I recently remembered something I'd been interested in writing many years ago, which I had all but abandoned. I love to watch this show on the Travel Channel called "Mysterious Journeys" which explores various mysteries of the Earth or human history. A recent one, on Easter Island, was fascinating. Yesterday, it was on the Nazca lines, a series of astounding geoglyphs in Peru, which I studied back in my college anthropology days, and became a little mesmerized by. So, I took some notes while watching and jotted down a few random thoughts to explore, which may or may not become an essay.

Notes on the Nazca, Dreaming

I have dreams of flying over Peru—dreams of a landscape like watercolor, with muted grays and smears of the palest, sandiest pink. Tiny stone brushed like paint across the Pampa, the desert, the back of my forehead. Time does not mask all; time does not reveal all truth. There is such a thing as a thing we do not know.

Ages ago, a people called the Nazca worshipped the desert and the rivers of secrecy that flowed in an unending pattern beneath, and they danced these paths into reality on the surface of the malleable Pampa. By their own feet, hands, brooms, they strode across their most sacred and enormous of canvasses and swept away the tiny grey pebbles that hid the pink sand below, in order to map out water, fertility, worship and balance.

On the great and wide vista of the Pampa Colorada, in the silent heart of the Peruvian coast, for centuries, the Nazca carved themselves and their community onto the desert like a strong wind. Their marks, though they seem so ephemeral, so delicate, have lasted for so long: between 1,300 and 2000 years have passed, slowly and definitely since they were danced across the wilderness. The windless and arid ground tucked into the hidden spaces of our globe. In a place seemingly so sturdy, so permanent, so unchanging, a wild history embossed like a breeze, like a ballet, like time or water.

Massive lines. Simple lines—straight or curved, arching and aching, twisting and forming shapes that were so familiar to the people who walked them. There are enormous trapezoids and quadrangles, swept clean of stone and appearing flat and depressed into the landscape they identify. The long beak of a hummingbird artfully graced into the sand stretched for hundreds of feet, alongside a monkey’s spiraling tail and the bowed body of a snake. They are so vast; they consume the desert in my mind. I picture a crowded Pampa, stuffed full of vivacious imagery, from centuries ago, from another world.

The endless lines pointing the way to an unreachable horizon, the animals and shapes: they all embody the concept of flight. They seem to have been created from the air, or by the air.

It cannot be that they were created by people who would never see them: and yet, it is.

People like us, people we were in another lifetime, people who could be our ancestors. People with a sort of broom, with devotion and a long walk. They had only the most basic surveying tools and they swept the stones as they walked and walked the desert. The people of Nazca swept the sand for years at a time and, for nearly a century, diligently preserved their mineral artwork. This desert that they worshipped, the desert that was their mother and goddess, the desert that sustained them, somehow, the desert of animal mystery and ancient instances.

And the most compelling truth of the creation of these magnificent and enduring lines is their mystery. Anthropologists, scientists, researchers and villagers have speculated for centuries; they furrow their brows over the hundreds of intersecting and unswerving straight lines. The ambiguity of geometry is that all the maps in the world cannot reveal to us the furtive truths of our own human past.

We forget this, in our age of information, technology, fingertips to research to answers. We forget the parts of ourselves we will never understand because we cannot understand not understanding. From long ago there are stories of ourselves: mysteries. For they are the stories of ancient people, the stories of civilization from thousands of years before ours, stories from a social structure so foreign, they seem like myths. We know of their pottery, their dances, their garbage pits and domesticated plants and animals; we know nothing of their hearts.

These lines have, since they were first seen from the air in the 1930s, represented all that puzzling, frustrating, terrifying anonymity; they reflect the void on and on into endless, frightening darkness. But if we are willing to listen, they could also teach us a great deal; they teach us of depth and understanding, of acceptance and movement, of penetrating embrace.