I could run forever under these clouds. #11miles
More lovely discoveries here in my continued exploration of language, landscape, wildness, beauty, and imagination with a focus on connections between language and landscape through the lenses of wildness, beauty, and imagination. There are pieces here on language, place, story, memory, myth, landscape, democracy, trees, and belonging. I hope you will enjoy sinking into these ideas and images as much as I did. And, speaking of landscape, wildness, beauty, and imagination, I have to include a photo of these fantastic pants that Mom and Wynn brought home from a consignment store. Best. Pants. Ever.
Please make yourself a cup of coffee or tea and settle-in to explore these worlds. In this complex time, I find exploring these expansive ideas allows me to breathe deeper, hold hope, be inspired, and dream. Enjoy.
The Memory Field by Jake Skeets How time and land hold “fields” of memory that unfold through language and storytelling. Memory is a touchy thing, and I mean that in the realest sense.
Light in my writing room window.
And Peace Shall Return by Ben Okri A stunning and timely piece on power of place, story, and solitude.
Skywoman Falling by Robin Wall Kimmerer: In this excerpt from the new introduction to her acclaimed book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Robin Wall Kimmerer draws upon the creation story of Skywoman and the wisdom of plants to guide us through our present moment of deep uncertainty. “The story we long for, the story that we are beginning to remember, the story that remembers us.”
Día de los Muertos 2020—Love Lives On by Dawn Wink As I placed each piece, I had to smile. When my Grandma Mary embroidered Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, when my Great-Grandma Grace ground the coffee before dawn in the sod hut on the ranch, never could they have imaged these pieces where they are now. The landscape of our altar reflects the landscape of my life. Yo soy fronterista. I am a woman of the borderlands, as used by Gloría Anzaldúa. My life is one of a fronterista, where worlds overlap: prairie and Southwest, rural and international, landscape literature and linguistic human rights. Here on the altar, prairie and farmland come together with the Southwest; German, Welsh, Irish, and English with Latino; Protestant with Catholic; past with present. The worlds, each with a distinct culture, come together to create the mosaic of the whole.
Close to the Bone by Amy Irvine Here in the American Southwest, the now naked ground reveals hundreds of ancient spear points, arrowheads, and hand tools once buried in bunch grass and pasture. Quartz, jasper, and obsidian wink like SOS mirrors, an alphabet of artifacts spelling out a story of survival. The fine, fluted edges, impossibly sharp ends. The patience it required to knap such thick, rough stones down to near ephemera. Pierce. Skin. Scrape. Every sharp edge honed for the hides of animals.
Literary Landscape
The Randomness of Language Evolution by Ed Yong The histories of linguistics and evolutionary biology have been braided together for as long as the latter has existed through drift and selection.
What You Can Learn by Following the Herd in Italy Transhumance, from the Latin trans for “across” and humus for “earth,” the seasonal movement of people and their livestock to and from summer and winter grazing grounds has been practiced for thousands of years by pastoral cultures.
Exploring Eco-Poetics as a Social Art by Dave Pendle I believe this sort aeistesis or sensing and articulating through writing, can be yet another a powerful aid, to reveal and discover mostly inaccessible information and energy dynamics in conventional social fields. Thus this article proposes Eco-Poetics as another possible systems sensing approach in addition to the two mentioned above.
Blue Whales Sing All Day When They Migrate and All Night When They Their mysterious songs could be an ‘acoustic signature of migration.’
Literary Landscape
What it Means to Belong in Many Places at Once by Elik Shafak Motherlands are castles made of glass. In order to leave them, you have to break something—a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you…
The Secret Life of Trees: Stunning Sylvan Drawings by Indigenous Artists Based on Indian Mythology by Maria Popova For a moment of respite from the palpitations of the present, from the American insanity, from the human world at all, stunning drawings and dreamings of trees by indigenous artists based on millennia-old Indian mythology.
Literary Landscape
Is the Environment for “Taking From” or “Giving To?” A Young Indigenous Economist Finds Answers On His Own I have always been bothered by the concept of indefinite economic growth and development with no regard for nature.
Quarantine As Ceremony: COVID 19 an Opportunity to Quietly Rebel Against the Dominant Landscape by Servern Cullis Suzuki Representing a profoundly different mental landscape, Indigenous languages reveal entirely distinct ways of being, ones that are not at odds with Life around us. In her article, “Speaking of Language” (Orion Magazine, 2017), Dr. Robin Kimmerer writes about the grammar of animacy, describing the use of pronouns for life forms in her Potawatami language, which conveys proper respect for life by the language user. She notes, “I think the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber.” Indigenous languages are a portal to a relationship with Earth.
Ugulate Love by Amy Irvine In far Western Mongolia, near the Russian border, there is a dusty, dung-spotted hill covered in black-purple boulders. At a distance, the rocks look glowering and contused. Creep closer, though, and things are anything but grim. There’s the lattice of pumpkin-orange lichen.
Early morning candles, coffee, books, flowers.
Dawn Wink: Dewdrops 