Last week, my family and I visited a sacred site of The Teaching Rocks in North Kawartha, Ontario. The rock carvings, known as petroglyphs, were made between 500 to 1000 years ago by the Algonkian Indians.

In the park’s learning centre, I see a display inside the exhibit that reads:

If the legends fall silent, who will teach the children our ways?

Another display reads:

The land is filled with places where the spirit is present. A presence that exists beyond our everyday world…the Teaching Rocks are alive. They teach us about ourselves. 

The Teaching Rock lies inside a building a short walk from the learning centre. I made my way around the large shelf of rock with inscriptions of beasts, humans and spirits and wondered: do we still have the capacity to understand what these Teaching Rocks are trying to communicate? 

We live in a time very different from when those carvings were made. Few of us now can still hear the songs of the trees and lakes. When I returned home from the trip, I am alerted of forest fires and heat waves around the world, violence and total disregard for life. We’ve forgotten how to listen, how to perceive not just with our mind, but with our whole being. So, we live in a world of abstraction and ideas, divorced from a visceral connection with reality. How did we come to believe that there’s only one way of knowing and being? 

I reflect on my own Chinese and Indian ancestry and the wisdom imparted by the ancients of these respective cultures of the East. It seems that other ways of knowing are only acceptable if they can be “validated” by the Western scientific model or if they serve some kind of commercial interest. Throughout the history of colonialism, ways of perception of other peoples continue to be met with deep suspicion and fear. We’ve stripped out all mystery from the world and now we try desperately to fill our emptiness with the next dopamine hit. Our new gods have failed us. 

Some believe that our future leads to some sort of singularity where humans become machines. I believe that is a mistake. An adolescent dream. We are not machines. What are we then and what are we becoming? What does it mean to be fully human? How much do we need to subordinate before our hearts are content? What do we fear so much that we feel the need to control everything around us? Whose values and ideas have we adopted as our own and in whose interests do they serve? What are we most hungry for? What do we really want in the end?

Reflect for a moment on the miracle that you are aware of your existence right now. How is it that you can perceive with your senses? What is it that perceives? What is aware of you, being a person, in a world with other beings? What is this consciousness and where does it come from? Perhaps some things will remain beyond our understanding. After all, the world produced by our brain is nothing more than virtual reality. Do we actually know anything? We can fear the unknown, but we can also meet it with deep reverence, awe and wonder. If you look deep enough, perhaps you may find love as the source of it all.  

The land is filled with places where the spirit is present. A presence that exists beyond our everyday world…the Teaching Rocks are alive. They teach us about ourselves.

I express my deepest gratitude to the traditional land of the First Nations and the unseen forces that helped me write this piece.