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Bruce Rice Writer
Standstill: A Hopewell Earthworks Daybook
and Other Essays
ISBN 978-1-0689497-0-8
Standstill has been called “a collection one experiences and this exemplary writer’s finest book to date.” Bruce Rice's often luminous journal takes us on a journey through Ohio’s two-thousand-year-old Hopewell Earthworks, which include the largest geometric earthworks in the world. It asks how can we respond authentically to such places and what they awaken in ourselves.
But these are also the landscapes of a writer who lives in the present. Rice's moving and evocative stories show us art that has saved lives—sometimes hundreds of lives—and a social history of those who literally have lost their power of speech. These are scenes that affirm the best that is in us and the persistence of beauty, which he says is stronger than we think and outlives us all. If a laugh is needed there's Buzzy, the kamikaze rabbit and the kind of story you can't make up.
What is this Major Lunar Standstill in the Title?
If you think the moon isn't coming up where it used to when you were younger, congratulations. You're a good sky watcher. The moon completes a remarkable cycle every 18.6 years. Over this time, the moon in its travels will reach its most northerly pint in the night sky at about 28° above the equator. This is due to the gradual northward shift in the angle of its orbit around the Earth. What ancient peoples observed from hilltops, we call the major lunar standstill because it is the "pause" in the moon's northward movement before heading south again. The good news is that this can be observed during the rest of 2024 and most of 2025. This is also the time when the moon's arc through the night sky is the widest it will ever be.
One of the mysteries of these sites is the precision of the observations over generations needed to pass this knowledge on in the alignments of neolithic sites like the Standing Stones of Callanish in Scotland and the three known Native American sites including Ohio's Octagon and Circle, one of the monumental earthworks in the book and part of the pilgrimage.
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