“Last Stand Hill”, Montana
July, 2016
The Montana sky is vast. The earth’s activity is so evident here. Its crusty surface is heaved up and sculpted by wind, water, and ice, striped with historical catastrophes, each geological era abruptly ending layer upon layer. The earth is in constant reformation and redefinition. The span of my life not even single breath in the life of this planet.
This particular place is sacred and scarred. The Little Big Horn River runs through here. It loops large arcs to my left from my position atop “Last Stand Hill”. The white markers in front of me mark the spot members where Custer’s 7th Calvary fell in battle, June 25, 1876, 140 years ago. Custer’s body was found at the marker with the black lettering. Tragedy and the ghosts of this particular battle, the obscene history of my government and our treatment of the nations of indigenous people who lived here through hundreds of generations, echo in this place. But my mind doesn’t reenter this painful history. I’ve walked this hill before. My mind, instead, goes to physics.
I am not even at the toddler age when it comes to my understanding physics. But I read and watch and listen to various physicists. These brilliant scientists conduct "thought experiments”. (I can’t even seem to hold just four specific items in my thoughts when I go to the grocery store.) They inspire me not only with their intellect but their quest to take the known and build on it to reveal the unknown. Like all scientists they continually question existing assumptions. But unlike the scientists that build theories observing old bones or old rocks, their composition and location, these scientists stretch their theories with math. That is what fascinates me.
Recently I listened to an audio book called A Beautiful Question: Finding Natures Deep Design, by Frank Wilczek. He discusses the concepts of symmetry, complimentary properties and an idea he calls "change without change." An example of change without change is a circle. My friends and I stand in a perfect circle. My sweet dog Violet stands in the middle of the circle. We'd each see her differently, then we'd change places and again see a different aspect of her. But the circle itself is a beautiful shape. There is no one point to begin, no one point to end. The arc of the circle swoops away from you in the exactly the same geometry no matter where you are standing. The distance to the exact center of the circle is the same no matter where you are on that perfect shape. We can change our place and our position to view my dear Vi, but the circle itself does not change.
Wilczek discusses nature’s four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Gravity is the interlocking of space and time, a fabric effecting the heft of objects. I feel the effects of gravity stuck here in this chair by my computer. My favorite coffee cup also was victim of gravity when it recently dropped to the kitchen floor and broke into pieces.
I experience electromagnetic radiation, at least the narrow bandwidth, the visible spectrum. Wilczek talks about it not as a field, but a fluid. I imagine being awash with not only the light I can see, but also Netflix, text messages, phone calls, all part of another slice of the spectrum through which I swim. My cancer tumors were victims of radiation. I lay under a massive machine, silently and painlessly bombed by gamma rays, the medical staff staring in at me from their protective place outside “killer-zap-atorium”. This radiation/fluid/field is around and within me.
The strong force and weak force are part of the discussion of Quantum physics; particles and what holds them together (strong force) and what causes decay (weak force). I can not even begin to understand these forces, other than I like the idea that there is indeed something to hold all of this “stuff” together, and there is another force that can actually effect change on the “stuff”.
Crazy, but these are my thoughts as I stand atop “Last Stand Hill”. So much I don’t understand, but I try to work out the idea of change without change. I try to make the metaphor of this concept reveal the real beauty of this place. I try to take these fundamental laws of nature and find comfort in them. I feel small and large. I feel old and brand new. I feel weighty and weightless.
I am small beneath the dome of sky, appearing like the business end of a microscope. Me, a specimen, laid on a glass plate for examination by the infinitude of the universe above. I am large in my own awe of this universe that I am conscious and alive within. I am connected, thinking, thriving and as much a part of the universe as the three quarter moon still lingering above. I breathe inflating my lungs such that I feel I could float and lose my physical boundaries to the blue sky.
This place, the battlefield at Little Big Horn, is witness to a brutal war, a tiny sliver of our human history. The battle, which was over in less than 30 minutes, brought a bloody death to a military leader, full of false power and ego. His defeat on this site would stoke the fires of intolerance and hatred and within a few years complete the process that resulted in subordination of the Native American nations that once lived here and throughout North America.
