TO WRITE a history of Raven Rocks at this time is not an easy task. That is because the accumulation of new history is so swift about the place these days. Events of considerable importance do quite literally swirl about one, confusing his sense of where to begin, what to include, or what to omit.

A very long time ago—it would be some thirteen hundred years ago—Indians who farmed in the Ohio and Captina river valleys began the practice of sending a few of their members to the “Raven Rock.” Because the ravens nested in the overhung ledges there, this is the name early white settlers gave to what we speak of as “the First Ravine.’ Archaeologists from Kent State, in excavations conducted in the late 1960's, uncovered evidence that the Indians had come here in order to carry out unusual projects. On at least 47 to as many as 59 occasions, always in Fall or Winter, and over a period of two hundred years, four or five skilled hunters had set up camp here, engaged in hunting, had used bones and feathers from their kill to make ‘tools,’ and then, their task complete, had gone back to their river valley community, leaving all those tools behind. That there seems no sign of any change in their procedures over a period of two hundred years, no indication of any revision or development, seems to point to a major difference between their times and ours: while rapid change characterizes ours, stability characterized theirs.

Though Olaf Prufer in his published report, Raven Rocks, A Specialized Late Woodland Rockshelter Occupation in Belmont County, Ohio, never uses the word, other archaeologists confirm our understanding that the activities of the Indians were ceremonial in nature. This would mean that they had come repeatedly to the Raven Rock to renew or to strengthen their bonds with the roots of their being. It was the task of a few members to quicken for the whole community their grasp on the meaning of their lives. At no other place, in either Ohio or in the surrounding states, have archaeologists or historians discovered evidence of similar exercises.

One is tempted, in the interests of trying to present his most honest sense of the history of Raven Rocks, to chance an hypothesis about the place. In its fledgling form, this hypothesis might be stated thus: for reasons or through processes we do not understand—not yet, anyway—Raven Rocks has played a more than ordinary role in human history. Is Raven Rocks a place where, stilled by its quiet beauty, awed by its grandeur, human beings can tap the reservoir of their accumulated past, and then, inspired, venture into the unknown in search of new meaning? Is this a function of Raven Rocks, and of other places like it? One can hardly avoid making and stating a judgment here: that, if so, it is a function that for too long we have neglected. Have we, lost in an almost frantic pursuit of recreation that takes us trotting all over the globe, come up relatively empty; and if so, are we perhaps more ready now to see that re-creation is what we had meant to find?

If we were to encourage among us small bands, like the four or five Indians in the ravine, whose bent and function would be to tune the antennae of the mind in order to extend its reach, might they find cause to go another step, might they expand the hypothesis? Might they suggest that just as fossil remains can be brought to view if and when we choose to dis-cover them, revealing to us the works of men long gone, so too with the thoughts of men, their aspirations, their endless search for meaning? Do places accumulate not only the fossil record of our physical enterprises, but also some aura, some residual energy of the desires and thought out of which those tangible artifacts were born?

Few of us would be tempted to repeat the works of former occupants of our particular locales. These works that once served our kind at its growing edge have had their day, have done their duty. But it must be so obvious as to be a truism that today’s world has its foundations in that past. It stands upon that base, in order to rise above it. And though we cannot but view those beginnings today from a vantage point that is so distant, so very different, they will, if we enjoy any degree of wisdom, stir in us not an iota of disdain, nor of envy, but rather a deep gratitude. For gratitude, as some of the most insightful among us have noted, has a powerful capacity to open the heart, which in turn is the key to an open mind.

One’s hunches about the reality of the accumulation of psychological as well as physical history in a place do not, however, arise from the world of inner musings alone. Not at all. Having over a period of more than forty years guided countless visitors through their first descent into the world of the Raven Rock, and had the benefit as well of the observations of so many others who have visited the rocks for years, one realizes that somehow places must accumulate—what is it?—a personality, a power, a function? How often one has watched newcomer and old timer alike slow their pace, fall quiet; how often heard them exclaim about their sense of the place, a feeling they have. A presence. Many want to pause for a time. To reflect? Yes, obviously. To absorb? Likely.

