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From here, I can see this era fade at the edges of my vision...

[...] But, I guess when I say that this age must end, I mean that it must end as do all ages, eventually. Migrating species, water, the seasons, the planets in our solar system––everything in this world moves in cycles. Somehow, some time, everything inevitably finds balance. While visiting Mexico City this Spring, I had the immense joy of visiting the National Museum of Anthropology (highly recommended). So many eras, so many civilizations have ebbed and flowed across the geographic footprint of this one city, long before the Aztecs, which is where most of our history books start the clock...

Across the Mississippi from St. Louis, MO, stand Cahokia Mounds, the oldest remaining architecture on Turtle Island outside of Mexico (thanks to Gavin Kroeber for the visit!). The contemporary space of the Mounds is rather odd––it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but not a federal historic site, so cars chug down a road between mounds and joggers pound up and down their steps; in this way, a mound is treated no differently from a natural hill. It is, of course, totally disrespectful, but standing there, staring out over the landscape, I had the uncanny sensation of being torn between two profound energies: sacred and mundane, past and future...

Grounded on the marker of another era, another people, another place; looking over a Mid-Western _______n vista blanketed with signals of structural ecological and social crisis. From Here, I felt I could watch this era fade at the edges of my vision. In moments such as these, I feel an uncomfortable comfort in the knowledge that we are of this world and we, too, are perhaps blessed, perhaps doomed, to cycle, even if just down the drain.