I know this mountain well from the east side, but today we were climbing from the west, in Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal (CSKT) Wilderness.

This Tribal Wilderness is the first of its kind in the nation, and the CSKT are recognized globally for their wildlife conservation.

A couple drainages to the south is the Grizzly Bear Conservation Zone- exactly how it sounds. Situated beneath the largest peak in the Mission, named Stwéwi in Salish, and Ȼupqanǂuqu in Ktnuaxa.

Some of the last surviving glaciers of the region live there too.

On the road in, I noticed large canine tracks in the mud, and no human tracks to follow. I often mistake tracks as a novice tracker, and so logged these as somewhat unusual but nothing to stop and study.

We missed our junction (navigating this Wilderness is notoriously difficult) and headed up a drainage to the north of our desired trail, noticing our error about a mile in. We had two choices, loop back and find the trail junction, or climb the ridge ahead of us and drop down into our desired basin. We chose to bushwhack: I wanted the training, my partner wanted spring king boletes.

We stopped at the top of the ridge to drink water and check our maps. Above us about 5 turkey vultures circled the updraft on the South facing ridge. Their ominous shadows cut through the dappled forest light. My partner joked, “I’m not dead yet!”

I had a thought that there might be a carcass nearby, but decided they were simply riding the updraft.

I’m 35, and one day I will learn to listen better. Wisdom is a slow accumulation of learning from mistakes.

We started down the ridge. Blooming nine bark grew thick and we couldn’t see very far. In bear country, in this kind of terrain, it is good to announce yourself loudly. About half way down the ridge we gave a couple of hollers.

At the bottom of the drainage came a response- the sound like women screaming. My first thought was a bear attack, my second thought was a homicide. My last thought came with the howls that started up the ridge towards us: wolves. At least 3 canines approached us in the thick brush up the hillside.

I’ve been around a ton of coyotes, who have circled my camp to check out the sheep hides I was tanning. While this sounded similar, the behaviors and the tone felt different.

I think I understand why the Otherwold, the Underworld, Hell, (whatever you want to call it) is generally announced by hounds in European Folklore. Silly, but in that moment in my mind I was Pwyll- so foolish in my pride- standing in the glade before the Cŵn Annwn.

We started backing up, but in the brush we couldn’t move quickly nor freely. The howls were about a hundred feet from us. A panic set in. We started shouting, I drew my bear spray.

That little can of pepper spray was ridiculous. Seriously, it felt so small and so weightless. A couple of months ago a man was found dead in Glacier National Park after a bear mauling, his can of bear spray empty.

It’s tough when you can’t see, there’s most certainly predators, and the possibility of a carcass or wolf pups in the mix. I felt the sharp edge of helplessness, of not knowing what to do.

Those moments of encounter are wild, for lack of a better word. Something in you has to give up to whatever is going to happen. You have to say your prayers.

My partner sheltered underneath a spruce tree, our most defensible position. I stood in front of the tree, heart racing, bated breath, the clip off of my bear spray, and waited for the dogs to show.

The howling stopped as suddenly as the surprise. An eerie silence. I knew they were likely watching us, or had retreated when they figured we were more a hassle than a threat.

I turned and high-tailed it, through the brush and back up the ridge.

We traveled the ridgeline in silence. Below us, hidden in the folds of the mountain, was whatever had called out from the drainage. A kill. A rendezvous site. A pack of wolves. We never found out.

I felt like a bear, chased off from a morsel and circling.

Knowing the other side of these mountains, I felt a deep sense of recognition and gratitude for the designated Tribal Wilderness. On the other side there are wolves too, but more pressure from hunting, hiking and recreation. In June, it is very well that this pack had pups to care for, and retreated to this basin.

We decided to stay on the ridge line as a more defensive position. In my experience, kills are almost always found at the lowest point of the landscape. If there was a carcass, predator activity would be heightened in the area. On the ridge line we could survey the terrain below us. Hanging just below the line, we could travel almost undetected. The sun on the south side of the ridge created an updraft that carried our scent upwards.

This is also how to hunt.

In Montana, we have the sublime privilege to hunt and to know what it’s like to be hunted.

The disorienting, bone-chilling howls aside, I think that is why hounds accompany the dead, the Otherworld, and the Wild Hunt in so many stories. Not because they are evil, but because they arrive from beyond the edge of knowing. You hear them before you see them.

Often, the signs are there, but you never see them at all.

On our way out a new set of tracks appeared in the mud:

across the stream a baby black bear hustled up a tree, spooked by our presence. Mom moved behind her baby. She was a small and beautiful black bear, her coat thick and shiny. She moved slow in the afternoon heat.

I’d love to hear from you:

Have you ever had an encounter in the backcountry that felt larger than its explanation? A moment that slipped from wildlife observation into folklore or myth?

A few notes from the trail:.

This is the beginning of my summer vacation as a public school teacher. We’ve moved out of our rental in the Flathead Valley so it can become an Air B&B for the tourist season. In the interim, I’ll be spending as much time as possible in the mountains, gathering stories, learning new places, and continuing work on several projects. I’m currently staying in the Mission Valley on the CSKT reservation. I’m excited to participate in this community and learn more tribal history and culture.

I will be preparing for a couple of workshops this summer. I’ve been invited to open the Good Health Confluence with a friction fire ceremony, and will need to make about 15 kits. Later in that weekend I’ll be guiding an eco-printing workshop. So far I’ve sewn 30 bandannas from recycled bed sheets, and need to treat them with a good scour and a tannin bath.

These are the first workshops I’ll be teaching under my new LLC, Boreal Folkways!

At the heart of this project is my dream to one day build a Folk School for my community in the Flathead Valley, Montana.

After a brief hiatus, I am delighted to continue writing and posting here for Substack, preparing a series of posts exploring traditional relationships with the land through seasonal harvests and craft.

As always, thank you for reading and for accompanying me on these wanderings.

-Lena

In Part 1, I wrote about losing the words for the living world. In Part 2, I offered a few practices for reforesting the mind.