So, is this history? If it is history, is something in it still alive, still active? It does seem so. And, if so, it may still be functioning, one would guess—or waiting to function. Thinking of the fact that, to one’s knowledge, the Raven Rock may not have played so important a role for some hundreds of years after the Indians had used it, one wonders—might a place like this, as it were, lie fallow? Does it wait to be re-activated? For, in the hypothesis being considered here, whatever the potential invested in the Raven Rock or some other place via its history, the present or future utilization of that potential wears a heavy dependence upon us. It must wait upon our desires, our choices, and then upon the strength and duration of our will to execute what we have desired and chosen.

One way or another, we are always creating history. Is there any way to avoid it? What if, in fact, even our thoughts become a part of history, however small a part? But awareness of its smallness is not where this theory takes my attention. Rather it tends in an opposite direction. It tends to suggest how much something so immaterial as our thoughts may matter in history. Does it behoove us, therefore, to decide to add to the processes of creation our own noblest actions of mind and hand?

Surely this essay draws direction and a sense of urgency from the state of affairs in our contemporary human societies. In fact, it was acute awareness of that sorry state that had drawn together the ‘gang’ of nineteen young Quakers, and then led them to their determination that they would, to borrow a phrase from their Quaker background, undertake to “speak to this condition.” In 1970, they purchased Raven Rocks and launched into what has grown into a whole host of experiments.

Neither we nor the environment out of which we have grown and upon which we do so profoundly depend is in very good shape. We seem to be at war, as it were, with an environment which we have chosen to dominate rather than to understand, and with one another, and for what appear to be very similar reasons. We are at war, in fact, with ourselves. Is it that our vision is clouded? Are we in need of the will to give high priority to the task of discovering and cultivating new roots of meaning and of connection? Must we, if we are to restore health to individual, family, society and to our Earth, discover meaning that can match our means, direction that can guide the exercise of the enormous powers we possess? Can we escape the confines of our ever-narrowing and isolated individualism, with its obsessive and destructive pursuit of the ‘I, Me and Mine?”

‘The gang’ of Quakers, mostly young people, who in 1970 decided they would buy 843 acres of land in order to set them aside, to reserve them forever if they could from future re-sale and development, were most immediately concerned about the future of the remarkable rock and ravine formations which these acres framed. That was ‘in the beginning,’ as it were, and since that beginning just about everything has changed. As poet Robert Frost wisely observed, “way leads on to way,” so that one choice puts us on a course that makes others more or less likely. We were operating on a few strong perceptions and choices at that time: we felt the ravines at Raven Rocks should not be strip mined for coal, the immediate threat, nor subjected to development, the future likelihood. Rather, we felt, it should become, and forever so, a place set aside from any of the acquisitive and possessive and exploitative tendencies of our kind. With varying degrees of clarity among us, we also felt that in order for such intent to thrive, for it even to survive in any of us anywhere, we would have to lay clearer, firmer hold on capacities within our human nature that presently lie dormant in us, undeveloped, neglected. Frankly, we for the most part have no notion at all that we possess such capacities.

We wanted, because we sensed that we are in grave need of, a new education. All that has been done at Raven Rocks in the thirty years of our tenure here has been done, in a very real sense, as a many-faceted effort at re-education. It has served, however unconsciously for some of us, as a beginning at least of the arduous process of reforming our assumptions, reshaping our priorities, widening the aperture of our awareness. It has been an ever-present exercise, aimed at changing our human education, both its goals and its methods. For to be honest, we have long felt that without such changes the prospects for a long-term human future are bleak indeed. We can see no way forward, which is to say ‘no way out’ for our kind or for life as we know it on this earth, so long as we continue to raise our young within the cruel limits of the picture of the ideal human being that we have so far in our human history devised. Do we really believe, for instance, that Creation has willed that we should spend such powers as we have been given on the amassing of wealth, the consumption of resources, the overpopulation of a crowded Earth with sheer numbers of our own kind?

