Before We Were Here

I’ve always been drawn to the past.

History has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, especially the people who lived on this land long before us. For years, I hoped that one day I would find an arrowhead of my own.

One afternoon, I was walking in the creek when I quietly said to myself, “Today’s the day.”

And somehow, it was.

I found my very first arrowhead.

I remember looking around, wishing there were someone nearby to celebrate with me. There wasn’t. I was standing alone in the creek, holding it in my hand, smiling and completely overwhelmed by the fact that after all those years of hoping, I had finally found one.

But almost as quickly as the excitement came, something else took its place.

I stopped thinking about the arrowhead.

I started thinking about the person.

Who made it? Who held it in their hands? What was their life like?

I wondered if they had been hunting that day. I wondered if they had a family waiting for them. I wondered what they thought about as they walked these same Appalachian hills, long before my footsteps ever reached this creek.

And then I thought about the distance between us.

I was holding something another human being had once held, in a place where they had once stood. I would never know their name or the details of their life, but for a moment, the distance between their world and mine didn’t feel quite so enormous.

Those questions stayed with me.

They eventually became the inspiration for a piece of fine art and for something much larger that was beginning to take shape in my work.

What struck me that day wasn’t really the age of what I had found. It was the connection.

The arrowhead was never just an artifact to me.

It had belonged to a life.

And maybe that is why I’m so drawn to old things, creek stones, pieces of glass, weathered trees, and all the things the land gives back to us. I find myself wondering less about what something is and more about where it has been.

Who touched it? What did it witness? How did it end up here?

Long before us, people stood beside these same waters. They walked this land, raised families, searched for food, watched seasons change, and left pieces of their lives behind.

Most of their stories are beyond our reach now.

But every once in a while, the land gives something back.

And for a moment, we remember that we weren’t the first ones here.

The land was keeping stories long before we arrived to hear them.