My first reaction after reading "Wisdom Sits" was envy. I wanted to live in a landscape so permeated with story, so instructional, as the Western Apache have. I had an instinct to make up stories about places when I was a child. And now I have such stories rooted in my own experience. But they are individual, only unevenly shared even with friends. They are not a part of a cultural guidance system.
How to let the land guide us was one of many things we could have learned (or re-learned, as it seems reasonable to assume that our "frostbitten forebears" as Robinson Jeffers calls them once had such stories) from the people of this continent had we not been so determined to dominate. It seems to me that we had the chance to regain the commons, but we were arrogant, violent, too sure to listen.
I have hoped that the LandBack movement is a path to restoring the commons. Exactly how that would work is unclear. I think there is such a path. But it appears that a majority of us care more about the price of Cheerios than about trying to achieve any sort of common vision.
In England many centuries ago, there were places with clayey soils. At least one came to be known as Claytown, or as they pronounced it then Claytun. Eventually there was a guy named John who took the place-name as his own. So maybe it's not just envy that you felt, but nostalgia. Our culture once named people after places. But somehow later that got reversed.
Thanks for the acknowledgement.
My first reaction after reading "Wisdom Sits" was envy. I wanted to live in a landscape so permeated with story, so instructional, as the Western Apache have. I had an instinct to make up stories about places when I was a child. And now I have such stories rooted in my own experience. But they are individual, only unevenly shared even with friends. They are not a part of a cultural guidance system.
How to let the land guide us was one of many things we could have learned (or re-learned, as it seems reasonable to assume that our "frostbitten forebears" as Robinson Jeffers calls them once had such stories) from the people of this continent had we not been so determined to dominate. It seems to me that we had the chance to regain the commons, but we were arrogant, violent, too sure to listen.
I have hoped that the LandBack movement is a path to restoring the commons. Exactly how that would work is unclear. I think there is such a path. But it appears that a majority of us care more about the price of Cheerios than about trying to achieve any sort of common vision.
In England many centuries ago, there were places with clayey soils. At least one came to be known as Claytown, or as they pronounced it then Claytun. Eventually there was a guy named John who took the place-name as his own. So maybe it's not just envy that you felt, but nostalgia. Our culture once named people after places. But somehow later that got reversed.