I present Part 3:

A Mink in the Engine Block

Glaciers are a slow, accumulated force, sculpting human lives since the last great Ice Age. When they melt, they expose the landscapes of our minds. In the floodplain of the Anthropocene, we begin the work of reforesting.

Birch comes first in the glaciated floodplain. Water-loving and quick to root, she is a pioneer species, the keeper of liminal thresholds. In the boreal north, birch teaches how reforestation of the mind begins: by opening perception in relationship to our living world.

But a forest cannot live forever in its pioneer stage.

Once ecological perception takes root, the inner ecosystem must diversify. It cannot remain all tenderness, new leaf and sapling.

We need brambles to hide in and resilience for the storms. We move through appetite, failure and improvisation. We need small bodies with outrageous nerve to test the boundaries and bring new possibilities.

A forest needs mischief, and we need play.

Raven, coyote, bear, weasel; play is ecological intelligence in motion.

❈

running, breathless
dancing, prancing, prowling, crawling
laughing, guffawing, giggling, singing
mimicking, loving, teasing
creek water seeping over your boots, sticks tangling in your hair
thinking you’re more capable than you really are,
falling
getting up
trying again
failing brilliantly.

Charged presence, a bright and animated energy.

This is play,

the part of rewilding we tend to only save for children.

Oh, rewilding.

At its worst, the algorithm sells our birthright back to us in stylized theatrics. Measured by the buckskin skirt, the handwoven bag, the sheepskin, the expensive retreat, the perfect photograph of a life supposedly returned to the wild.

Meanwhile, the nitty-gritty parts of life keep calling: into the forgotten brambles out along the edges, where the nervous system learns the world by touch and lays down new pathways through the thicket. Mischief, improvisation, failure with our sleeves rolled up. Resilience springing from the woven web of relationships.

We are all capable of the old animal genius that tests what the world will hold.

This is ecological intelligence in motion, slippery as a mink in an engine block.

❈

Weasels love my father.

An ermine followed him into his house, a badger took care of his gopher problem, he wrestled otters for a stringer of fish.

But minks, in particular, give him some grief.

Last year I arrived at our fishing camp to find my dad half folded under the hood of his car. A mink had stolen away into the matrix of the car engine with the pirated remains of the day’s catch, and there was no way of retrieving them from those weaselly hidey-holes.

We drove into town to get rid of the remaining attractant, the cab smelling like baked walleye intestines and low-tide rot.

I found it funny. My dad shook his head in disgust and some stress. On a different trip, he was the one out to drift on a large and fluctuating tributary to the Columbia River- with a mink who refused to leave the boat engine.

Quick, mischievous, fierce and a bit dangerous, impossible to pin down, weasel bounds between worlds: slipping through, stealing left-overs, startling certainty and testing every opening.

This is trickster territory.

Across stories and folkways, trickster often appears as the boundary-crosser. Coyote, Hare, Raven, Loki, Hermes, Nanabozho, Weasel; the figures are not interchangeable, nor do they belong to one tidy universal category.

Yet each carries a kind of sacred disruption, and the cultural codes embedded within: a foolishness with nerve, chaos with teeth, the intelligence that learns by trespass, appetite, error, and surprise.

What trickster does in story, play does in the body. Play keeps living systems nimble. A mink in the engine block is biodiversity inside the machine.

It is the method I use to remember my relationship with the wild.

❈

After decades cultivating teamwork and leadership for companies like Google, Nike, and Disney Imagineering, and working as a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, Cas Holman’s work circles a simple but radical idea: adults do not need to learn how to play so much as unlearn how not to play.

Adults do not need the right toy nearly as much as they need to unlearn the habits that make play feel frivolous, childish, or unproductive (Holman & Denworth, 2025).

There is a Sanskrit word that describes this well: līlā, often translated as divine play. In Krishna traditions, līlā understands that creation itself is a playful unfolding (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.).

The world is not a problem to solve or a resource to manage, or (dare I say it) a wound that constantly needs healing1.

The more we focus on the problems we’re facing, the more stuck we get. The malaise or stagnation we feel in life is neurologically similar to forgetting a word, or looking for lost car keys: the mind narrows, paces in circles, and cannot force the answer directly. Then, hours later, after a cascade of small psychological and neurological shifts, the answer arrives (Pillay, 2017).

And the play Holman refers to is not childish. We are not meant to become children again, and children’s games are not always fit for adult bodies and minds. But adulthood is not the end of development, the mind keeps adapting, reorganizing, and making new pathways.

What changes is not our need for play, but the form it takes.

Adults often inherit narrow ideas of acceptable behaviors and therefore play, reducing it to recreation, entertainment, competition, or escape (Holman & Denworth, 2025).

Rarely do we ever engage in free play.

This kind of play strengthens social bonds, nourishes creativity, and helps us feel connected to meaning and purpose.

Engaging this way can also support cognitive flexibility. Neuroscientist Dr. Srini Pillay describes free play as a way of super-tasking. In free play we allow the mind to move between focused attention and unfocused association so more of the brain can participate and make unexpected connections (Pillay, 2017). Without the pressure of immediate performance, the mind solves, rehearses, recombines, and discovers ideas.

Monty Python’s John Cleese puts it another way:

“..you can teach Creativity. Or perhaps I should say…you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will be more creative.”

Embodying weasel can help us understand those circumstances.

Across the animal world, play builds resilience, develops skill, and tests the boundaries of risk and reward. Ravens tumble in the wind and drop sticks just to catch them again. Fox kits pounce at invisible prey. Bears wrestle. Otters slide through mud and snow.

Survival is rehearsed through what appears to be useless joy.

A mink does not ask permission from the machine.

Where we have become too fixed, too defended, too sure, weasel crawls under the fence, enters through the seam in the wall, doubles back and tries the side door.

This is what play does too. We remember there are more ways through than the options presented by a narrowed mind. As Holman states:

“Accessing play requires an awareness of which rules of adulthood are important and which are not.”

Play steals from the over-secured life: from the closed schedule and the tidy self we lock up from the world.

Trickster tests every claim of mine with small sharp teeth. The fish guts were never really contained and neither is the self...(If you can, please forgive the metaphor).

