Today I am reading Robert MacFarland's Underland, and his words on deep time have struck truth in me as I finish this long and strange project. In this passage he is climbing through a mountain pass in search of prehistoric cave paintings, his own winter journey towards ancestral craft.

Something I heard an archeologist say in Olso about deep time returns to me: "Time isn't deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift." Here that seems right, I think. We ghost the past, we are its eerie.
The crags are seamed with blue ice-falls. My eye is caught by a thread of green, drawing my sight on. It is a thin path, leading between the stones, running a fine line through the moor grass, joining former doorway to former doorway and then on around the bay, picked out by the bright mosses that grow on it. It is a path made perhaps a century ago, still there as a trace in the land, now kept open by otters and others.
I add my own feet to the path, thank it for its softness underfoot, for its elegenace of route - and for its movement within time.

I am so, so thankful for Ötzi's story, for his lessons, for what he has gifted us with his perfect death. We may never understand why he was killed, but I hope he knows how much he is appreciated by me and by others. I hope he has forgiven those who hunted him and I hope he is at peace.

Ötzi was pursued up the Hauslabjoch and killed by an arrow while he was facing the other way. The snows fell, the glacier grew, and he slept for 5,300 years.

He and I have gotten along famously.

Leave a note, catch me where you can, and stop by for a cup of coffee whenever you're in the neighborhood.

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