Horizon's Lens: My Time on the Turning World
Dazzling essayist Dodd (In the Mind’s Eye, 2008) leaves her Kansas home in search of new portals into the matrix of place and time. Hiking and camping in all kinds of weather to fully experience terrain both familiar and new to her, she visits ancient sites created to chart celestial events, beginning with rock art on the Colorado Plateau. Profoundly receptive to the land and its echoes, steeped in history and cosmologies, beautifully expressive, funny, and self-deprecating, Dodd is fascinated with how language embodies and gives voice to place and with the art of timekeeping, from petroglyphs measuring the course of the sun and moon to calendars, almanacs, and even social-media status updates. She thinks deeply about cyclicity and the “biochemistry of time” as she participates in scientific fieldwork and contemplates such monumental structures as the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, neolithic stone circles on the Scottish Orkneys and Hebrides, and Maya sun-oriented stone structures in the Yucatán. The first essay in Dodd’s transporting and mind-expanding book of attentiveness begins with “Imagine,” and the last concludes with “Listen.” --Donna Seaman