As Dr. Pillay notes, one of the major obstructions to creativity is a fixed identity.

Trickster often arrives as the holy fool, the one who reminds us that ego can always be caught with its pants down.

And this is a brave act. To let our guard down requires an interplay of vulnerability, trust and risk, which to us signifies danger. We remember our painful experiences of mistakes and heartbreak, failure and judgement, and disapproval from others. To play freely is to consciously open ourselves to vulnerability and uncertainty.

To quote Lao Tzu, “When I let go of what I am; I become what I might be.”

Our minds often prioritize safety in environments that pose very little risk. We overthink the dangers, priming our minds to expect failure before anything has even happened (Pillay, 2017).

We forget to ask if the rules we’re following are keeping us safe or just keeping us from playing (Holman & Denworth, 2025).

Are those rules worth questioning?

And maybe that is why the mink in the engine block felt so funny to me. The mink tipped our camp routine into the absurd. The assumption that human plans were the center of the day was tested by one small, stinking, whiskered intelligence.

All audacity per pound, that holy little vandal of rigidity.

❈

So how do we enter play?

Weasel belongs to thresholds. They are a creature of the edge-lit and gone-in-a-second. A lithe and electric body, shape-shifting and bounding through multiplicity and uncertainty.

Play begins when we stop asking, What is this for? and start asking, What happens if? This is the fluid and curious mind I described in the second essay of this series.

What happens if I follow the creek?

What happens if I make the thing ugly first? Or try a new material? Or draw blindfolded?

What happens if I sing while I work?

What happens if I let myself be seen trying?

What happens if I do not turn every longing into a project?

As Albert Einstein said, “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” A hypothesis, by definition, is the possibility of an outcome.

Play begins in possibility and experiment. Children do this instinctively, discovering play through local feedback: try something, enjoy it, repeat it, change it, and make it into a pattern (Pillay, 2017).

Adopting a possibility mindset — the authentic optimism that getting unstuck is possible — helps the brain experience curiosity and low-stakes experimentation as intrinsically rewarding (Pillay, 2017).

If this still feels abstract, here’s some wisdom my drawing and painting professor told me in college: we tend to make art in the same way we used to play as children.

As an art teacher now, I like to test this idea with my high school students. After watching them work in my classroom, I can often guess how they liked to play. A student who built an intricate apartment complex out of cardboard loved to play Minecraft. The sloppy wheel throwers in ceramics were happiest in the mud. The one who disappears into small details constructed tiny worlds and lost herself inside them.

We can enter play through the memory of play.

Did you build forts? Make potions? Sneak through the grass? Stage battles? Invent languages? Collect rocks? Dig holes? Climb trees? Build tiny houses for invisible beings? Did you play chase, kick-the-can, dress-up, dolls, basketball, wilderness survival, restaurant, school, spy?

The form matters less than the pattern.

I helped a friend think through the ways he used to play. He confessed that he does not always enjoy his daughter’s kind of play, and because he loves her so much, he feels pressure to optimize their time together.

He also thought he didn’t play, but it turns out putzing in the garage is an adult form of play. We can be so boring, can’t we?

Or maybe not, tinkering is where adult play often hides.

An avid hunter, full of fantastic stories about stalking elk and mule deer through coulees, he did not surprise me when he remembered loving physical sneaking and hiding games as a kid, like kick-the-can and capture the flag.

I suggested he begin there with his daughter by meeting her more authentically through sneaking, hiding, and tracking games. For her preferred play roles, mainly character exploration, all he needed was a gentle shift in perspective to make them feel more natural for him too. In this way, they can bond through mutual attention, movement, anticipation, tradition, and delight.

❈

Play leads me back to relationship. I am in love with the way the wild follows me home.

Sap sticks to everything I own. In summer, resin coats my feet until they feel padded like an animal’s paw. Fir needles weave ragged patches through my clothes. Nests of birch bark curls and shredded cedar spill from my pockets. Sometimes, in the grocery store, I forget the soot on my face and the feather tucked behind my ear.

Waiting in the checkout line, I turn the little mystery rock living in my coat. I am distracted by bird calls, but I know when a hawk is hunting and can track the fox loping through the underbrush.

My imagination follows weasels around.

This is the part of rewilding no one can sell back to you: to risk foolishness for the sake of relationship.

A mind is not meant to work like a machine, and a life without little trespasses becomes over-managed.

Weasel keeps us from becoming tame.

Tell me: how did you play as a child, and how do you play now?

❈

Thank you for joining me for The Ecology of Perception.

We began with glacial, ecological loss and the words we are losing, moved toward the attention that returns us to relationship and reforests the mind, and end here with play: the wild, foolish, necessary intelligence that keeps a life from becoming tame.

May you notice what calls from the hedgerow and bramble,
may the wild follow you home.

— Lena, Boreal Folkways

Bibliography:

Holman, Cas, and Lydia Denworth. Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity. Avery, 2025.

“Lila.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/topic/lila. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Dr. Pillay, Srini (2017). Tinker Dabble Doodle Try. Ballantine Books.

We were guiding a group of teens that day, at the base of Big Mountain in Whitefish, Montana. Wandering in the intoxicating warmth of a spring day. Thaw pooled in the spruce forest, and the trees grew fat suckling the snow melt. Protected by an old homestead property, they were spared from the ambitious blades of Stump Town and the Great Northern Railway.

The tree could have been hundreds of years old. They don’t grow as fast in the Rockies as they do on the coast. The top of the trunk from the ground met my breast. My co-teaching partner climbed the log to gain purchase on the bark.

His knife blade pressed through scaly bark, then slit the pale flesh beneath. There’s a secret smell released when something is cut open. The soul escaping, perhaps. Spruce resin mixed into spring sunshine, adding sweetness to the acrid smell of skunk cabbage.

Lifting the bark at first with the blade, he then slid his hand into the tight pocket where phloem clings to heartwood. He had carpenter’s hands, rough from timber framing, and this task required a tedious and patient strength. We gathered, transfixed, working the bark for a good hour or so.

