in the air.

    Your work, however, gives me hope.

    Paco
    mitchell@cybermesa.com

  6. Dear Elizabeth and Paco,

    The many different kinds of Oriental yoga have for centuries sought the transcendence of self and oneness with the universe by discipline and meditation culminating with the great compassion of Gautama Buddha who wanted all to be able to achieve this.

    Their path requires preparation of soul and body before entering into the ultimate path of transcendance and unity. The Hindu concept of oneness with all being and Ahimsa – harmlessness – is a big step in showing us how to partake of the earth’s bounty frugally in relationship to what we need versus what we want.

    Jesus of Nazareth taught this also, reportedly saying that if we follow his path, He and the Father would abide in you. (Similar to the Hindu concept of soul in relation to ultimate being – “Thou Art That.” The Sermon on the Mount stressing compassion to others and humbly opening the soul to awareness and mindfulness of what is around us is to me most sublime – stressing justice on earth!!

    Marge S.

  7. May I inlcude the URL to your article at unleashingthewench.com/The_Mystic.htm along with the 2007 live webcast of Newgrange?

    Wonderful aritlce!

  8. Yes, Sarah, of course you may. I’m glad you enjoyed this piece.

  9. Re: “Sunrise on the Medicine Wheel”: Truly a numinous place, the Medicine Wheel is a poignant reminder of a culture that has a deep connection to the land and a refreshing perspective on cosmology. My only vexation in the article was the statement by Mr. Potts about his cautious optimism of the coming decades of climate change. He points to the unique ability of homo sapiens to adapt, which is undoubtedly true, but what about humans who don’t have the resources to adapt? What about the rest of creation? American coastal cities will make adjustments in infrastructure to deal with rising sea levels, but what about communities in Bangladesh, Nigeria or Indonesia? These countries are likely to have thousands of environmental refugees simply because they lack the resources needed to adapt to climate change. While we’re already seeing some species adapt to changing climatic conditions, as indicated in the article, but many species are not capable of adapting to the type of rapid change that lies ahead. It’s wonderful to be optimistic about adaptation, but Mr. Potts needs to think realistically before talking so optimistically; he needs to expand his vision just a bit to include homo sapiens in the developing world, as well as the rest of creation.

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