“No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.”
High Acres Farm is perched along the eastern shores of Lake Champlain, a primordial body of water with a geologic history stretching back half a billion years, to when the lake was a shallow tropical sea, located near the Equator, and home to some of the oldest fossil reefs in the world.
Around 400 million years ago, this Iapetus Ocean started to close, leaving deposits of sedimentary rocks such as limestones, dolostones, and quartzites, which were folded and faulted to form the Green Mountains — and through this process of mountain-building, were transformed by heat and pressure into metamorphic rocks such as marble and slate.
Three million years ago, as the Great Ice Age began, a mile-high sheet of ice overtook this whole area and transformed the local landscape as it moved — scouring out valleys, eroding mountains, and depositing glacial till.
12,000 years ago, as Earth began to warm, this ice sheet finally melted, and waters began to arrive from an inland arm of the Atlantic Ocean, carrying saltwater creatures like beluga whales into this newly formed Champlain Sea.
Around 10,000 years ago, as the saltwater inflow receded, the water that remained became present-day Lake Champlain — covering 435 square miles, with 600 miles of shoreline, holding a volume of 6.8 trillion gallons, now a source of fresh drinking water for almost 200,000 people.
The indigenous people who inhabited this area prior to the arrival of European settlers referred to the lake as Pitawbagok (Abenaki) and Kaniatarakwà:ronte (Mohawk) — meaning “Middle Lake”, “Lake in Between”, or “Double Lake” — sandwiched as it is between two ranges of mountains: the Adirondacks of New York to the west, and the Green Mountains of Vermont to the east.
In the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching (The Book of Changes), Hexagram 58, The Joyous, Lake (䷹), is composed of two trigrams each meaning “lake” — offering the image of a “double lake” (one lake resting on top of another).
A lake evaporates upwards and thus gradually dries up; but when two lakes are joined they do not dry up so readily, for one replenishes the other. It is the same in the field of knowledge. Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force. It becomes so only through stimulating intercourse with congenial friends with whom one holds discussion and practices application of the truths of life. In this way learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness.
This image of a joyful community of learning on the shores of a peaceful lake has been a guiding inspiration for the future of High Acres Farm.
On a more personal note, I sought to reclaim the phrase from its associations with a painful breakup I experienced in 2010, towards the end of my Today project.
This sparse opening film is a meditation on the motherlike presence of this primordial body of water through its many moods and seasons — a glassy witness to the human dramas that unfold along its rocky shores.
With the horizon line perfectly centered from image to image, the mirror-like surface of the water creates a set of two lakes and a set of two skies — a living version of the Hexagram, marking the place between Heaven and Earth.