A thin film of sticky resin coated our hands. Dirt cased them in. We dug through the bare ground exposed by the root ball, pulling tendrils of roots from the ground. I taught the kids how to clean the root bark while my co-lead peeled a few more panels from the tree’s body. Returning to our base, we sat in patches of grass stitching our baskets.

A simple fold to make an envelope of bark. We punched holes with improvised awls, roofing nails from my coworker’s truck.

Nothing about the work yielded easily. The bark clung to the tree. Wrists twisting, pushing the nail, hoping the bark wouldn’t crack. Then coaxing roots through our makeshift holes. Nothing could be rushed.

Years of practice taught me that a basket is a patient accumulation of crossings, tension, and return. So, I’ve learned, is skill.

It is a ritual of belief: that an idea of a basket can take form in my hands until I, too, am slowly shaped into a vessel for what the work has given me.

❈

My ceramics teacher in university used to tell us that a pot is not the clay, but the void inside.

Its meaning lives in the open space made useful by the labor of shaping. Without that interior, it is only a lump. The clay matters, of course, but only because it has been worked into a form that can hold water, grain, flowers, light.

The making creates capacity.

That idea can extend to a person. Craft hollows and shapes us, asking for patience, attention, humility, and repetition. Over time, those practices make an interior space within us: a capacity to hold frustration, beauty, uncertainty, grief, wonder, and gift. The work of the hands is also the work of the soul, a practice that asks us to become the hollow bone.

Teaching is the most difficult craft I know. Again and again, I am asked to respond in devotion for the student in front of me. Through fatigue, burnout, and overwhelm, I am asked to find patience; to keep my aperture of perception wide enough to meet the moment; to keep the heart open beyond ego, beyond defensiveness, beyond the small tyrannies of the self.

I don’t say this because I am altruistic by nature. I am not. But I am unwilling to leave the work because I like the challenge. I like to make my prayers with blood, sweat, and tears. It pushes me to be more spacious than I feel, more patient than I want to be, more willing to hold what my student is carrying on their own. It asks me, in other words, to become a vessel.

To become a vessel is not to be emptied of self, but opened wide enough to hold more than the self alone.

Basketry requires a learned tension in my hands and teaching demands that same tension. The materials yield to a certain kind of attention. If one knows how to listen, they bend and fold to the process.

After that first lesson in spruce bark, the years cycled through tents and rentals, seasonal work and scraping by, my life packed and unpacked in the back corners of borrowed rooms. For all that movement, I never let go of my craft supplies. I refused. I built out a school bus to make it easier. One summer evening it burned down. My art, my instruments, my books and journals, reduced to ash.

About a month later, I started a new full-time public school job while attending an online certification program in the evenings. With PTSD already in the mix, and a couple of medical crises folded in, it was a brutal combination. Teaching is a profession that burns through people, and for a time it nearly crushed my spirit.

In the springtime, I haunted logging roads for fallen trees, searching for bark to make my baskets. No grandmother taught me how to cut into a living tree. YouTube cannot replace her, and I have never been able to gather the dignity for it. Instead, I bear witness to the slash.

I think there are many small deaths in life: exhaustion, disillusionment, disappointment, the narrowing of the spirit under too much pressure, the slow erosion of faith. Life cuts to the quick. Seasons when my passion severed from soft earth, collapsed and dried out. The trees I found along those roads bore wounds in their bark. They had been taken by wind, by logging, by time. Some stood half dead, alone; their roots once protected by forest now exposed to a barren hillside. Some lay open to the weather, their bark already tightening.

Not every tree has good bark for weaving, but I learned how to straighten lengths into cut strips. I taught myself how to weave them in patterns.

❈

A friend texted me a couple of weeks ago about fallen birch trees he thought I’d want to see. We harvested what we could, though the bark had been weathered longer than expected. After he left, I wandered the forest alone.

That evening I couldn’t find downed birch, but I noticed fallen spruce. For years I tried to harvest spruce bark, but to no avail. Each tree seemed to have fallen at least a season before I found it, the bark too dry and stubborn to remove. I tried tree after tree as the sun dipped behind the canyon walls, the hatchet handle growing sticky with resin and dirt in my hands.

I gave up, ready to eat dinner.

Then, on the drive home, I found another stand blown over. I labored long and steadfast, determined to finally harvest bark for a basket I’d dreamed of years ago. The first piece stuck and cracked on one side, the second, a small strip of bark that also stuck and broke. In my last chance, tuned to the meticulous motions of a rocking hatchet blade, I wedged my fingers just enough to glean a large piece of bark.

Dusk settled heavy on the evening like silt in a lake bed. Dizzy from concentration, I looked up and into the dark tangle of branches. This is where bears den. Gratitude came first, then caution. Even fallen, the trees were still making shelter. In the twilight I half expected a grizzly to emerge. I left the forest balancing on logs, hovering above the chaos of wind thrown trees.

A dinner for one was served on the kitchen floor that night, spreading paper grocery bags out to make a pattern. By midnight I cut the bark to form.

Spruce cannot be folded and stitched after it dries. No one told me this, but my instinct understood that re-hydration would not restore the pliability of the fresh bark. In basketry, the best way to know is by experience.

The weekend dwindled like a candlewick. I burned at both ends weaving and stitching strips of birch for panels. On Friday I scraped, cleaned and cut birch bark into strips. On Sunday I returned to a birch on Crane Mountain to glean anything I could for the second panel. By Monday afternoon the sugars in the spruce bark began to ferment.

It was then, or lose it.

I sifted through a box of cedar root wound in loose spools. Those, too, had come from Crane Mountain, from trees now stacked high along the dirt road. I soaked them in water to a particular pliability.

The clock turned on the cusp of early evening. The kids returned home and I spread out on the table of the ceramics room. With bated breath, I punched the first holes with my basket awl. There’s no way to measure at that point. The more I flexed the spruce bark, the more prone to cracking and tears. I had to trust the makeshift pattern I taped together on the kitchen floor, and my movements needed precision.

I began stitching. More like pleading, actually. Four layers of bark, one from a spruce more than a hundred years old. The smell of her heady resin filled the room. The birch proved most difficult. The spruce maintained her soft and spongy sweetness and as I stitched her I could feel my own tender heart.

