Under the snow, it’s spring.

Under stone, it’s the same.

Where the sun intensifies and molten water collects, it’s spring. This is when the rock is mined for nutrients that feed the grasslands. Under the big sagebrush, for instance, it is spring.

Even on a slope of the right angle, where water weeps out into the cold and, together with the sun, keep off frost.

Even on the bare face of the rock.

These are all interface zones: boundaries. Look how neatly the lichen keeps to the squared off edge of the stone below. That’s how precise this is.

Look how similar that stone is to one in the shade below, covered with frost, not with lichen. Life is a kind of frost at this time of the year, a boundary effect, filling a point of energy exchange.

So this is where we go farming instead, and the success we’re having at it.

Isn’t it time to stop subsidizing settler agriculture? 5 months of a year are not enough.

The sun is a wind here. Where it strikes (from the right, above), winter melts away. A milimetre away, winter stays. Even the roofs of our houses are telling the story.

Look at what nails under a layer of shingles have done! That we’re not doing the same to produce food from the earth, and that we’re not copying the lichens in any other way, and that we’re not even developing these natural processes in our so-called university, is sure evidence that Canadian culture has never moved to this place. It has, simply, blundered. Now it’s time to live here as if it were home. Look at the decorative settler culture leaves below giving it a try.

We can’t escape this.