Do rocks collect saskatoons because they are focal points of life in the story of the land?

Or because they collect heat and rain?

It’s a question that goes to the deepest and most specific points of the land, as the mature saskatoon in the split rock above and the young one in the split rock below show.

Is every saskatoon colonizing a favourable space, or is every rock’s heat finding expression in a saskatoon, which is the way of things?

Before you answer, look at the question again: “Is every saskatoon colonizing a favourable space?”

That’s the language of the American and Canadian invasion of the West. That should be a warning. Here’s one of those rocks, with its spirit, a yellow-bellied marmot, and the daughter of the birds it shares this space with, a saskatoon.

It’s a major tenet of evolutionary theory that specific species colonize environmental niches, but that’s just language, that’s just words, that’s just cultural material. What is really happening is this:

It is time to live in this place, as if we were not strangers, because we’re not.

We’re this.