A Daughter's Gift: 

An Opportunity for Reflection upon Rock Art from Red Rock Canyon

Our daughter, Elise, and her family joined us in February for a week’s vacation in Palm Desert, CA, and she and her husband got to go on a side trip. It was their first mini vacation alone since becoming parents, and they choose Las Vegas for their three-day respite. They went hiking in Red Rock Canyon, and sent brief text messages with images of themselves sitting high on a bluff overlooking Vegas and of the steep rocky “trail” that they had climbed to get there.

About five years ago, Chuck and I drove the scenic loop and only got out of our car to take pictures.  I remember the spots on the rocky cliffs where boulders merge into shapes of giant beings. The majestic shapes and colors trigger that sense often identified as awe. I was delighted that they had gone on an adventurous hike. Yet, another surprise soon followed when images of rock art began coming in.

I remembered Bill telling me a couple of years ago that there was rock art in Red Rock Canyon.  Chuck and I were spending a week in Las Vegas. Bill and I had gotten through introductions the month before, and we had just begun exploring each other’s backgrounds and interests in greater depth. I may have mentioned something to him about being interested in rock art, but at the time we were more focused on becoming reacquainted and sending each other photos of our families. I do remember sending him some poems I’d create from symbols while playing slot machines. “You can do that?” was his reply.

Now twenty-four months after Bill and I reconnected, Elise and my son-in-law went off looking for rock art for the first time. I wondered if they would have searched out rock art in Red Rock Canyon if Bill and I had not published Engaged: Rock Art Reflections in Photography and Poetry. While I hold fast to the belief that it always the parents’ lifelong responsibility to congratulate and praise the child’s accomplishments, I must confess that I did wonder what my daughter thought of the finalized work.  While it is not the child’s responsibility or role to compliment parents’ on their endeavors, Elise did the redesign this blog, so I knew she was very supportive. I was now struck by how these rock art images that she offered me provided a much more powerful answer than any words formed into a reply.

I asked her what she thought about the images when she and her husband returned from their trip. She said that the hands painted upon the rock are her favorite.  Part of me wanted to ask how the hands made her feel and whether she had any sensations of that place being some kind of sanctum. Yet, a different question formed in my mind: “Do I even know what a sanctum is?”  Suddenly, I remembered a disappointing experience.

More than a decade ago, I met an American Native woman at a conference.  I attempted to engage her in conversation by sharing that I grew up on a “sacred” piece of land where people of the Castanoan tribe had sculpted oak trees and created mortars in the sandstone bedrock. Frowning deeply, she stepped back and replied, “We consider all land sacred.”  And then she turned away.  It took me until now to realize that I had not really attempted to engage her, but to trigger some kind of connection through perceived commonality.  Now I wonder where she grew up; I had not asked before jumping in. I sent the images to Bill along with my thoughts and a question: What is a sanctum?

When Dori shared these thoughts with me, we began to reflect on our reasoning behind identifying rock art as a sanctum for reflection.  For us, a sanctum is a place where a person can experience a sense of freedom from everyday demands and mental restrictions, and it is identified as a sacred space. If all land and the rock art upon it is sacred (something highly valued and deserving great respect), maybe the word for what we experience when viewing this ancient art upon the rocks is reverence.  

We both feel that the last two years of pairing poetry to photography of rock art took us on a journey that required radical openness to new ways of engaging the images created by ancient artists. We experienced a new attitude of mind and heart, a kind of fluidity of mind connection and an openness to whatever might come forth in feelings and written word.

We let go of reasoning and explore photography of rock art and poetic prose with a new sense of freedom. In this way, we released some kind of need for control and learned to become more  comfortable with the unpredictable.  We discovered an amazing energy within a cooperative meditative-like practice by engaging this art. We learned how this energy could be cultivated to experience a greater presence with emotions and creative thinking, and we share this through photography, story and poetry. 

 What is a sanctum? It is a place where one can move into a state of openness that invites both vulnerability and strength of response from personal reflections often left untapped. It is a place where one can sit in silence and then feel the sensations and hear the language of soul. One does not have to be there to go to this place. This is one of the powerful side effects of art.