Petroglyphs in the American Southwest, cave paintings in the South of France, the stunning piece of ochre discovered in the Blombos Caves in Africa dating back some 77,000 years suggest our ancestor’s minds had developed profound new emergent skills in both language and symbolism. It wasn’t our good looks, our sex appeal, our standing on two feet, our thumbs, but instead in the discovery of these artifacts is evidence of our greatest achievement. We celebrate celebrity, fame, wealth, sexuality, power and physical beauty. Much less attention is given to our minds, our wisdom; the power we have to solve problems. In the digital age we mark our moments here with our 0’s and 1’s in
soon to be obsolete storage devices where our ancestors etched into stone or stained onto cave walls markings that remain tens of thousands of years later articulate, evocative, revelatory examples of what concerns they faced in their brief moment of being here. Imagine being dropped off in Nevada and then marching off into the wilderness, trying to remain alive long enough to mark on stone or draw in a cave a message that might weather the onslaught of yet more tens of thousands of years and still be there for future humans to find, to discover, that might move them to wonder about the majesty of your consciousness. Our earliest ancestors are dated back by two or three million of years, but in just
the last 110,000 of those years something changed, something in our minds abilities changed. Now we can not just solve problems with our minds, but it turns out we can also make problems. This paradox has a way of capturing both our brilliance and our stupidity and the challenges we face in not just using our minds, but in changing the way we use our minds, so that we might leave to the universe through our wisdom more than what we found when we arrived.
Highway Home The Novel
Here swept out before Noel the boundless Great Basin Desert of the American West. Sagebrush
saturated the land. Horizons stretched wide, and the contours of ridges, rims,
and hills squatted low, shaved by ice, wind, and time. Here, east of Burns, at
first appeared wasteland and despair. It reminded Noel of how he felt within
his heart. At the same time there was a solitude to this place of a kind that
was rare.