I twisted the awl with as much patience as I could muster. Push too hard, the bark could crack and I would lose my stitching panel. So much work and effort could be lost to a careless mistake. I used damp rags to keep the roots wet. Each time a root finally pushed through that impossible hole it felt like a marvel. Their blunt faces found my pinching fingers. They behave like they would in the ground, their intelligence winding them through duff and stones, impressive in their strength and flexibility.

At least an hour went into each stitched panel. The janitor came through and asked what I was doing. In the middle of explaining, I broke a root. By ten o’clock, the column of the basket stood before me. By eleven, the janitor returned to wish me goodnight. Hours passed in the crisscrossing of roots. Teaching the next day would be punishing.

The next day I soaked the rim in the spare sink in my classroom. After work I stitched it into place.

❈

I do not entirely understand why I do this work. Why I bump along the potholes and ruts of logging roads, why I stay up too late stitching roots through stubborn layers, why some part of me keeps returning to the difficulty. I only know that when a basket finally comes into form, it surprises me every time. It stands there with a life I could not have predicted, improbable and tender as a living thing.

In the tension of stitching roots through bark, I am opened into a vessel. I am gathered back to myself through the work of my hands.

Our lives are built in this way, in a thousand crossings that, somehow, hold.

Reflections on birch trees:

Part 2

The Watchful Tree

Glaciers are a slow, accumulated force,

sculpting human lives since the last great Ice Age.

When they melt, they expose the landscapes of our minds.

In the floodplain of the Anthropocene, we begin the work of reforesting.

❈

I press my body into the birch tree and collapse.

Her sturdiness reassures me.

Bark so taut it seems like she could burst; so are my nerves.

But she is made of wood.
I can barely feel my bones.

Her wrinkled eyes gaze into mine. Scarred tissue spirals around an old node at the pupil of her eye.

A blind seer.

The tree breathes me in.

She takes my exhale in her body and reaches for the star at the center of our spiraling galaxy, drawing light down into bark, branch and canker.

Intro starlight incarnate.

Into something I can hold.

❈

I’ve come to pay this grandmother a visit.
This tree, mother of my mother’s mother, is the keeper of my bloodline.

Since the glaciers scraped the earth down to her mineral bones, we have sat at her roots and begged:

make soil, make fire, make home, make shoes, make baskets, make medicine.

Hold us, mother.

Without her, the north would ask more of us than we could carry.

❈

I am drawn in by her presence.

She stands starkly white, like the full moon poured into her slender body.
Her lunar shimmer casts a halo into the dark mystery of fir trees. Dappled sunlight dances through her delicate serrated leaves. Rainbows gleam in the sheen of her oils.

I fox step in a wide arc to meet her. My feet press into the spongy duff newly released by winter’s ice.

Slow, slow, I tell myself. Take it in.

I resist an impulse in my body that task-masters me from sun-up to sundown, 6 days a week.

I don’t have time for this.

No, breathe.

This is becoming a daily ritual.

It’s 2013, four years after my spinal fusion surgery. Pain still rips through me. I lift my left leg into my car because it hangs there like a limp noodle. I muscle through it. At night, my body turns to fire.

I don’t remember my 18th birthday. Oxycodone washed it out, weeks spent staring at the ceiling in a chair.

After that, everything unraveled. My parents divorced. I escaped to Missoula, Montana, high on whatever drug I could get my hands on.

As I cling to the tree, I come back to my feet at her roots.

I wandered far from this, trading walks in the woods for alleyways, pills, booze and abuse. After a miscarriage, I woke from my fever dream.

My hunger for connection moved through me like the tree’s roots underground, searching.

I longed to feel something beneath the surface.

I started going on plant walks with a local herbalist and learning herbal medicine, beyond random searches on Erowid. In my research I had just learned of the Doctrine of Signatures1.

Curious, I found a birch tree in the woods behind my house.

I soften into the tree’s support. Her bark smells spicy sweet, like a tannic cinnamon, like the smell of frosting on a ginger cookie.

I breathe deep. My body fills with the sensation of water, as if I’m loosening, becoming more porous. I imagine this is what frog skin feels like. So sensitive, I begin drinking the forest air through my skin.

Her powdery, papery bark coats me where I’m touching her, drying me, tightening the skin of my fingertips. A squeaky chalk.

Back at home I start turning pages, searching for birch in my books.

What did I feel? Could it be?

I learned that birch is a diuretic: moving water through the body, supporting the kidneys, tightening and toning tissues, reducing inflammation with a cooling effect, astringent.

This was only the beginning of my understanding,

something akin to what Goethe called the intimation of things.

A shimmering glimpse behind the veil of ordinary experience, the feeling of the world welcoming me in,

when the birch tree’s gaze met my own.

❈

We are paying attention more than ever, and noticing less.

There is an assumption in modern life that attention, on its own, is enough. But true perception grows in relationships, the way a forest grows.

As Josua Schrei suggests, many Western mindfulness practices are removed from their cultural ecology (Schrei, 2024). Like monocultures exhausted of soil, the practices remain, but the conditions that allowed them to take root are now dust in the wind.

The way we attend builds soil for what grows in us.

The kind we’re taught - the tight, effortful, goal-driven focus- can actually exhaust the brain over time (Pillay, 2017). We call the exhaustion burnout, as wildfires rage across the planet.

Neuroscientist Srini Pillay gives us signs of a jammed-up brain:

• You don’t have as much energy as you used to

• You can’t follow through

• You’re not reaching your goals, even when you set them

• Repeated mistakes

• Feeling easily overwhelmed

• Settling for less

• Finding yourself far from hopes, dreams and goals

Most of us would not choose this. After we retreat, searching for rest, we often return to the same environment that degraded our nervous system.

I feel this tension daily in my high school classroom.

Many of us were taught how to know, but not how to perceive.

“Good listening” often means compliance: focus on a single voice, ignore the rest. In a credit recovery school like mine, this is a mix of overstimulation and understimulation all at once, and the kids’ attention gravitates to the dopamine stimulation on their phone.

