In the caves and covered places of the Lower Pecos, on the northern banks of the Rio Grande, grand shamans spread their arms above ghostly congregations, sprout feathers, fur, fangs, and talons, and stretch exorbitantly across great canvases of rock.

Some have held their poses for 5,000 years, frozen in hues of purple, ochre and blood red set by ancient artists who climbed the rocks of these cliff-bound rivers to ply their sacred, colorful trade.

The art we see has been preserved in part because of its felicitous location, high, dry and remote. Nature was kind to it, but so were people. Until now, no one across its thousands of years of constant attention destroyed it.

On a July 8 Science Friday podcast, Solveig Turpin, the archeologist who is most responsible for bringing this treasure to the attention of the world, was asked whether, throughout the centuries, this sacred gallery and place of visions had been vandalized, or erased, or destroyed.

The answer was no. That does not mean it was left alone, set apart as an untouchable specimen of past spiritual messaging. Rather, it was mined as inspiration, an ever-flowing spiritual river alongside the might Rio Grande, channeling the invisible essence of life even as the river carried life’s water. Sometimes younger artists drew in the same spaces as their ancestors, layering their work within the images of the previous drawings, nesting generation within generation, essence within essence.

Or sometimes, the archeologist suggested, a bit of the pigments might have been scraped off, mixed into the potent drinks of tribal puberty rights and imbibed by the initiates.

But both ways were expressions of absorption and honor. The one way sought to incorporate the youthful artists into the work of the ancestors. The other sought to incorporate the work of their ancestors into the youthful initiates.

The art is meant to be timeless. Eternal. It is a cycle of spirit and nature and civilization each nurturing the other. Nature-as-canvas and pigment and animal offers itself as a medium for the grand expression of civilization, which, in the hands of the artists, in turn offers a celebration of humankind’s grandeur through the vocabulary of nature.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we too could see our civilization in such a way, not as transcending or mastering or subjugating nature but celebrating it? What if we imagined that our creations would one day be ground up and nurture (not poison) the next generations?

What would our world look like if we saw our cities, our medicine, our art, our roads, our buildings as artful expressions of an enduring civilization drawn with the fragile pigment of the earth?

How would we build and manufacture and consume if we imagined that for generations to come our creations would be displayed larger-than-life for all to gaze upon and critique?

How would we design our world if we remembered that we too, like the shamans, dance upon a thin canvas of earth that must be shared by all generations?