Spring Equinox at the Calendar

I did post Equinox Sunset 2009 over at Rock Piles just a few hours after the sunset and just edited my video footage that revealed too much about where this place is. You'll find it at the end of the post. It's sort of a tradition for me to write about this place around the spring equinox and to even visit the spot when conditions are right (Search this Blog with "Calendar" typed into the box above). I've tried before to capture the event in various media and tried it again this past friday, March 20, 2009.

I've seen this knoll change alot since the mid-1970's, when it looked like an old orchard just below it, the hillock a little roundish clearing with some stones sticking up out of the grass. Now it looks totally abandoned, dying apple trees shaded out by larger trees that have sprung up.

It's also changed in my perception as I noticed more stones - a serpentine row and even watched a 100 year flood wash clear some of the old stream beds to reveal another border of stones on the other side of the stream, realized that the branch of a river once flowed to the western edge of it and the entire floodplain - that another little stream had been diverted by a zigzag stone row to flow around this little island that was documented as a burial ground where historic Native People buried their dead beneath stone mounds, planting apple trees to the east of them and so much more...

A 1986 map with my highlighting

(North at the top):

The Red circle is the Stone Calendar, the yellow a pathway as wide as whatever was used to mow that path back when a Fox Hunt Club used to run down foxes and coyotes years ago...

I came to the conclusion that the Stones were a Calendar after reading "Manitou" a couple thousand times (Other Calendars are also springing up in Google Searches on the phrase), illustrated here and there in the book, like these for example:

Just like that last photo with the cat, the brightness of the sun was always a problem when it came to capturing the even on film or video, so I once drew a recreation of how the place may have looked around and before 1700 and just today updated a diagram of the stones, facing west, just as in the drawing...

And once again I've placed my darkest pair of sunglasses over the lens of a video recording device and tried to capture the Vernal Equinox Sunset over the Calendar Stones, already thinking about how I'll do it next time...

Native American Flute Music, "Primevera" or Native American Flute Sunset Meditation

by Kerri Wind Song Dove, used by kind permission, lifted from YouTube.