At the Earth Sanctuary on Whidbey Island there is a stone circle. It is a modern interpretation of the ancient structures that dot the northern European landscape, about which little of certainty is known. It’s safe to say they were communal structures that served to bind groups together as central gathering places for social rituals, funerary and other wise.
I took this photograph in May of 2019. I wanted to capture the shadowed “reflection” of the basalt columns in contrast to the columns themselves. Those bold straight lines were intoxicating to my amateur perspective; rectangular pillars arranged in a perfect circle, holding their defined space while the sunlight provided an alternative point of view for anyone willing to appreciate the slowly shifting contrast.
We are living through a period of social deprivation; it pains me to acknowledge. Our communal spaces are no longer safe, the foundational columns of our society threatened by charlatans and their highest bidders. There is no patience for the “slowly shifting contrast” of differing perspectives, there is only the rush to the simplistic, the banal and the grotesque expressions of the worst we have to offer.
Worse than that is the systemic abuse of the central principle of any highly functioning society: the common good, the care and concern for all, especially the “least of these.”
It has become exceedingly difficult to imagine, in the fall of 2020, a gathering of diverse voices within a communal structure designed to bind and unite us, that would not immediately disintegrate into a battle of hateful rhetoric and harmful aggression.
I am not hopeful.
And, and…I am just naïve enough, just old enough, just desperate enough to choose to believe that the strong, straight columns of our historical inheritance will bear the weight of our collective mass once we have spent all our rage, and find that the only consolation left to us is to lean against them, cooling in their shadows, waiting for the slow and shifting sun to come again.
