Been thinkin’ about…Wild rabbits watching

The runaway mine train roars over closely cut grass, flying between stands of elm and cottonwood. It is strange to be riding a roller coaster that hugs the earth. Riding so close to the grass makes the speed seem faster. The dandelions, the mullein and the wild hawthorn blur faster and faster. Riding a real-live roller coaster through a natural landscape that looks just like my yard where I grew up in Illinois is surreal. The River King Mine Train, which opened back in 1971 at Six Flags St. Louis, may just be my favorite ride at that venerable amusement park.

The train peels hard to the right, cars slowly slightly as they lean around grassy earthen mounds. From the corner of my eye, I see several eastern cottontails. The wild rabbits are munching dandelions, unconcerned about any wild train raucousness. I realize they are instead watching.

Wild rabbits and earthen mounds seem to haunt the untapped back regions of my mind. This St. Louis metro, half of which is actually part of the Ozarks plateau, was once a place of ancient mounds built as a part of the Mississippian city complex we now call “Cahokia.” City planners of the previous two centuries saw fit to level most of the great mounds on this western side of the Mississippi River.

Omission is a hard sin to notice and now, no one will really know how many sacred mounds disappeared to make room for downtown cityscape. I’m confident the grassy mounds of the River King Mine Train are not ancient mounds, but then again, neither was the towering pond bank behind my childhood home. Just the same, there was strange, earthen magic in that hill too — magic that climbed to the hilltop with me over and over and stared with me into a forever summer blue sky. That was magic that heard the cottonwoods and cottontails whisper their secrets into the coming autumn chill and also whispered memories into my young ears. I hear the secrets only in memory. The words on the air were too natural for me back then to understand others could not hear them.

We spend a lot of time lost in busyness, in responsibility, accountability, or just the addictive need to be too full of schedule to quiet, to listen, to hear the ticking of our own mortality, or to go deep inside to let the mysteries of creation whisper our names. That strange place between sleep and wakefulness, that place where things are created, that place in which we allow strange new places to blossom and become? We spend not enough time there. I now have a wild rabbit tattoo to remind myself of an ever-calling other place, one half-dream and yet half-real.

I lay nearly asleep in my bed that morning eight years ago, weirdly dreaming of a festival that didn’t even exist, yet. I had been tasked with creating an Ozarks arts-and-crafts festival but I couldn’t help myself and had begun inviting goblins and Power Rangers and Ghost Busters and Darth Vader. The madness was planned.

Our city administrator looked at my quizzically. “Goblins, Josh?” I could only shrug. “Trust me?” Perhaps against his better judgement he did and eight years ago, we rolled out the first StateoftheOzarks Fest which, technically, was an Ozarks arts-and-crafts festival (and still is). But the festival is also replete with eccentricity and wildness and strange permission to let one’s stranger sides come out to play. The goblins and fairies and the Ghost Busters and The Order of the Red Boar with clanging steel swords return this year on Downing Street in Hollister, Missouri, on Saturday, September 13. StateoftheOzarks Fest helps create a place-out-place, a place where the person we really are in that never-land between sleep and wakefulness may come out and play.

We never are quite as smart as we think we are but there is humility in hope and curiosity. We mistakenly look askance at the past, shaming our ancestors with the adjective “primitive” only because our ancestors didn’t have technology as we understand it. My mind turns back to a wayward PBS show I was watching one holiday season while at my sister’s farm (I don’t watch TV at home). Absently munching away on GrapeNuts, I started listening to the voiceover talking about Chichen Itza, noting one of the great temples was thought to have just been built mistakenly cockeyed as it didn’t line up with the sun and moon. Until someone compared the temple alignment with the path of Venus. I got chills.

I cannot plot a building based on the path of Venus or any other celestial object. But the historic reality is profound. Here were ancient people with great cosmological sophistication. The documentary then began to compare the layout of city in the Yucatan with that of Cahokia. Similarities exist. It’s unlikely these two great civilizations did not communicate, despite being some 2,400 miles apart.

Modern logic says this is impossible. “They didn’t have cars or cellphones!” I think we know differently. It’s just hard to accept that peoples 1,425 years ago knew more than we know today.

So much has been lost. So much has been overlooked. And now, we even overlook the mysteries and profundities within our own souls. Erasure is, to me, a sin, even against history, as well as against our own souls. It’s high time we get just a little less busy. Busy for its own sake is the corruption of our Puritan work ethic. And it is high time we do the thing that can be the most uncomfortable:

In the quiet of the soul, begin to find ourselves. There is eternal memory there, and solace beyond the discomfort. And as for me, there are wild rabbits watching as well, and earthen mounds of ancient cosmology, and strange festivals filled with things crazy and bright and profound, and a late summer sky of blue tinged with winter and on the wind the lost voices of those I have loved most.