Cascadia rises out of the seabeds of the continental plains, where a hot, conductive current rises from deep in the earth and shears and curls around the impenetrable ancient rock of the North American Craton. We call this column of fire Yellowstone.It is a wave of energy and resistance that creates mountains.

They rise from fire and create zones of cold, commonly called snow, in the ocean they made into the dry prairies of the Upper Missouri River. So are rivers born out of mist.

So is winter born out of summer air. It too pours in rivers over the plains. It reaches out.

Rivers are everywhere in this ripple in the sky. They squeeze the sky onto the dry earth.

Just as they are squeezed by rock that is still rising in a massive wave.

Not all leave the fire mountains, having molten the sky, or at least not yet. First, they pour through the caldera of the volcano, in a country of fire.

The fire here is green, but it burns just the same. These are the great fire pines of the North West. They are born in fire and die in it.And are born in it again.

They live on the caldera wall. Look at them lick with flame among the bones of their mothers. Look at them drink the molten sky. Look at them grow on the ash of old volcanoes. The fire is not still. It still drives hot water out of the deep earth: snowmelt and rain and water squeezed out of the beds of ancient seas. Here, too, fire pines burst into flame from the soil…

…and the water …

…grow old in the sky…

… and return to the fire.

It is not a linear wave. It is happening all at once.

The fire does not consume.

It is the fire. We who walk here are in the fire. It is the water. We who walk here are burning water. And it is the sky. We who walk here stop, as the land has stopped, and give ourselves over to new forms. Some volcanoes erupt very slowly.

This is one. In it, water and fire are one.

In it, we live, who live in Cascadia.

Nature is a foreign word in this fire country. As soon as you see nature, you know you are not here.

As I was making an image of the pines below …

… a woman walking past looked up and said, “I don’t see anything there. Just a whole lot more pines.” She didn’t see this…

… or if she did, she didn’t see that this lone aspen is this hot pool…

… or these splashes of magma…

… or that there are creatures …

… who eat this fire …

Calling it nature makes it random and wild. Look at it…

… it’s not random. Look at it …

… it’s not wild. Humans have the capacity to be this energy.

When they are not this energy …

… they invent nature, where, before, the fire rose up…

… and rose up higher …

… and sang.

Without poets, we would be living on a dying earth. We would be dying and contemplating turning ourselves in to machines. That is the age that abstract culture has made in its own image. This is the world that humans live in…

These differing worlds are equally abstract. They are equally simple.

But you do have to choose.

I have. I hope you can find your way to the earth, too.