Just yesterday, I learned for the first time about the Nazca lines in Peru: huge pictures, hundreds of miles long, carved symmetrically into the earth over 1,000 years ago. A monkey. A spider. A hummingbird… I never knew this, despite watching In Search Of as a child. :-) And we make movies about crop signs!

This morning finds me thinking about the faith of these ancient people, that would spend the labor of a lifetime on something they’d never be able to stand back and see.

I’m thinking too about perspective – how we can be in the midst of something orderly and large and readable to the skies, but not evident at all to us. These drawings stayed hidden for centuries and we built a highway over some of them before a pilot looked down and recognized what they were. (Reminds me of The Silver Chair, when Puddleglum, Jill and Eustace are crawling inside the words “UNDER ME,” the very clue they’re looking for in Giant Land, but think they’re at a dead end.) 

Most of all I’m thinking about the mystery that surrounds us whether we notice it or not. Wendell Berry’s poem “To the Unseeable Animal” captures this delight. It’s written in response to his young daughter’s comment, “I hope there’s an animal somewhere that nobody has ever seen. And I hope nobody ever sees it.”

Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods’ shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow…

The rest of the poem can be seen here. More on WB, and more of his poems, here. Poetry Friday is here today.