While it is likely that those earliest humans to use the Raven Rock were intent upon sustaining for their society and their times a surer grasp upon a Reality that both transcended and infused their lives, our aim and our methods today, dictated by the compelling emergencies of our times, have to be different, and will be more difficult. Our modern malaise, we believe, has its roots in our failure to keep our religious understanding abreast of, or, better by far, in a leadership role in relation to our knowledge and ever-expanding physical powers. We have pursued, with great success in so many regards, a mechanical solution to all kinds of persistent problems. We have now arrived at a materialist society that begins to see the limitations of its successes. We have lost, and are wakening to the fact that we have lost our hold on the reasons for our being, and with it a convincing sense of purpose and direction. The Indians, in ritual ways, were maintaining their hold in times when change was slow. It seems to us obvious that the hypotheses of that Indian past fall short of the task today for which they are needed. Our means have outstripped our past formulations of meaning, and with the passing years the distance between them only widens, and at an ever-accelerating pace.

So, what of the current experiments underway at Raven Rocks? On the face of it, we at Raven Rocks have emphasized those same physical powers, our means. Just look at our very strong focus on such mechanist-materialist solutions as underground architecture; or on innovative equipment, from energy-stingy refrigerators and windows to clothes washers. And now, in 2001, major additions to our capacity for energy production. The windmill which has stood here since 1991 is being replaced with, not one, but two prototype windmills and, balancing their production, erection of four giant (16' x 13') photovoltaic arrays, mounted fifty feet in the air on another prototype, a tracking device that will let these arrays track the daily progress of the sun across the sky. Perhaps most significant of all our innovations will be the integration of these solar-source energy systems with another technology, the hydrogen fuel cell. Sometime this summer Proton Energy Systems, who are using Raven Rocks as their field laboratory, will install state-of-the-art electrolysis equipment that will free the hydrogen in water. This product then can be utilized in a variety of ways, including pollution-free combustion, or, most elegant and promising of all, the fuel cell which, through a chemical process, re-converts the hydrogen to electricity as needed.

Within the foreseeable future, and thanks to swift advances in the alternative technologies, Locust Hill at Raven Rocks should be able to demonstrate a modern home fully powered by energy from the sun and wind, and almost certainly as well, a car run on hydrogen, that hydrogen, too, made by power from the sun. What about “Sky Mining” as a way to think of all this? At no place in this sequence need there be resort to any kind of combustion, with any kind of consequent pollution. In fact, the only discharge from the tailpipe of such an auto will be drinkable water.

By some good fortune, we are entering these latter expansions just at the time when our society, sufficiently jolted at last, is wakening to the crisis circumstances born of our energy habits, habits of consumption as well as of production. We should be in a position, even by the close of 2001, to demonstrate highly efficient, effective and economical ways to address our crisis, as it is related to energy production, consumption and the trashing of the environment upon which we depend.

So, is Raven Rocks today, in some way or degree, performing its historical function? We do ask ourselves that question. If work already accomplished, or in the plans for the months and years ahead, were the sole basis for judgment, we would have to give ourselves an E-plus for effort. For, were the moves we have made here to catch on at all, they would head off the immediate emergency. We have no reason to doubt that. Which means, they would buy us time. Precious time. That is the best that a mechanical fix, by itself, can do for us. And it is not enough. For the problems of our cultural blindness would remain. We would still suffer from what English historian/philosopher Gerald Heard saw as our “strangulated consciousness.” So long as such a narrow consciousness remains our universal pattern, there can be no end to our unraveling of the fabric of life, the life of Creation about us, and of our own selves within it.

Human history since The Garden traces the steps by which we have tried to right ourselves and our course. Promising as some of these steps were for their times, and though most of them did produce relief, we must recognize that we simply have not up-graded and expanded our meaning, making it contemporary and hence a match for our means. Some of us, recognizing this fact, and thanks to further insights especially from the work of Gerald Heard, undertook the project at Raven Rocks, including all the mechanical fixes. But it has not been in the mechanical fixes themselves that we have pinned our hopes. We were aiming at another end, for which the mechanics were a means. We wanted to try—to learn, if we could—whether we might conduct the processes of choice, planning, testing, revision and final construction of these mechanical fixes in ways that they would serve as tools for training a human being with broadened vision, greater freedom of choice, and access to the will and energy to press on. We have attempted to make some start at a new view of human potential, and at an education that might train it.

What we have attempted, then, is but a small beginning in these regards. It had to be that. Only time will tell if we have in these pursuits made any gains at all.