The water rewrites the forest.
It also rewrites the world of the fish.

And the turtles.

Like so:

Human minds are constructed to bridge the difference.

And to dissect it.

Do you find yourself asking: “What is this?” Or dismissing the question? So human!

Human minds are water.

Do you find yourself calling that tree waves reflecting light? You are well trained.

Many humans live today in an age in which dissection is claimed to be intelligence: the ability to differentiate.

Western Painted Turtles Hanging Out

It’s not always easy.

Do you call that a trick of light? Or this?

You have been trained to do so.

Many other humans live today in cultures in which the ability to unite is seen as intelligence.

Like the world above the water and the world below it, dissection and unification are the same, but only when we erase them both.

Gardom Lake

Only when we are the Earth we live on.

This is not land. This is the Nimiipu’u and their ancestors, those dead, those living, and those yet to be born.

In Europe, this effect is called “fate.” In Iceland, the word for such fate is “scäp,” the writer Gunnar Gunnarsson told a German audience in 1936. The word remains today: “land-scape.”  Do you see a landscape above? Or land? This is the real choice. Your fate, in which all time is present now. It helps to have a loon as a guide…

… who goes both ways.

This is why the old stories have loons bringing the earth from deep underwater. If you want a place to stand, it comes from the place that holds life: a shell collecting it.

You are what has been collected. You are what the shell speaks. It does not use words. 

Or to put it another way: that image above shows the real words. These ones you have “read” are only pointers. Now they vanish, and you are left with your fate.