Over time we learn what to notice and what to filter out, until it begins to feel like who we are. As an art teacher, I am hopeful to nurture creativity. Yet I encounter students who are terrified to make a mark on a page, or judgmental of every mark they make.

This isn’t just personal, either.

Vine Deloria Jr. observes that Western knowledge systems tend toward empirical observation, while Indigenous ways of knowing ground in direct experience, in place, and in relationships.

Part 1 of this series connects relational linguistics to Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

What is considered real and what is dismissed as irrelevant are decided long before we consciously choose them.

In cognitive science, this filtering is called sensory gating: the process by which the brain determines what enters our awareness, and what we ignore (Buhner, 2014).

Gating allows us to move through the world without collapsing inward by our senses. It develops through care-giving relationships, our environments, learned patterns of attention, and what we inherit genetically. Some people, including those on the autism spectrum, experience sensory gating differently.

Under constant stimulation- novelty, emotional charge, social noise- the brain learns to prioritize urgency. We slide into what Pillay calls a “cognitive bottleneck”.

These constraints can take different forms:

• Attentional bottlenecks—visual and auditory over-stimulation.

• Memory bottlenecks—limits working memory, making it harder to access what we know.

• Problem-state bottlenecks—reduced capacity to hold the information needed to solve something in front of us.

• Emotional bottlenecks—when stress, fear, or negative patterns block learning and movement forward.

Over time, a conflict emerges between the patterns we’re trained into and the more subtle signals of the body. In many Western contexts, those signals are dismissed by a worldview that no longer recognizes their value.

And yet

What we call “the five senses” is only a fraction of our perceptual capacity.

❈

Five years from that first encounter and my life revolves around birch.

She taught me how to begin again.

At forest school children tear into birch logs, their tiny hands like bear paws. They peel bark into bracelets, armor, fairy houses, anything their imagination offers.

In the frenzy, salamanders slip from the rotting wood.

We ban burning bark in the main fire. The kids gleefully heap piles of bark on the flame to watch the billowing black smoke, too thick for our lungs. Yet every morning, we teachers strip fine curls and lay them carefully on the hearth.

I drink a chaga tonic in my coffee. In springtime, a tea of twigs and leaves. I stir honey with a birch spoon.
In summer, I gather berries in baskets woven from the bark.

But mostly I sit with her, every day, in a practice called sit spot.

Birch,
Beithe,
Berkanno.

She is the first tree. The mother of the boreal forest, the largest biome on earth.

Birch is a pioneer species. After glaciers retreat, she anchors soil to bare stone. Fast-growing and water-loving, she lays her body down as spongy, carbon-rich humus.

In the north, she provides the materials of daily life. Birch bark becomes the shingles of a home, baskets, cups and utensils, food storage, waterproofing, shoes. The bark will light a fire even when soaking wet. Food stored in birch bark containers resists rot. Her sap offers sugar in the lean thaw of early spring.

Chaga carries fire, traditionally used to catch sparks and hold embers over a distance. If only the man in Jack London’s To Build a Fire2 had a tinder fungus. The canker is renowned for fighting cancer and stimulating the immune system.

Across the northern half of the American continent birch canoes carried people by water, a vessel for movement, trade, and culture.

Without this tree, I believe my people would not be here. Our relationship with her is symbolic of a glacial, ancient perception.

❈

We live in complex relationship with the places that hold us.

What they ask of us, what they offer, and how we cultivate resilience influences both our survival and the world around us.

It tickles me to watch children interact instinctively with the birch tree.

The exuberance of a child, that bountiful joy as they encounter the world, those incessant questions, that insatiable curiosity: this is where art and science begin.

Some of our greatest minds in history tend their relationship to a childlike mind.

Helen Keller describes Luther Burbank, a self-taught horticulturist, plant breeder, and one of the most influential figures in shaping modern cultivated plants:

“He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. Only a wise child can understand the language of the flowers and trees.”

Albert Einstein is often described as having a childlike imagination. He wrote,

“The important thing is not to stop questioning… it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

Curiosity is the first step into cultivating ecological perception.

This is the posture we assume when we want to open our sensory gating, allowing ambiguity and surprise to lead us.

In this state, we open our minds to the Default Mode Network (DMN), the “Do Mostly Nothing” network. In my students, phones preoccupy most of their do-nothing time. Unfortunately, this generally stimulates the Task-Positive Network -the antithesis of the DMN.

Reduced connectivity in the DMN is linked to dementia, alzheimers, multiple sclerosis and vegetative states (Pillay, 2017).

When the mind wanders in an intentional way -imagining and making meaning- our mental flexibility improves. We connect deeply with ourselves and others and move more fluidly between past, present, and possibility (Pillay, 2017).

In an open state of wonder and curiosity, we begin to move our minds like a trickling stream of melt water, fluid and responsive.

This is a way of softening the gaze. As Goethe writes, “Every new object, newly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.”

Novelty is what tells the brain this matters. In teaching, we call these “discrepant events”: moments that pull students out of their attentional lull and engage their long-term memory (Pillay, 2017).

Here is a simple way to begin:

• Find a plant. Settle in and take a moment to arrive.

• Begin asking questions, one after another, pausing just long enough to let each one settle. Please don’t feel the need to answer any of them, although this is not strict. Try your best to focus on sensations.

• Start simple, and let the questions lead. When I teach, the questions purposefully and gradually build in complexity (Young, 2010).

What you are able to see arises from the way you ask, and you may be surprised by what reveals itself.

In my practice, I record those questions to later create a mind map. I group them, draw connections, and note what I don’t yet understand. New questions emerge, and I carry them back into the field.

Looking for connections sparks creativity and we access analogical reasoning, a more fluid intelligence (Pillay, 2017).

After noticing, don’t dismiss what you’ve perceived as noise.

Tune the fine instrument of your body,

loosen your sensory gating. This could feel like a sort of synesthesia; a visual, auditory or physical gestalt, the world arriving more wholly.

