All the versions
Discover more from Ordinary Collisions: Intersections of Nature & Culture
All the versions
Collisions of past, present, and future
I got out for a quick trail run before work today high on the river bluff. The St. Croix is churning, and spring energy is growing. This river rises every year, spilling out of its banks in an invitation to the backwaters to be part of the main channel for a time. River towns pile sandbags. Trees and parking lots get swallowed up. Beauty and danger go hand in hand, and tragically, human life is lost some years to curiosity and the desire to get close to the power of the swell. From my high vantage point, I was reminded of how the land, and the rivers, hold stories. Layers of existence, from the sorrowful to the jubilant. A rising and receding that is continually making the world. The land you’re standing on right now carries all the versions of itself from generations past in what it is today.
Just like we do.
Maybe we’re like the Russian nesting dolls my grandparents brought home from a trip they took to Moscow in the 80s, the ones my mom still has on a shelf in my childhood home. Like a nesting doll, we carry inside us every version of ourselves that we’ve been: the innocent child, the exploring young person, the one we were before this happened, the one we became after that happened. The person who has survived everything we’ve been through to exist as the version we are right now today. I think we have within us the possibilities for who we’re still becoming, too, even if they don’t all come fully into being. Maybe those possibilities are there in our center, waiting for the conditions they need to sprout. Of course, the conditions necessary aren’t always available, and carrying around all the versions of yourself, especially the ones you don’t care to look at much, can be really exhausting. But I think it’s worth it to carrying them if it means you also carry the possibilities.
At any rate, when we pay attention, listen in, and allow all of those layers (of the land, or of ourselves) to be what they are, in time we uncover the way forward that adds yet another layer to the healing of the world.
The photos in this post were taken along the bluff at one of the sections of Standing Cedars Land Conservancy just outside of Osceola, Wisconsin, a place set aside for conservation in partnership with various groups and thanks to the efforts of many volunteers. The section I ran today was pasture for dairy cows before it was protected, and quarried by white settlers before that. Further back, local lore says this spot high above the river was a peaceful gathering spot for various Dakota and Anishinaabe tribes, thanks to the abundance of natural springs in the area. These lands have seen peace and destruction and everything in between throughout the generations.
In Collisions of Earth and Sky , I write, “As I run the wooded trails of Standing Cedars high on the river bluff, it’s as if my own breathing mixes with the breath of those who walked or ran on this land generations ago. I sense my animal kin breathing alongside me. I can hear the story of the land humming. I can feel the call to reconciliation and the need for reparations. I can sense the part of me that originates in Mother Earth herself.”
High Water Season
It’s there
in the rising
power churning
banks of the river
unable to contain
a current unleashed
mighty veins of the land
reminding us that in this world
—even in this world—
wildness still wins.
A bold claim, I know, but one I’m willing to stand by.