Notes from my Knapsack 4-6-23

Notes from my Knapsack 4-6-23
Jeff Gill

A time to walk around the world
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Do you see the world around you as a circle, or a square?

Anthropologists surmise that people long ago would have naturally seen their world as a circle, the horizon all around any one of us, before and behind our immediate vision. That imaginative circle would echo the outlines in the sky of the sun and the moon, and you could project from there the circle one would imagine from the orbit around us (as it appears), half in view overhead and half beneath.

When agriculture became a mark of civilization, it's likely the world starts to develop a different imaginative outline, a rectangle or square, after planting rows of crops. A field becomes the near horizon, and with the addition of a compass let alone a map you get north and south, east and west.

Navigate much with those tools, and you quickly pick up four more, northwest and southeast, southwest and northeast. Eight points, a rotated square, even an octagon of sorts for the principal directions.

Since Apollo spacecraft took astronauts around the moon, and back towards an earth rise, we've had a new appreciation of the circles we live in. But our smartphone maps pull us back down into grids and checkerboards, squares and rectangles. The push-pull, tugs back-and-forth, continues in how we imagine the world we see, and the world just beyond the horizon we don't see.

For the Octagon of the Newark Earthworks, the four open house days for 2023 have been announced, and while there's another coming in the summer and one in the fall, two arrive quickly, Sunday and Monday April 16 and 17. At the public area just off of 33rd St. and Parkview Road, there will be interpreters and guided tours from at least Noon to 4 pm, along with the museum at the Great Circle being opened there off of Rt. 79.

The Saturday before those two open house days at the Octagon, I will be leading again a three mile hike around the streets of Newark, on April 15 from 9 am to Noon, beginning and ending at the Great Circle Museum. We won't quite make it to the Octagon, but we will cover about half of the once four-and-a-half square mile complex of interconnected earthworks that the Octagon and Great Circle are 'corners' of, so to speak.

You are welcome to come join my stroll (bring water and a hat) on that Saturday, but I want to encourage anyone who can to take advantage of one of those open house days to simply go and walk the perimeter of the geometry there. 55 acres worth of octagonal enclosure, another 20 acres of the connected Observatory Circle. Take a tour if you wish, say hello at the interpretive tents, but make sure to simply go and walk around the world.

It may not be your world, it might not have been a cosmos in miniature, vast though the earthworks are, it couldn't just have been an observatory alone, but it was built to define a space and connect us to what is seen, and unseen.

Walking the outline of the earthworks makes me more aware of my horizons, even when I'm driving around now. And more conscious of how much is beyond my immediate horizon, but still part of my world. Spring is an excellent time to take such a trip, right here nearby.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he prefers the view on foot when he can take the time. Tell him how you slow down to see more at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.