My wife, Judy, and I went "up north" to the cabin last week.  We've been doing this for twenty-one years, shortly after our first son was born.  Our three now grown children learned to ride bike, fish and golf up in the Park Rapids area. It was just the two of us last week, but we still continued several traditions that included blueberries, building fires, ice cream, the Mississippi river ... and reading.

Not being interested in "Fifty Shades" or any of the other current top sellers, I opted for the non-fiction 512-page "The History of Art."  I know that sounds peculiar, but you have to understand that I was the kid in elementary school who loved to read the encyclopedia just for the fun of it.  Not that I became smarter than anyone else. It's just that I was no good at hockey, and video games weren't invented yet.  And I really DO like to learn new things.

Another motivating factor is that my wife was an art and design major for a while in college, and I felt it was time to finally catch up on things like the color wheel, sculpture, Michelangelo, the non-singing Madonna, Pointillism, Impressionism, Expressionism and all of the other "isms."  After combing chapters dedicated to Western and non-Western art from all ages, I found I was most captivated by cave art.  (Insert your own "man-cave" joke here.)

It turns out that 40,000 years ago cave dwellers drew paintings on their walls, mostly in the part of the world we now call France and Spain.  They lived there to escape the possibility of literally being eaten by wild animals at night, whom they also hunted by day.  As far in at 1/2 mile, always beyond their living quarters, they would designate an area that was used only for artistic expression and religious purposes.  The two would always go together.  They mostly drew the very animals they were hunting/freeing/living with.  There was a sacred quality to the drawings as they made a holy connection with them and their Creator. 

I felt an affinity with them as I looked out on the waters of Fish Hook Lake.