When I was still a child I held in my hands a slightly curved arc of yellowed bone that had small holes drilled into it. The holes swirled across the surface like a flattened, elongated S. It was a moon map that one of my relations had made long before my life began.  Keyed to a particular bit of horizon, the drilled holes marked the rising point of the moon as it wended its way over the course of a bit more than a month. I’ve never seen another, and have yet to make one myself, but I can still feel the bone in my hands. It made a huge impact on me, although at the time, and for decades after, I could not have said why. Even now, as I think I am beginning to understand it, its power over my imagination is still largely beyond my linguistic mind – as all good symbols should be.

I haven’t thought about it for a while, but on leaving work today, the knowledge that the coming dark was a turning point in the solar movement along the horizon, the clear sky and the waxing crescent of the moon in my southern sky, brought the memory sharply to the surface. The thing about that moon map is that it measured the passage of time in a way that made it seem a geographic phenomena. Many decades later when I learnt that some people conceive of time as something that retreats the further one travels from home, I understood it instantly. Time is a spatial phenomenon.

We are so reliant on the linear representation which our calendars and clocks provide for us that it seems difficult to grasp what time is like to those who map it on bone and through standing circles of stone. It’s not, I think, as simple as wanting to know when the next season is coming. It has to do with wanting to know where and when you are.

In one place I used to live, the winter solstice sun rose just between two tall cottonwood trees in an otherwise low-growth field across the road from my house. The first year I was there, when the sun rose that day, it was if I had been given a map that had a big golden X saying “You Are Here!.” The thing is that it didn’t map the earth, nor even my place in the universe. It mapped time, laid it out flat for me, so I could understand the dips and curves that had rolled me into this time. It located me “now;” not in splendid isolation, but like an asteroid that inhabits a location because of the various positions, trajectories and speeds of all that is around it.  This is what I mean by knowing where you are — it is knowing one’s movement patterns in relationship to all the other patterns that impinge upon yours.  This is what I felt in that bone that mapped the moon’s time.  The bone mapped by relating the moon’s movements to a specific bit of horizon, to a specific bit of land known deeply by the woman who gathered the bone, and who day after day, went out stand in the same place and watch time rise a little further along the horizon and then swing back on itself, marking time as something curved and sibilant.

With the sun, such a map is a simple arc, moving south in winter and then north in summer. It works well as a guide for groups of people because of that simplicity. The sun can locate us all at once. But with the moon the movement pattern it describes is far more complex and more difficult to track.  We can do it with our tools of course, but what happens is that we map it against something outside ourselves. This is our 3rd person sense of locality and its that sense of things that gives us the perception of time as an arrow — a movement even simpler than the sun’s year-long arc. The consequent maps, whether of space or time, locate all of us simultaneously, and all of us are placed against a rubric that stands outside our individual selves. This is the beauty of 3rd person reasoning, but by its very nature, it is not something that can give us that personal shot of feeling that we need to locate our 1st person selves in the time we move through.

To do that we need something that can map things in relationship to our particular selves in motion, our particular bit of lived on land.  That’s why the bone map works so well in evoking a sense of personal immediacy that includes the world. It’s a feeling of immanence, yet there is no transcendence to balance it because there is nothing else. So it isn’t really a “dwelling within,” so much as a simple “dwelling.” This “dwelling” is something that exists simultaneously in each object in the world and, most importantly, in the resonant space that defines the “between” that makes distinct objects possible.

The little grooves on each side of the s-track of holes on the bone marked some specific location, some rock or tree perhaps, in that long-ago relation’s world. When she stood there, had the marks lined up to her reference points, she knew exactly where the moon had risen the day before. By virtue of that she also knew that in this one spot where her feet pressed against the earth, she was also in that time past, and she knew she would be in that future time, when the next day the moon would rise again. The map of the rising points, her sense of intimacy with the particulars of the land, must have crafted an experienced world which welded her sense of space to her sense of time. Quite literally, she stood at the center of all time and space because it was mapped based on her particular location within it.

What I have been wondering is what it must have been like to have that sense of time and space be the predominate measure by which we guided our actions. Because we must live almost entirely with 3rd person concepts and maps, it seems nearly impossible to credit 1st person locality as a true measure of what is, yet really, our bodies must do this all the time. Every time we swing along the road on the way home our bodies are mapping time and space in just the way my relation did. The difference is that since bodies do it unconsciously, and we have largely lost the art of bringing this into awareness, for us, learning to map reality in the 1st person sense, and do it consciously, has become a kind of mysticism.  All my relation really did is find a way to share the intimate map of her individuality with those that would come to hold the bone. The thing is that part of what the bone said about her was that she had a specific place and a specific time and that these were as much a part of her as the hands that drilled the holes and the longing to represent what she had come to know. She was a woman, I think, that must have really known where she was.