Pounding Stone at the Confluence of Big Creek and the Kings River at the bottom of Pine Flat Reservoir in a Drought Year

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THE CONFLUENCES

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

Descending the steep slope
on unstable stones,
I remembered--
from another life--
a vision of my return.
Before the dam,
before the road,
I had seen my future self
among dark skeletons
of oaks and sycamores
preserved by cold water,
and bridge abutments,
like walls attached
to nothing—
As I lived the vision,
the river meandered
in the drought
as it did before
the dam, pestles still
near pounding stones—
ancient paths
still vanishing
in the grass.
Am I living
a vision
even now,
always
at the confluences?

Pounding Stone at the Confluence of the Kings River and Sycamore Creek at the bottom of the Pine Flat Reservoir in a Drought Year

THE CONFLUENCES

   At Pine Flat Reservoir, where a pounding stone juts from the steep, denuded slope halfway between Trimmer Springs Road above and the reservoir below, a soul path grows clearer. The canyon below holds the dark weight of suppression: buried beneath the water, at the confluence of Sycamore Creek and the Kings River, an ancient village site of a vanished Native American tribe lingers, the reservoir stretching out like a vast collective shadow.
   Under water now an old dirt road meanders through the village site between skeletal oaks preserved by cold water for over sixty years, the support columns of a bridge like abandoned fortress walls within the creek bed. Not far away, where Big Creek meets the Kings River, a stone chimney looms above cockleburs that have spread wherever the reservoir has devoured the oak woodlands.
   A soul journey can be strangely unbalancing. Legend has it that two out of three who enter the magical forest go mad. In a drought year, when I was exploring the former contours of the river and creek at the bottom of the reservoir, my soul flowed into a confluence of time: Even though I thought that I had never been there before, I suddenly recalled that I had in some other life envisioned what I was experiencing, and my soul not only foresaw my return but also knew that I would remember the vision.
   As I was living this vision from some other life, I sensed that my core self is like a vast watershed with forgotten trails and streams, transcending the comfortable "I" of my personality, transcending even what my culture has done to ecosystems and races. Somehow my soul knew of the devastation of this place beforehand and also knew that I would experience this wasteland.
   I have hiked all over the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, finding Native American trails and village sites wherever I go, on public and private lands. The pounding stone on the steep slope is atypical. Most pounding stones dominate comparatively flat land where a tribe could build huts, on ridges or near water. The reservoir has eaten away the trails as well as the vegetation, so it is impossible to know how the stone connected to other sites, but I at least can surmise that it served as a lookout point where women ground acorns, warning the village below of potential threats.
   As I peer down into the reservoir from the pounding stone, I hear only the lapping of water and the wind moaning occasionally around the canyon. The sense of disconnection is palpable. A trail must have led down to the village site that is now under water and up to other encampments because vanishing trails still link Native American sites in one huge net across the entire range, the boundaries rewoven with barbed wire. This pounding stone on the denuded slope represents social and environmental and historical disconnection on a large scale, but what my soul revealed in the vision at the bottom of Pine Flat Reservoir is that everything is connected, even beyond space and time, transcending the disconnections caused by race and culture. The soul, or higher self, a state of lucid meta-conscious awareness, knows the divinity and kinship of all things; the collective shadow reveals in stark contrast the need to strive for the courage to live from the perspective of eternity, to re-establish the sense of kinship, harmony and order for self, family, and community.

Flowers in House Pits near a Pounding Stone:Sycamore Creek
   For years I have explored the watershed of the Kings River, finding again and again places that feel familiar, the paths next to streams leading to ancient village sites--places so familiar, in fact, that I have often believed without a doubt that I once haunted that watershed in another life. At the same time, I feel in some ways that over the past thirty-five years, I was intended to know the terrible shadow of disconnection, so that I would experience a spiritual transformation moving me from a transient sense of identity to a sense of eternal and expansive Being. If there is fate, then I have to believe that some part of myself, my higher self perhaps, did not let me veer from the difficult path even though my incarnated personality expected so many other things.
   Because I have experienced disconnection on many levels in the past four decades, I continue to explore a spiritual path that honors ancient wisdom and allows me to experience the mysteries without fear of purgation or hell, a path that enables me, in shamanic relationship with the land, to call forth the elemental energies of nature and the powers of local deities and great Shining Ones, a path that celebrates the interweaving of visible and invisible energies, Other worlds and Under worlds, and the spiraling cycles of transformation, birth, death, and regeneration.