Shepard for the Day.12

continuing: child's life in primordial hunter-gatherer times, when we became human...

Vigilant Owl by Kenojuak Ashevak  Cape
Dorset

"There is a constancy of people, yet it is a world bathed in nonhuman forms, a myriad of figures, evoking an intense sense of their differences and similarities, the beckoning challenge of a lifetime.  Speech is about that likeness and unlikeness, the coin of thought.

It is a world of travel and stop.  At first the child fears being let and is bound by fear to the proximity of his mother and others.  This interrupted movement sets the pace of his life, telling him gently that he is a traveler or visitor in the world.

Its motion is like his own growth: as he gets older and as the cycle of group migrations is repeated, he sees places he has seen before, and those places seem less big and strange.  The life of movement and rest is one of returning, and the places are the same and yet always more."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
pp.9-10