In To Speak for the Trees, Diana Beresford-Kroeger describes a meditation where one stands in a field like a tree and feels the dance of the sun’s energy on their skin. The Celts called this feeling the “Song of the Universe.”

Western culture generally views intuition as something that comes to us from within, although we have a capacity for many kinds of intuition.

In some indigenous cultures, like the Kalahari Bushmen, intuition is relational.

They must read the feeling of a landscape, sense the presence or movement of animals while tracking them, and interpret subtle changes in the environment. Anthropologists describe this as embodied cognition or participatory awareness.

Trust yourself.

When you spend time with this kind of sensing, your unique forms of perception flourish. The brain categorizes perception from memories, so what may feel unfamiliar will become recognizable (Buhner, 2014). The more you experience, the more your inner forest begins to grow.

To be called beloved by the world.

As you’re reading this, you’re engaging in a sort of dreaming. My words on their own mean nothing, but as they move through your awareness they are imagined, felt and embodied.

In a similar way, when we engage in our participatory awareness with the living world, when we read the earth’s poetry, the earth dreams in us.

This is the birthplace of myth in humanity.

It is told that the “Song of the Universe” dictated the creation of the Celtic Ogham alphabet, the first alphabet of Ireland (Beresford-Kroeger, 2020).

Across several Siberian traditions, particularly among Evenki and Buryat peoples, the birch tree is an axis mundi, a bridge between worlds.

In some ceremonies a shaman climbs a birch tree, ascending through layered realms of existence: from the roots of the underworld and the ancestors, through the human realm of the trunk, and into the sky world of spirits and expanded perception (Znamenski, 2003).

This act of climbing embodies a journey of transformation, knowledge-seeking, and rebirth.

The birch’s ecological role as a pioneer species cultivates renewal and passage between states of being, when the earth is released by ice and begins to grow again.

I found my way from my darkest moments, my own Younger Dryas3, by the lunar light of the birch tree.

By instinct or call, through feeling and through memory, her roots entangled with mine. I came home to myself and my ancestry. In the Boreal North, birch invites us to reconsider our own place within a layered, living cosmos.

This is the work of reforesting the mind, allowing meaning to grow the way a forest grows.

Bare ground slowly fills in.

What falls becomes soil,

as mycelium thread their web underground.

Roots reach down,

until presence moves like light through leaves.

Season by season,

our understanding takes hold at the heart,

and we meet the birch tree’s gaze with our own.

Thank you for reading. Each like, comment, or share cultivates this community and helps us grow.

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Part 1:

Bibliography

Beresford-Kroeger, Diana (2020). To speak for the trees : my life’s journey from ancient Celtic wisdom to a healing vision of the forest. Vintage Canada.

Buhner, Stephen Harrod (2014). Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth. Bear & Company.

Dr. Pillay, Srini (2017). Tinker Dabble Doodle Try. Ballantine Books.

Schrei, Joshua. “Why Mindfulness Isn’t Enough.” The Emerald Podcast, Sept. 30th, 2024.

Young, J., Haas, E., & McGown, E. (2010). Coyote's guide to connecting with nature: For kids of all ages and their mentors (2nd ed.). Shelton, WA: OWLink Media.

Znamenski, Andrei. (2003). Shamanism in Siberia. 10.1007/978-94-017-0277-5.

The spine of Turtle Island, these nodes of earth rise suddenly from the prairie, whittled by wind and gnawed on by glaciers.

They divide the continent. Snow melting on Triple Divide Mountain in Glacier National Park flows to the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean.

Heading east the land spreads over her ribs like a turtle shell, stretching wide across a primordial ocean.

Buttes of earth roll like waves in the foothills of the Rockies. Their presence is soft clay, the grass like velvet on their crests. Cloud shadows and dappled light shift over their faces.

They feel like the earth is dreaming.

At their feet the Maiasaura, the “good mother lizard”, nested. At Egg Mountain entire Late-Cretaceous nurseries pressed into the mud.

❈

It is late March, just past the equinox, and the snow geese migration is peaking. Freezeout Lake, outside of Choteau, Montana, lies along their route to the Arctic tundra. They arrive here after a single, unbroken flight from Northern California.

They are wilderness birds, drawn to quiet places where the land still holds space for them.

The geese come in lean. The journey has taken what it needs and there are many more miles to go. In the surrounding fields, they glean what remains of last season’s barley harvest.

The east side of Montana is the nation’s Bread Basket. The grass grows taller with the thunder clouds. Long Grass Prairie of the Midwest gives way to the Mixed Grass of the Dakotas. Then to Short Grass Prairie under the wide Montana sky.

Last summer’s stalks haven’t forgotten the sun; they glow golden against the moody March sky, as if in defiance of winter.

Yet they shiver in the wind.

I break their brittle stalks between my fingers and peel their pith from their bark.

My companion and I arrived in a snow squall. Large, soft flakes melt as they touch the ground. The sticky clay on the east side, infamously known as “gumbo”, pulls at my truck tires, endeavoring to return the gasoline vehicle to meet its maker.

Still, we are grateful for the mildness. Out here, it could just as easily be below zero. When the wind comes, the muscles cling tightly to the bones, protective, lest it steal their marrow.

The geese, too, seem to fall from the sky like snowflakes. Their soft calls drift over the ponds of the Wildlife Refuge. We hear whispers of the past few days:

Friday morning, 65,000 birds lifted in unison.

Anticipation gets the best of us. There don’t seem to be many geese today. Having never witnessed this before, we wonder if we missed it.

We circle Freeze Out Lake, searching for both a campsite and the birds. On the ridges above the lake, eagles ride the updraft. They pick at the bellies of behemoth carp strewn en masse along the shore. It is always alarming to see so many corpses. I sit with the perplexing feelings of balance and invasion. Did the state poison the carp? the question lingers. The birds don’t seem to mind.

Later, I learn that carp cannot withstand the cold. The lake is shallow, the east side frigid. The fish surface and collect, offering their bodies to a raptor population that has declined by more than 30% in the last thirty years.

In the community hall in Choteau, I trace the red and purple lines of migration data—Golden Eagle routes stitched across the continent—with awe-filled eyes.

