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 have worked here since 2011 telling stories of the Earth as preparation for a history of the Intermontane Grasslands of Central Cascadia and the rainswept coast that keeps them windy and dry. Now I am presenting this history, step by step, as I have learned it, often from the land itself. The history of this region includes the Canadian colonial space “The Okanagan Valley”, which lies over the land I live in above Canim Bay. The story stretches deep into the American West, into the US Civil War, the War of 1812, and the Louisiana Purchase, as well into the history of the Columbia District of the Hudson’s Bay Company. In all, the story spans the Chilcotin and Columbia volcanic plateaus and the basins that surround them. In this vast watershed lie homelands as old as 13,200 years (Sequim) and 16,200 years (Salmon River.) That’s how far we are walking together here, who are all the land speaking.
https://okanaganokanogan.com/harold-rhenischs-shop/ Click to buy my new book The Tree Whisperer, an extension of Thoreau's Wild Apples and a book about learning to write poetry by pruning fruit trees. Only Olaf Hauge, from Norway, and I have followed such a path.
Okanagan Okanogan 
Stone poems live!
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Every stone a poem.
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