Ancient places and people have always had a powerful effect on me.  There is something about being in a place like Chaco Canyon (pictured above) that makes time palpable.  For all of our dwelling on the past and future of our own lives, humans really spend most of their time in the present, living now.  We think about our past in terms of how it affects our now, and live now based on our hopes for the future.  Being in a place like Chaco takes me out of the now, back to a time when it was full of people, building, farming, playing, loving.  I touch the stones and feel their age, imagining how they were placed by people who probably didn’t even live to be as old as I am now.  I look through their windows, imagining the vibrant scenes they would have seen standing in the same spot as I am today.  I wonder what happened to them.  I wonder where they went.  I wonder why.  I know I can read the theories and histories about their lives and demise in books, but for me, the joy of being in a place like Chaco is being transported and simply imagining what was.