On Prayer

Barbara Hobbs | Non-Fiction

There is a 12,000 year- old child’s footprint in a French cave, caught forever in the

limestone mud.

This late summer afternoon, I crouch through a small stone passage into darkness. What in the world am I doing? I have a fear of earthquakes; of plates gliding adrift over earth’s molten core crashing into each other, seeking me out when I crawl into confined spaces.

It is the chance to see this footprint that takes my mind off my descent. I want to reach down and touch the child’s print, to see if it is still fresh and malleable, connect with the child from long ago.

I don’t know what the child was doing in the dark. Hearing, even then, the muffled drops of water creating calcium carbonate sentinels along the cavern floor. Was this place a refuge from the world of light? Did this child sleep with legs drawn up to trap warmth into his skin from drafts of cool air circling the cavernous room?

Did he dream of being on the surface wading the river among otters swimming on their backs looking at him with eyes that looked like his? Did he think of the small- headed girl with the enormous braid, hoping she was watching him?

Today, electric lights cast elongated knife-edged shadows of horses and outlined hands on the cavern walls. I think, “How primitive!” When the light is extinguished, I silently breathe in, breathe out in total darkness. A candle is lit. Then I see what he saw. A soft, flickering light brings forth the past. The voluptuous spotted horses are running, caught in motion on their way. Running where?

I stand in this long-secret earth pocket, wondering, like an ice carving in a punch bowl, what are these paintings for? Why did they spend so much time making them?

I think of this boy’s life, the small deaths he experienced, losing hope and surviving. His charmed escapes caught on a fulcrum point of magical horses. His survival, tipping either way, depends on magic practiced, gods appeased, who escort him back to the world of sky and connecting dots of stars to guide him.

I don’t know if this cave is safer than the world of light. I don’t know if this is sanctuary. Yet, thousands of years ago what he and others drew in charcoal, powdered rock, and berry stain, kept darkness at bay.

Do I give power to this rock horse head, as he did? 

Do I even know how to give power? I am far removed from the horse’s spirit. Yet, as a mother in a scalloped skirt, I croon“hush, hush” creating my own magic. I know the chill of loss, the keening of grief, head thrown back, the depths of despair.

A stone horse head nibbles away at the vast emptiness, and somewhere on plates of the earth, the horse shifts and becomes spirit again.