Gather your ideas.Let inspiration flow.

01

Long ago, people did not have so many precise words.

They did not know how to explain rain. They did not know how to explain illness. They did not know how to explain dreams, fear, animals, death, or the images that only appeared in dance, firelight, and song.

So they drew them.

On the rock walls of Drakensberg in South Africa, the San imagined rain as an animal.

Not a cloud. Not a kind of weather. An animal that could be chased, caught, and led.

Shamans entered trance through dance. People gathered around the fire, singing, clapping, stamping their feet. Bodies grew hot, breath became urgent, and consciousness began to drift beyond the edges of daily life.

People believed the shaman could enter another world. There, rain was not rain. Rain was a bull.

They had to find it, catch it, and bring it to the places that needed water. Let it bleed and give milk. Then the rain would come.

Seen today, it looks like myth. But perhaps myth was humanity's first way of thinking.

When something could not yet be explained, people gave it a shape. When a feeling did not yet have a name, they gave it a metaphor. When a thought did not yet have logic, they left it on a rock wall.

02

In Tassili n'Ajjer, the Sahara was once not the desert it is today.

There were rivers. There were animals. There were hunters. There was dancing. There were thousands of images left on stone.

People drew antelope, cattle, crocodiles, and human figures. They drew hunts. They drew dances. They also drew beings that were not fully human, and animals that were not fully animals.

Not just daily life. Something deeper.

Things seen. Things believed. Things feared. Things not yet understood.

Perhaps this is how human thought has always begun.

Not with answers. Not with structure. Not with beautiful sentences. First there is a sound. A gesture. A line drawn on stone. A sentence that cannot yet explain itself. A little blabla.

03

Rain is a bull. Trance is flight. Invisible forces become white marks.

At the beginning, these ideas may have seemed strange. Even absurd. But those strange metaphors made the invisible visible. They gave shape to confused feeling. They let something inside a human mind, fifty thousand years ago, be seen by someone today.

Human beings did not begin recording because they had already understood everything.

The opposite is true.

Much of the time, we record because we have not understood yet. We say it first. Draw it first. Leave it somewhere first. Give the vague thing a place where we can keep approaching it.

A stray association. A strange metaphor. A syllable spoken before it knows what it means.

Later, it may become a story. A direction. A work. A decision. A new way of seeing the world.

For fifty thousand years, good things have started as blabla.