Maggie's Farm

A quote from Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon, travelling through Texas:

"A massive, squared mound, quite unlike the surrounding hills, rose from a level valley; it had been the central element in a Caddoan Indian village a thousand years ago. I took a sandwich and climbed to the top to eat in the low undergrowth of wild blackberry bushes. There I was - a resident from the age of lunch meat, no-lead, and Ziploc bags - sitting on a thousand-year-old civic center.

The aura of time the mound gave off seemed to mock any comprehension of its change and process - how had it grown from baskets of shoveled soil to the high center of Caddoan affairs to a hilly patch of blackberries? My rambling metaphysics was getting caught in the trap of reducing experience to coherence and meaning, letting the perplexity of things disrupt the joy in their mystery. To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible."