Begin there —

You are listening to Season Four

Begin there —

of Future Ecologies.

Welcome back. Mendel here. And before we get

started, I just wanted to say thanks for your patience. It's

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Okay, now on to this episode. What you're about to hear comes

from a gathering on Klahoose, Tla’amin, and Homalco territory,

specifically Cortes island, in the spring of 2022. It was a

symposium of artists and scholars of all description,

assembled to reflect on, discuss, and share their

practice. Namely, that at an intersection referred to as

Geopoetics.

The word poem comes to us from the Greek "poiein", meaning to

make or create, and which would also be borrowed into the word

sympoiesis. Quoting from Donna Haraway, "Sympoiesis is a simple

word. It means making with. Nothing really makes itself.

Nothing is really autopoietic, or self organizing" end quote.

In that spirit, what follows is not a perfectly condensed

version of those events, nor is it attempting to be. Instead,

these many voices have been recontextualized and collaged

from where I sit — here as an uninvited guest on the unceded

and shared ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-waututh peoples — into a stream of consciousness on

language artmaking and more than human interconnection.

The sound isn't perfect, and sometimes you can hear a baby in

the room. But hey, that's life.

Here we go.

In the field of environmental education,

anthropomorphism — the charge of anthropomorphism is sort of a

dirty word. It's considered a logical fallacy. So that it's a

formal critique so that even the content of whatever comes is

sort of rendered false. If so, what if you just talk about your

experience with that, and anthropomorphizing the ocean,

but also ecologizing the body, and how you contend with that?

Yeah that's a great question. And it's a funny

talking to a room of a lot of poets and artists, as though

qualities like this could not be transferred across species, but

I think that my short answer to that leveling of that charge of

anthropomorphism is always like, why do we think humans felt

those things first, or had those things first? We learn our

feelings, I think, from the world around us, we learn

sensation, we learn inter-relationality, we learn

communication, we learn language, from all of these

things. So then to say, you know, to hold all of that stuff

close to us and say, "No, this belongs to humans. And it's

ethically wrong to consider that another kind of being would be

tired or be angry or be upset or need a hug" is I think, even

more anthropocentric in a way — because it like it hogs... it

hogs all of those great words and feelings and sensations as

though they just belong here. You know, where did we get them

from?

Something to me that I find really helpful

recently, particularly been thinking a lot about, because

I've been working with birdsong for a while. And something that

recording gives you access to — that just listening without

recording can't — is your ability to slow things down and

speed things up. There's this artists, Marcus Coates in the

UK, who did this project called Dawn Chorus, where he, he slowed

down birdsong, specific birds, by 20 times and got different

people to learn the song 20 times slower, and then filmed

them singing it 20 times, and then sped them up 20 times —

their breath, their head movements, they become bird in

this really uncanny way. And it just makes this really strong

point about this time, this kind of temporal barrier between us

and some other living organisms that exist on a different

timeframe. And once you can slow down or speed things up, you can

somewhat close that gap, and kind of meet in this weird,

uncanny way.

It's not so much a statement as a question — what

is the language of ecology? And there's an issue here with the

word "environment" versus "ecology". People think of the

environment is something that's out there, and we're gonna fix

it or we need it or something like that. Ecology is something

we're inside of. So part of what I've experienced in the ecology

movement over 50 years, is that we just continually get hung up

on language. And that I've kind of felt like I've been searching

my whole life for a language that actually speaks ecology,

and speaks of this undivided whole of which everything is a

part.

All divisions are arbitrary. We cut up the world to describe it.

And someone might say, "Well, we know the difference between a

rocket tree we know the difference between a tree in the

atmosphere." Do we? We talk about a tree, the soil, and the

atmosphere, but none of those three things (tree, soil, or

atmosphere — or fungi) exist independently in the others. So

when we speak of them, were approximating. Language is

necessary… or useful, let's say. Language is useful so that we

can just talk to each other. And we can talk to each other about

the tree and the soil and the atmosphere, when we know that

none of those things exist independently.

The real subject here is really how the

Earth means. I just take for granted that the Earth means. It

is so obvious to me that it has never occurred to me that it

needed explaining. But I hear a lot of people say that they are

engaged in making meaning, as if there weren't any until they

made some. I just don't get it.

The ground we walked on to get here, the stones that got stuck

in the soles of my shoes, and the other ones that are big

enough to stay in their places, and the trees, and all the

little plants underneath the trees, and all the little things

way up in the trees — they are all meaning incarnate. This

building is not meaningless either, but it ain't much

compared to what's out there. And we are meaning incarnate

too.

You and the world are real together. You're built

so that you can understand one another.

To our animal flesh, to our creaturely senses,

each thing I encounter is always withholding parts of itself

within itself. And it also is hiding other things behind

itself.

Their features refuse to cohere into

recognizable form.

Nothing is ever encountered, all explicit, open,

total. For me, that's not a source of frustration, it's a

source of delight. It's just the signal that I —

Anima, animal, animate

— in my own animal body, am inside something much

bigger than me, in which things dance and play with one another,

and beckon to me and others withdraw from my attention

entirely and hide off.

Explicit — what that word means is unfolded,

everything has been unfolded. Well, often what that means is

to dissect something, or to flay it, to peel it, to expose it. A

great deal of biological life must remain implicit, or it's

dead.

And of course, a way to gain the bare beginnings

of an access to the interior of something (without flaying it),

is to ask and to enter into conversation.

Make eye contact

Listen. Let your water be your guide.

Let the water decide. Lose yourself in the meantime.

Listen.

How the world is organized is a function of

belief. For example, here are just a few ways that climate

change is understood or portrayed. As an apocalyptic

threat to humanity, as a national security issue, as an

engineering problem, as a social and environmental justice issue,

as a hoax, as a business opportunity, as a crisis of

capitalism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, racism and or

neoliberalism, or as an opportunity for radical

transformation.

How climate change is framed then has reverberations for how

it is approached or addressed or ignored. These framings also

often map onto deeper ideologies about human-environment

relationship, expressed through social, political, economic and

land systems. When I think about the climate crisis from a

geopolitical standpoint, climate change is about time and

materiality. Time — the scales of time in which we must think

to understand climate. Materiality — minerals, fossils,

plastic bags, the decayed remains of marine life powering

our machines. In short, organizations of matter.

Scale asks us to measure phenomena in terms of

close or far, small or big, more significant or less. And we

readily think of scale in terms of things like time or duration,

minutes, years, eons. Or in terms of size or space — micro,

macro, local, global. It follows that a scale of mattering might

map onto these other scales according to things like

intensity and heft, or sheer numbers. "We need to scale our

actions up", we say. "Just a drop in the ocean" is a figure

of speech for a reason, after all. But despite our desire for

scale to temper the crass leveling effect of analogy, we

also recognize another kind of brutality creeping into these

scalar logics. Where Euclidean geometries assemble, to measure

and mark and value, and with these metrics comes fungibility

of each constituent part.

This is what anthropologist Anna Tsing might call the malevolent

hegemony of precision nesting — an expansionist logic whereby

scaling up means that any precisely measurable elements

can be multiplied without consequence. So here, instead of

the violence of analogy or equivalence, we face the

violence of quantification and reduction and exchangeability.

And neither gives us the tools we need for the kind of scaling

up that we seek.

Many things in the world are a matter of

scale. Sandhill Cranes are creatures whose song is within

our hearing range, and whose bodies are large enough, and

whose gestures are large enough that we can see them. And so if

you are lucky enough to hear the Sandhill Cranes and watch them

dance, you will be changed forever by this experience. But

another thing that ought to happen is that it ought to occur

to you that just because you can see the Sandhill Cranes dance

doesn't mean that nothing else dances. What about the bacteria?

What about the deer mites? What about the lichens? What about

the other things that are outside your range somehow — the

things whose voices are too high or too low in pitch for your

ears; the things that are too small or too large for you to

see. The Earth, for example.

I mean, we dance inside ourselves. Even when

we're still.

Nature and its description into image —

whether photo, drawing, or painting en plein air — has long

been conscripted into the propagation of a historical myth

— The untouched and glorious Earth, primed and waiting for

your eyes, and yours alone, to appreciate to capture an image

of your own.

A name on a map, like a contour line or a

smudge of green or squiggle of blue, can never tell you all you

want or need to know.

One — Note your elevation above sea level. What

poems occur here?

What is is what has happened, Hegel says.

Who cares what Hegel says?!

And what has happened

What happens is what is.

is what is

What is

spread out through time

is what is timeless caught in time.

[Magic Number Song]

But what stuck with me was the walk, not the

song. I don't remember the song. But the specific walk that I was

doing. So then I started playing with this walk all over town.

And I had the weirdest thing happen, which was this temporal

effect. Where I started being — the slower I walked, the sooner

I would get places.

I was working in a restaurant. And I had my boss start timing

it until he got super angry. And he was — he stopped. He refused

to do it anymore. Like he really screamed it out. He was really

angry, because it was disturbing at a really deep level to his

sense of... his sense of the way things are.

And the question that I had was "is time incarcerated?" I read

and I read and I was like, ah... I can't actually ask this

question before I ask this other question, "How can we be more

intimate with time?" I need to first encounter time before I

start asking is it incarcerated, because there's all these

presumptions about what is it... and I was doing the NGO thing

unconsciously — already making the other the object, and then

trying to fix it and solve it. So luckily, I caught that before

I started the project and said, "Okay, how can we be more

intimate with time?" And then the second question, "is time

incarcerated? And if so, how can we help to liberate it?"

So these zoom windows I know, I know, it can be offensive to be

like... I heard David this morning, right, the tone like

"not on Zoom." But it was different! People would sleep,

right? There were people from all over the world. So as that

entire almost like 15 hour period will go by, we'd watch

the sun, we'd watch the shadows, you'd hear the birds, you'd see

the dawn. People would fall asleep, and they'd leave the

sound on, and the video on, and sleeping! Right? That's the...

it was both the informality and the safety, but also the study

of time.

We are now all tumbling in the circulations of

planetary exhaustion, where tiredness is both different and

shared. Much has been made of our 24/7 neon-lit late

capitalist cultures, the vertigo-inducing speed of the

Sixth Extinction, the spectacularly swift and tireless

resurgence of white supremacy and eco fascism, alongside the

never resting rising heat of the noonday sun. But we have thought

perhaps less about what comes after and with the end of this

world, the insomniac one — our bodies see no longer hack it. We

fall down, fall apart, exhausted. We need to sleep.

And that happened all the time. It was like we

were always right on time.

This is multispecies sympoiesis at work,

in the name of flourishing. Although we often speak of sleep

in terms of self care, paying attention to the ocean and its

communities reminds us that even sleeping — the most inward

oriented and perhaps solipsistic of acts — is actually about

mutual care.

Some of the planet's most significant deforestation events

have in fact occurred underwater. Off the east coast

of Tasmania, 95% of the giant kelp forests that once dominated

these seas have disappeared in the last few decades. In Western

Australia, a particularly hot summer between 2010 and 2013

wiped out 100 kilometers of kelp forests. These forests are not

only magnificent in and for themselves, but have been vital

for the formation of habitat on reefs around temperate

Australia. They are places for hundreds of other species of

plants and animals to rest.

A desire for order is the most dangerous

dream that is held by the majority of North American

citizens. Technically, even the fascists dream at night. It is

our obligation to dream differently.

Two — Map the quarter mile radius around your

home in a poem.

Everything's going to be... alright.

Everything's going to be... destroyed.

The world is going to end. Why is the world

always fucking ending?

I dunno how to say this, but I feel like

sometimes... I've had to observe a lot of like human life loss

and precarity, so I have a different perspective sometimes

about... I don't know, I feel like this is a weird thing to

say, but I feel like a lot of you might be really sad because,

like, things are really fucked up right now.

And I guess what I'm going to say to you is that... it's been

fucked up for a while. And I just like I kind of live with

that in my gut sometimes.

Just because, you know, for some, for some of us, it's been

hundreds of years of incredible terror. And, you know, it's a

great luxury to feel in this moment like something's wrong.

It's good to be agitated — to want to make things be

different. When we start to become a little too comfortable

with things being out of sort being unjust that's where if it

feels like it's a problem. It's like that since the agitation is

actually some kind of good fuel, I think.

[Song of the Agitators fades in]

I struggle between being instrumental in wanting

this outcome, and also just being unconditional that

whatever happens we still need to do what we can. So it is

late, but it is not too late.

Well here we are today, still pushing for

equal pay. And these treaty rights don't hold. Their shiny

like the Judas gold. Stain of blood still remains, a mother's

only son slain. And our youth are crying out for more,

continually being ignored. On that day, we will be family

equal born and free. Dawn will come, night will cease. We'll

rejoice, mind at ease. For that day we'll work and wait. That's

when we'll cease to agitate.

So every morning, the Earth turns and day

breaks over the horizon. And every night we spin away

eclipsed by the planet's own great shadow, facing outward and

away from the center of our solar system until we're back in

the favor of the light. It's not so difficult to miss the sunset.

Draw a line. On one side of the line note

observations. On the other side. write responses to those

observations. Which is which?

I learned to rinse my hands with vinegar

before lifting away the thin new mothers that formed on top of

the brewed kombucha every two weeks. To tell mold from age

spots, and to let go — to forgive myself for letting

things turn too sour. The process of fermentation presents

itself almost too easily as a metaphor. The way time

transforms something bitter into something full of goodness; how

the mother turns raw materials into something entirely new

while simultaneously replicating itself. Perhaps we can follow in

the footsteps of Susan Sontag's argument in Illness as Metaphor

in which she insists that, quote, "Illness is not a

metaphor." And that "The most truthful way of regarding

illness, and the healthiest way of being ill, is one most

purified of, most resistant to metaphoric thinking." end quote.

Likewise, perhaps the most truthful, or even the healthiest

way of understanding fermentation is as it is —

devoid of metaphor. Rejecting metaphor requires extending our

feeling, stretching our empathy towards understanding something,

not based on its use in relation to human comprehension, but

towards attempting to understand it purely for what it is. To

understand fermentation as not only a metaphor — because of

course it can exist both to us as metaphoric and actual — is to

understand it as a naturally occurring process with which

humans are simply collaborators. And in understanding this, we

can realize that this form of non-human life, this collection

of symbiotic bacteria and yeast, is as vital a form of life as

our own existence in the world.

Go with your gut, and repeat after me. I am mostly

microbial flora. Great. How does that feel?

When do those molecules of apple become

molecules of me? At what point? For me, I start to realize,

well, you don't need to know that because it's just this

constant flow. And that's part of the ecological consciousness

as well — that we're not independent, isolated beings.

And even though we have this skin, and so forth, that nothing

about us survives or lives without this constant flow of

energy, food, nutrients, and all of this. From an ecological

point of view, there are no isolated things, and everything

is a process. And everything is a process. So it's an

interesting question, but maybe not that relevant to ask "when

does the apple become me?" Because it was me before, and

then me after, and it doesn't matter.

And, you know, this sort of ties into this, this whole idea of

this expanded self. In human society, there have been many

movements, which have proposed that we, that we expand the idea

of self beyond the skin. So we have these social imperatives.

And there's a social self. And we're one with our brothers and

sisters all over the world. And we're a family. We've certainly

bicker like one. But this expand itself doesn't stop with the

human family, does it? And it doesn't even stop with all

sentient beings. Because it's the soil and it's the rock and

it's the earth and it's the atmosphere. Intellectually, we

can arrive there. But emotionally and

inter-relationship-wise, it's very difficult because we keep

falling back into our language — which makes things out of all

this process.

Bodies are not self-sufficient, zipped up in

some diverse suit of skin. If imagining the sea as a body,

however anthropomorphized, can help us understand its fatigue.

What might it mean for us to imagine ourselves our human

bodies of water as more oceanic? What if we understood ourselves

to as whole ecologies made up of component bodies and supporting

systems? What if the borders of our sovereign selves were to be

a bit dissolved?

This is not only an ontological question of what a body is, or

even what a body can do. It's a question of care. While our

exhaustion can teach us something about the uneven

distribution of sleeplessness as an index of other inequalities,

it can also encourage us to consider multispecies ecologies

of sleeplessness, and what it will take to help each other get

some rest. We need each other. We are nothing without each

other. Opening to share vulnerability, relying on each

other, we might help hold each others fatigue.

each others

Then the long range migrations of certain creatures

can only be a conundrum; a puzzle we'll try to solve by

continually compounding the various internal mechanisms that

might somehow in combination grant the creature the power to

grapple its way across the world. But instead of

hypothesizing more metaphorical gadgets, adding further

accessories to a Crane's or a Salmon's internal array of

tools, what if we were to allow that the animals migratory skill

arises from a felt rapport between its body and the

breathing earth?

That a Crane's 3000 kilometer journey across the span of a

continent is propelled by a felt unison between its flexing

muscles and the sensitive flesh of this planet — this huge

curved expanse, roiling with air currents, and rippling with

electromagnetic pulses. And so is enacted as much by Earth's

vitality as by the bird that flies within it. What if this

dynamic alliance between an animal and the animate orb that

gives it breath — What... what is this? What seasonal tensions

and relaxations in the atmosphere? What subtle torsions

in the geosphere help to draw half a million Cranes so

precisely across the continent? What rolling succession or

sequence of blossomings helps summon these millions of

Butterflies across the belly of the land? What alterations in

the olfactory medium? What bursts of solar exuberance

through the magnetosphere? What attractions and repulsions? For

surely, really, and truly, these migratory folks are not taking

readings from technical instruments, or mathematically

calculating angles. They are riding waves of sensation,

responding attentively to allurements and gestures in the

topological manifold; reverberating subtle expressions

that reach them from afar. These beings are dancing, not with

themselves, but with the animate rondure of the Earth. Their

wider flesh, meeting — between oneself, one's creaturely body,

and the vast body of the land.

So perhaps it'd be useful to consider the large collective

migrations of various creatures as active expressions of the

Earth itself — to consider them as slow gestures of a living

geology, improvisational experiments that gradually

stabilized into habits, now necessary to the ongoing

metabolism of the sphere. For truly, are not these cyclical

pilgrimages, these huge creaturely hejiras, also

pulsations within the broad body of the Earth? Are they not ways

that divergent places or ecosystems communicate with one

another, trading vital qualities essential to their continued

flourishing?

Think again then of the salmon. This gift born of the rocky

gravels and melting glaciers. Above here, nurtured by colossal

cedars and tumbled trunks decked with ferns, fungi, and moss. An

aquatic muscled energy strengthening itself in the

mossed and forested mountains, until it's ready to be released

into the broad ocean. Pouring seaward it adds itself to that

voluminous cauldron of currents spiraling in huge gyres, shaded

by algal blooms, and charged by faint glissandos of whalesong.

Until, grown large with the seas abundance, this ocean-infused

life flows back up the rivers and tributaries, and spreads out

into the wooded valleys; gifting the hollows and the needle

highlands with new minerals and nutrient; feeding bears and

osprey and eagles; ensuring that the glinting gift will be reborn

afresh from the lump of luminous eggs stashed under a layer of

pebbles. This circulation, this systole and diastole is one of

the surest signs that this Earth is alive. A rhythmic pulse of

silvery glacier-fed briliance, pouring through various arteries

into the wide body of the ocean. Circulating and growing there,

only to return by various veins to the beating heart of the

forest, ravid with new life.

Go to a different elevation. What poems occur

here?

I'm always kind of like, interested in

like, who's not in the room? I guess I think about that, like,

is this a space where my grandmother would be like,

"Yeah, this is where I should be." And like, not just my

grandmother, but like, so many of the people that I grew up

with, who didn't have the luxury of particular kinds of education

or particular kinds of experience. And are they

actually less equipped to be able to provide solutions to

some of the challenges that we're facing? Is there a kind of

wisdom or brilliance that is overlooked? The mundane

creativity that's practiced by poor folks, by women often, and

how that sits inside of inside of here.

People who would say to me over and over again,

"I don't belong anywhere. I hate groups. I don't join groups. I

won't go to school, I can't go to school." A lot of neuro

divergence, a lot of children coming and feeling welcome to

speak, and speak their mind, and be taken seriously. It just

really meant a lot — like this place where people would

continuously name "I don't belong, I don't feel belonging

and I come here." And this here — there was no here.

There really is no way to presuppose what

kind of miracle exists inside of each and every person. And when

we look, and we think we already know what kind of magic exists

inside of another, we've lost something.

That's what I mean by inter-cosmological space.

These whole like sets of knowledge could work together

and come to life, and we would play with them.

So in Anishinaabe way, we have our stories — we

call them the sacred ones, the ones that are informing the

worldview — the way to learn to view the world. And we call

those sacred stories. And those sacred stories morph and form

our imagination. And so the stories people us.

Anishnaabe, the ones who were lowered here, were gifted with

the capacity for language, but the language comes from the

place. And the place is the sounds; the acoustic! And then

when our language, respectfully, fits the place, and the place is

singing it, and we're ringing it, it's a completely different

thing.

I too, was thinking of Dylan Robinson and his citing

of Leanne Simpson in terms of Anishinaabe internationalism. So

thinking of the language as embedded in this web of

interspecies, international in her terms, relations.

And then we track the teachings of our relatives.

So when we're tracking them, we have to know their names and

their stories and their teachings, given this

mythopoetic landscape, what we call the cosmology. And we call

that way finding. We're finding the human way, the Anishnaabe

way of walking in this cosmology, and the teachers are

our relatives. In our story, in our sacred story, all the

teachings that were gifted to the beings in the seeds of

creation, were also poured into the human and overflowed into

the body of the human being, as well as the mind. And so we

don't know them only in our heads.

And so right across Canada, you hear and I'm sure in

other parts of the world, you hear elders saying that the

language is the way the land talks to us. That is in a sense,

it's not our language, it's the land's language, which we have

learned in order to listen better to what it has to say. So

then, when the language has faded from daily use amongst the

people, there could still be a sense in which much of the

language is nonetheless embodied relationally in interhuman

relations, and in interspecies international relations. And

also a way in which even where those relationships themselves —

as is usually the case — are also frayed, because of the same

processes of colonization, capitalism and so on,

dispossession. Nonetheless, if relationships can be

re-established with the land, and a lot of knowledge has been

transposed into English and other colonial languages about

those practices, and the practices themselves are

enduring and carried on and passed on. Then there's a sense

in which language is also present in those things, even

though it's not being spoken as the language itself at the

Robin Wall Kimmerer says that some of us, us the old

moment.

ones, you know, we walk back along the path where our

ancestors left, the broken pieces — the songs, the dances,

the words, the ways, the ceremonies — and we pick them

up, and we learn how to hold them; to carry them. We put them

in our bundle. We have these words, we put them in our

bundle, and they travel with us. Like a lens, they help us

interpret. They help us to see in ways, that's where we use the

phrase wayfinding

I think back to my entry into working with

Indigenous people and thinking about the languages and my

mentor at the time, my first mentor in this area was a woman

called Ruth Norton, an elder from Manitoba, from Fort

Alexander. And at one point, I was doing research on the Ruth's

behalf for the Assembly of First Nations. And I had been reading

the literature on bilingualism and so on. At one point, Ruth

said to me gently but very firmly, "If some of our people

don't speak their language, it doesn't mean that the language

is still not deeply part of them. I don't expect you to

understand that. I just want you to accept that."

So the Haudenosaunee scholar Dan

Longboat says "How long will it take our imaginations to

naturalize here?" Right, how long will it take to morph, so

that we can carry the teachings of the beings who are here as

our relatives? As, respectfully, as they are given. Not

interpreted. As they are given.

Choose a species you know little about, but that

lives in your ecosystem. Learn everything you can about that

species, then go find the species. Write what happens.

[Translating Pablo Neruda] You ask me perhaps

about the Alcyonarian plumes that tremble in the pure origins

of the Southern tides, and about the polyps' crystalline

construction you have no doubt considered one more question,

posing it now.

Find an urban ecotone. Stand there. Write a

poem from the dual space.

Walkers are sometimes in flight. Have orbits

that do not recognize the idiocy of borders.

Imagine a rise in sea level. How will that affect

your elevation poems?

My dears, burglary has always been the surest way

to get the gods to notice and give chase. Language, sunlight,

the list goes on.

List everything that is natural around you. List

everything that is not natural around you.

Sky is light grown over days, everything a

coast of open bane, commerce winds up a bray coarse grit

shoals dense blue green fluvial strips and the dark green delta

dust — probably spores — hung in the air. Black apple fist fur

fish and lumber. Gray deciduous claims heights all logged to

stumps.

Conclaree has cht cht chp chp chp scoops blue ponded hard, to

boat or hike you would fly, flap, soar and dart.

So give me the light of stars that strives to

but can't quite reach us. The one whose eyes are struck by the

beam of darkness, the wings blinding, forms beating,

piercing, all songs singing, fragile light spiralling from

every wood and window. The time now is for pirates, and possibly

warblers.

And if I don't believe it when I say it,

sunlight, language, fail me if you must. I know eventually you

will. Divinity never forgets what's their's. The God's gave

us healing willingly. We've been trying to return it ever since.

Hand waving out front, shooing us away. They just won't take it

back.

Stand up and put your arms out. The length of

your arms is the circle of the poem.

We've learned to read the surface, like

departed fluff and pollen husks. Phantom wings lighten up and fly

away, wet and fall into soil, and a success of propagation

rest and whetted loose trailing, roots dangle and venture.

In the absence of the written page — the book —

the land will be the visual mnemonic, and it will be

speaking stories steadily to us, in various sites in the

landscape, various powers potencies presences.

Yeah sure, the world, the land is the

original page, if you like. And it's not written because it's

constantly writing itself and erasing itself, and correcting

or at any rate changing itself.

If the phenomena of the sunset is part

of the natural, unfeeling world, and I find myself to be as well,

then what applies to the sunset must in part apply to me. And if

the sunset is beautiful, then the world must be beautiful, and

I at least in part must be too. This revelation is present in

viewing any great miracle of the random universe that patiently

allows us to exist at the same moment as Northern Lights or

Spring. And if looking is a practice of discovery, then the

potential to find some similarity between ourselves and

the sunset should be enough to sustain some faith in living.

So go now, and watch the setting sun. See its colors be devoured

by horizons and skylines — the sky emptied out. There is

nothing to prove. What gratitude, love and grace we

might feel in watching the sunset has no recipient to greet

it. And what good is a fiction of pure individuality when you

are loving the world across the chasm between yourself and

everything that is possible? The goings ons of chemicals in

rotations, the marks of physics in their indifferent routines.

We are so small in the glow of the setting sun. Nothing natural

burns purely for our benefit. So love those last drags of light,

and our love is reflected back — leading us into the quiet

miracle of loving and being loved, with nowhere to go but

on.

And our responsibility, says Leroy

Little Bear, our responsibility is to give it back through

ceremony — that we're paying attention

Fifteen — Write a poem that takes place over 4.5

billion years. Thanks.

The feet are the link.

Between earth and the body. Begin there. Begin there.

The lungs are the link between body and air. Between body and

air.

The hands, these uprooted feet, are the means

Of our shaping and grasping. Clasp them.

The eyes are the hands of the head; its feet are the ears. Its

feet are the ears.

This episode was composed with the voices and

words of Michael Datura, Astrida Neimanis, Cosmo Sheldrake, Rex

Weyler, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, David Abrahm, Megan

Gnanasihamany, Stephen Collis, Eric Magrane, Hari Alluri, Nadia

Chaney, Kaitlyn Purcell, Khari McClelland, Rita Wong, Jessica

Bebenek, Vicki Kelly, Mark Fettes, Marjorie Wonham, and

Cecily Nicholson.

And with music by Cosmo Sheldrake, Anne Bourne, Meredith

Buck, as arranged by Vanessa Richards, Jonathan Kawchuk, the

Time Zone collective, Emily Millard, Khari McClelland, Ruby

Singh, and Nathan Shubert. Field recordings by Julian Fisher, and

our theme song by Sunfish Moon Light.

A huge thank you to Erin Robinsong and Michael Datura,

without whom these conversations wouldn’t have taken place.

Thanks to Hollyhock for their generous hospitality and

support, and thank you to Juliette Bertoldo, Megan

Gnanasihamany, and Vanessa Richards for the help recording.

And thanks to you, for listening. Don’t forget to take

our survey, and to take care of yourself too.

You'll be hearing from us again soon.