Underlying all of this awful drama are the fundamentals of nature. The object that is my body is held in this space by a force I barely understand, but can feel. The object that is my body is being bathed by a fluid I can see but only a part of. The object that is my body is a some how bound together by quantum forces I don’t understand. The boundaries that define this object that is my body are mostly known to me by the geometry of light beams constructed on the back of my eyeball, transmitted, then translated by my brain.
I look down the hill and to my left. Across the Little Big Horn River is a golden field. Bales of hay in random cubes lie here and there. It was on this land a village of over 11,000 Lakota, Cheyanne, and Arapaho families lived when the attack took place. Behind me is a large granite memorial to the U.S. Soldiers who died here. It covers a mass grave entombing the remains of many of these soldiers. To my right is another memorial, the Indian memorial. It not only speaks to the lives lost here, but also their way of life and the near extinction of the whole culture of these indigenous people.
My mind races around the circle. The granite memorial, a testament to the bravery of the soldiers and their valiant battle against the Indians, built only a few years after the battle in 1881. The Indian memorial, built in 2003, carries an inscription attributed to a warrior who fought here, “In order to heal our grandmother earth we must unify through peace”. The land itself, once home to a sizable village, now cultivating crops; mechanized harvesters cut, bundle, wrap and drop neatly bundled hay. History is liquid. It isn't time that morphs the once defined past, it is our human perspective, our changing ideas, our acceptance or rejection previously held "truths". The solid granite built by the U.S. Government now looks grotesque, incapable of comprehending the full loss of humanity witnessed here. The etherial Indian memorial is more reflective from my view on this day. The field shows no sign of having been previously inhabited by a village that on that day held about half the current population of my town of Olympia.
I stand firmly here on this Montana hill in the warm sun, my body absorbing heat from a rather average star pulsing energy 93 million miles away. The stuff I am made of is the same stuff of that star. The underlying symmetry, like the perfection of the circle’s geometry, will remain. The fundamental beauty of which I am a part will not change. The fundamental forces cause the tall, broad granite memorial to cast a shadow over me as the afternoon becomes evening. At the time, the powerful in my country felt that the people who lived here did not fit into the plans of growth and prosperity. The Indian nations interfered with their presumed God-given destiny. For this, my government sent soldiers to die. Now these ideas seem senseless, obsolete, and unimaginable from my position here at this particular point in the circle.
Change has happened. Time isn’t what made the change. People made the change. Enough information or empathy, or love, or even fear was stacked up to push our ideas to another point on the circle. Today our circle is vibrating with the heat of conflict, misunderstanding, and hate, transmitted at the speed of light. Our ability to speak, to stand and share is can be in the public dialogue with a few clicks on a keyboard. The noise is overwhelming. So much talking, so little listening.
Perhaps this is my lesson on “Last Stand Hill.” Our fear, our creativity, our laughter, tears, hate and our love felt or executed or tucked away and hidden, live amongst us in our common human-ness. These are our human particularities and our human perceptions. They dance in the center of the circle and we experience them differently from where we are in the circle. Holding tight to our spot, believing only in the unchangeable geometry of the circle, refusing compassion, refuting cooperation, and rejecting new ideas can only lead to more memorials that will too soon look obscene. Loosening our position requires risk, courage, and vulnerability. Loosening our position affirms faith and hope. Loosening our position removes “they” from our conversation and replaces it with “us”.
The laws of the universe are constant. They will continue with or without our human consciousness, intellect, and understanding. We determine whether or not we wish to establish a “Last Stand”. We determine whether or not we want to move and take another’s look at what lies within this circle. The universe will not save us. It hums all around and within us. We are part of it, absorbed in its beautiful symmetry, a grand design of which I am privileged to begin to recognize.
I witness from this spot on Last Stand Hill that change of perception is inevitable. Those that believe that history repeats the same old story, or this is the way things have always been just need to move around the circle for another view. The universe in its vastness, like this Montana sky, is replete with its beautiful design. But it is us that have the power and the responsibility for the change in ourselves. Like a curious and inspired scientist, we must question assumptions and imagine what might lie in the unknown. We must courageously move around the circle holding the lamp of empathy and empowerment and action.
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