I Take Thousands of Photos a Year. Ancient Islanders Did This Instead.

Why taking pictures has never been about technology

Time has never moved faster than it does now.

As a mother, it feels less like time is passing, more like it’s sprinting—like I’m holding on for dear life while everything I love grows, stretches, changes right in front of me.I look at Vave, six months old, and genuinely don’t know where that time went or how she got so big. And River, two-years-old too, which somehow makes time feel even stranger—elastic and slippery, unbearably slow on the hard days and terrifyingly fast in retrospect. Days feel endless. The years vanish.

Maybe that’s why I find myself taking pictures all day without planning to. By the time the light softens, my phone is already warm in my hand—battery half gone, storage full, thumb tapping almost on its own. Photos of River climbing over black lava rock like it’s a playground. Vave giggling in her father’s lap. The ocean flashing silver for half a second before going blue again. Dinner pushed closer to the window because the light is too good to waste. Ordinary moments, briefly elevated because I noticed

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At night, after pajamas and brushing teeth and the long negotiation over one more story I already read, I scroll through the day, genuinely surprised by how much I caught without trying.The camera roll is chaotic—blurry shots, duplicates, accidental screenshots of nothing in particular. I delete most of it. I save a few. I post a dozen or more to my Ranch Review story on IG if they feel right. The rest slip quietly into the archive. A small, familiar ritual of deciding what I want to keep close.

Sometimes, as I swipe, my daughters appear almost swallowed by the landscape—tiny figures playing in front of the moai. We live among them these enormous forms we call ancestors. We pass them on the way to run errands, to the beach, to the grocery store. We raise children beneath their gaze

And suddenly, the act of recording doesn’t feel modern at all. Because here, memory once required effort.

In Rapa Nui, moai means to have. Not ownership in the modern sense—not possession—but to keep, to preserve, to remember. To moai something is to refuse to let it disappear to honor it. The word existed in the Rapa Nui language long before the stone figures it’s now associated with, before it became a noun known around the world.

What most people call a moai is not simply a statue. Not a monument in the abstract sense. A monument is symbolic, anonymous, meant to impress. But every moai had/has a name. Every one was carved for someone specific—an ancestor, a leader, a person whose mana, or life force, mattered to the community. They were not symbols. They were people, held in stone.

They stood on ahu’s—elevated ceremonial platforms, often described as ahu moai o te haʻinga ora, places of living memory. The ahu was not a base; it was a declaration. Memory raised above the earth so it could endure. In front of many ahu were stone circles used for gatherings, ceremonies, decisions. Memory here was collective, social, alive.

According to oral histories, the first moai were carved centuries ago (100 CE), long before European arrival in 1722. Archaeology places the settlement of Rapa Nui between the early first millennium and the 1200s, while oral tradition reaches further back, naming ancestors and lineages that begin around the year 500. Both timelines coexist here—one written in data, the other carried in story.

The earliest moai were simpler, some without necks, still emerging from the volcanic stone where they were born. Later figures became more refined, transported across the island using a technique sort of like waddling a piece of furniture into the right spot of your house. Some were topped with pukao, red scoria “hats” quarried miles away, symbols of vitality and status. None of this was casual. Each decision required labor, coordination, belief.

The mata mā‘o, the island’s original people, were meticulous record keepers. They carved petroglyphs into lava rock, etched symbols into caves, cliffs, and along the coastline. I often say the island is a museum—you can’t walk two meters without encountering an ancient artifact telling a story. But calling the island a museum isn’t quite right. Museums collect objects. This place remembers lives.

The largest record they left behind were the moai.

Not because they are massive. Not because they are mysterious. But because they are precise. Each one is a snapshot of a human life made permanent in a world without cameras, without paper, without archives. When someone was carved into stone, it wasn’t about immortality. It was about proximity. About keeping someone near.

Today, we take more photographs in a single year than were made in the entire first century of photography. We walk around with cameras in our pockets, selfie sticks in our bags, and an unspoken understanding that everything is content. Most mainstream marketing now relies on the fact that we are constantly filming ourselves—documenting, performing, proving we were there. The first permanent photograph, taken in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce, required eight hours of stillness just to prove something existed. Now proof lives inches from us, right here on this ranch. And yet, the impulse is the same.

I favorite certain photos the way the island raised certain memories onto ahu. Curated. Chosen. A decision of what we I don’t want to lose. Motherhood sharpens that instinct—not because I think I can stop time, but because I know how little of it I get to hold.

There is so much spectacle now around the moai. So much curiosity, mythology, projection. They surface in headlines every few months, framed as riddles, as unsolved problems. But beneath all of that is something profoundly ordinary.

The moai are not riddles. They are not questions. They are answers. They are evidence that long before camera rolls and cloud storage, people were already asking the same things I ask as a mom in 2025 with 190,000 photos on my phone. How do I keep this? How do I remember you? How do I make sure this doesn’t disappear?

There is no perfect solution. Stone erodes. Hard drives fail. Children grow. Memory softens at the edges. But the act of trying—of choosing to hold, to raise, to mark what matters—is the point. That is Moai.

Tomorrow my daughters will be bigger than they were today.

The moai are still there, doing what they have always done. Not watching. Not guarding. Just holding.