The North West Passage

Last fall, while walking around Raven’s Knoll just to get to know the land, Austin discovered a long slab of stone, about a meter wide and perhaps three meters long. I remember watching his face light up as he brushed off the pine needles with his shoe. “This is the perfect Orkney Island style standing stone!” he said. We all enthusiastically agreed.

On the first weekend of June of this year, the stone was transported to a different site at Raven’s Knoll and raised up. The occasion was the Three Rivers Festival, also known as the ADF Eastern Canada Regional Gathering, so there were plenty of people available to help. All the festival goers were invited to turn a shovelful of earth from the hole, so that everyone had a chance to contribute to the effort. Numerous people also placed offerings in the hole, to be buried with the stone. I think that a few people whispered little wishes into their offering before giving it to the hole. Then the stone was levered and wrestled into position, tipped upright, and straightened; and then we backfilled the hole again. I did my best to help pull it up and position it, even though I am not the most athletic person in the world. At one point I nearly fell over, and had to grab someone’s arm for support (my apologies to whoever it was!).

The more I think about it, the more philosophically important this stone-raising becomes. It seems to me that we enacted a certain philosophical principle which has come to dominate my thinking over the last two years or so: that principle is “presence”, the here-ness and now-ness of something-which-is-not-nothing. This stone established the presence of the people who built it: “We are here”, and “We are now”, expressed in the most permanent and enduring of all media. And as I see it, this presence established by the standing stone has deep philosophical and spiritual significance.

As we were raising the stone, a toad was discovered nearby. Several people who said that the toad was their totem picked it up and out of the way, and fawned over it for a bit, and declared that it was a good omen. I know that a lot of people reading this blog post are not interested in that kind of “superstition”. Most of the time, neither am I. Still, it seemed “right” that our stone-raising was witnessed by an animal which a number of our people associate with the gods of the earth. If I were a more magically inclined person, I might think that the gods approved of what we were doing.

About an hour later, we held a stone blessing ritual. The main event of the ritual involved everyone taking a turn to cover their palms in red ochre, and then plant their hand-print on the stone. Now the “we are here” asserted by the stone was joined with our personal signatures. This stone had an identity now: it is the stone we raised. I felt somehow as if in relation to the ancient Neolithic people who raised standing stones on their own lands, and who painted their handprints on to cliffsides and cave walls. I felt as if history was bearing down on us – but not as a weight. It felt more like a river, or a wind, gently carrying us into wonder.

More omens appeared the next day. Since it had rained overnight, the red ochre handprints didn’t dry, and by the next day the moisture formed little black outlines around all the hands. Then a raven was seen eating some of the offerings left at the base of the stone after the blessing ritual. And finally, a dragonfly landed on someone’s hand and stayed there through most of the festival’s closing ritual. The latter two omens are particularly curious. The landowners chose the raven as the symbol of the land (Raven’s Knoll), and the dragonfly was chosen as the symbol for the largest event planned for the site (Kaleidoscope Gathering). Again, I’m not normally one to look to supernatural explanations for things. I’m a philosopher, first and foremost. Yet the re-enchantment of the world can play an important part in the worthwhile life.

That’s what I loved about raising the stone, and the omens that attended it. With stories like these, and with the human relations that figure into such stories, we enchant our world.