Amazing rocks that have been cooked deep underground, broken free and tumbled in the river. They are not from the Similkameen. The river bed has been brought from far away. It is, itself, a river.
It is possible to speak of these rocks with our bodies. First we make a body. Then we give it voice. As humans, we choose visual signs.
Coyote does it, too. Not just visual!
Once you get the hang of it, every point is speech.
Even a praying mantis chrysalis.
We don’t need words to speak with and as the Earth. We already know how to do it with our bodies.
In the last 50 years, British Columbia “land use” policies have led to slime like this on the rocks. Before that, there was none at al. The rocks in the river now have no centre, and do not speak.
It means that we can’t speak either. This is called “balanced management.” It is a great silencing of what, in British Columbian culture is called “pre-modern thinking.” By that is meant thinking that does not flow through the agencies of government and the roles they assign to “citizens.” It is not accepted in British Columbian universities, government policy, or British Columbian publishing. That’s one reason why a group of Indigenous educators and allies have published some songs for people in healing within the river’s flood channel itself.
Yes, the river will take it all away. This is art for the river and her people.
I am working at rebuilding human relationships to the earth, growing the global from the local and developing new environmental technologies out of close observation of the land. The land is the watershed and run of the Okanagan River in the North American West, and the Chilcotin and Columbia volcanic plateaus and basins that surround it. It is the goal of this blog to build the future now and to do it through attention to art, earth, science and beauty, so that there is, actually, a future for our children and a path for them to feel out their way to the earth should they ever find themselves in the dark. The project will lead to two book manuscripts in the summer of 2013, one on the salmon of the Okanagan River, the last major run on the Columbia system, and the other on the connection between the Manhattan Project and the political and industrial face of Eastern Washington and Southern British Columbia. They will do so within the broader context of land-based technologies, in forms that are simultaneously art and science. In this land without borders, there is no international line at the 49th parallel, cutting our country in two, and no imagined wall between settler and indigenous cultures. We are all walking together. We are all the land speaking.
Stone poems live!
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Every stone a poem.
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