After pitching camp, I stirred up a good share of gumbo on my mud flaps and brought it into town.

My friends and I escaped the wet cold to watch Rob Domenech’s presentation on raptor rehabilitation along the Rocky Mountain Front with the Raptor View Research Institute (RVRI).

Domenech’s work with Golden Eagles is not for the faint of heart. After condors, they are North America’s largest raptor. It is quite something to watch biologists grab the eagle by the feet to disable their talons.

RVRI has wing-tagged and monitored these birds since 1992. The data stretches across decades, across borders. An eagle named Diego traveled from Durango, Mexico to Alaska, over 3,500 miles. The routes follow the Front Range, threading the length of the continent.

The Old North Trail.

The Front holds what moving bodies need: water from snow melt, trees for shelter, a softer edge between the extremes in the mountains and exposure in the prairie. In the Pleistocene, herds of mammoth and ancient bison, Bison antiquus, tracked seasons along this corridor. Predators followed and scavengers followed them.

For millennia, people followed too. The Blackfeet have stories of traveling the Old North Trail to Mexico. And now I understand that the birds, the bison, the bears, anything that migrates, still do.

The hall clears out, volunteers start folding chairs. We return to Freeze Out. In a pond we witness our first flight of geese. Behind them the long blades of wind turbines slice the air.

❈

The next morning we arise before dawn. The sky is clear, frost sparkles like stars under my headlamp. The truck engine burbles and churns out heat. I pour hot water sloppily into an aero-press of coffee.

We drive east into the Saltillo blanket of sky. Thin threads of red, orange and yellow weave the turning of the earth into the cosmos. I gasp as hares dash before my rumbling tires. I’m wide awake now, no coffee needed.

A group of people gather on the eastern shore of the big lake. They assemble like the geese, and I gladly join them.

In the middle of the lake, a large flotilla of snow geese rests. They look like the last bit of snow and ice floating on the water.

Their calls are softer than the “HONKA HONKA HONKA” of a Canada goose—a higher, breathier bark. Their voices blend together like the rush of an ocean wave breaking over sand, a rolling trill that moves across the water. More geese float down from the sky to join them.

The front range starts to glow a soft, dusky pink. The sky is baby blue. The geese’s white bodies turn pink too.

The small congregation of people wait with bated breath, no one wants to move in case they miss it. I take sips of my coffee to stay warm.

Now the range is bathed in bright pink. The sunlight travels down the mountains into the buttes. Watching, I could sense the billions of sunrises that have stained this earth red.

The geese calls crescendo into a stirring. And then,

the sound of thousands of wings against water.

Like the shuffling feet as the church choir stands to sing, feathers beat the air to lift bodies into the wind.

I am overcome by the sound and I begin to weep.

The geese pass directly overhead, their bodies now golden. Black wingtips flicker and fold through the shifting light, patterns flashing and dissolving, dazzling the eye.

My spirit rises with them, flying north over the Great Plains to Saskatchewan.

❈

The late morning sun finally seeps through my layers of wool clothing. We eat breakfast, laugh and share stories. My friend reads Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese out loud. Although I’ve heard that poem so many times before, her words hold weight in the shape of this landscape.

We drowse together in a field next to the lake, observing Sandhill Cranes, Tundra Swans, Bufflehead ducks and Northern Shovelers. The geese fly many times, I experience their wing beats in my body with my eyes closed.

I wish I never had to leave that dreaming.

Slowly we rise, pack up camp, and drive back into the mountains.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Boreal Folkways is a space for weaving relationships between people, land, and our innate creativity.

Through essays, field notes and practices, I explore traditional craft, ancestry, and ways of reconnecting with the natural world.

Just notes, really, bits of my naturalist’s journal: chipmunks in the woodpile, water rising in the spruce bog, chasing alpine flowers up the mountain.

Sitting in my deer-stand waiting, when absolutely nothing and everything happens.

Mushrooms peeking out from the duff, then the snow falling soft and the fire holding,

Writing like the rhythm of weaving on my loom. Month to month just noticing what’s here.

I hope you enjoy these more informal writings, thank you for being here with me.

~Lena

❈

I can’t really tell you how the ink on this page coalesced.

I remember the sun shining blindingly off of the glacier, the brilliance of sparkles in the mudstone, how my skin had the same shiny sheen and I too tasted like salt and minerals from dragging my bones up to the high alpine. I huddled against a boulder, sheltered from the wind, painting the mountains of sea beds before me.

I can dissect this visually, explain the anatomy of a painting, but I can’t tell you for how long I was up there, or if I even thought of what the brush was doing.

When I came down from the pass, sitting in my camp among the mountain goats, I was a little surprised by my sketch.

There are ways of seeing that come from slowing down, like the sprawling glacier before me. To slow down long enough for the nervous system to settle, for attention to widen beyond the narrow confines of urgency.

Glaciers are often spoken about as things that are disappearing, as the cold water feeding that Data Center downstream.

But they are also archives of ancient memory, the very stuff that shaped the valleys and lakes and the animals and people of this land.

The lines in this painting trace the layers of the Belt Supergroup: argillite, quartzite, dolomite. Sediments laid down in primordial seabeds over a billion years ago. The environments that created the earliest forms of life.

These lines are language, if you know how to read them.

They record the debris and movement of the glacier, the slow crumble of stone, the long arc of geologic time.

When I paint them I feel their essence in my body; the sheer elemental quality of a glacial floodplain, the way the water sparkles over stone in the blazing sun, the crisp, clean quality of air.

This is one reason why, around the world, the top of a mountain is sacred.

There are languages that know how to speak to land. Ways of being wrapped in a bone bundle. Relatives, teachers, memories, cyclical time, embedded into grammar and syntax, spoken like we breathe and drink water.

And there are ways of speaking that flatten everything into objects. There are ways of seeing that are narrowed by speed, distraction, and constant input.

Most people view Glacier National Park through a car window.

Attention softens the boundary between observer and observed. The longer I look, the less separate I feel. If I stay long enough, people sometimes mistake me for a bear.

And somewhere in the painting, I begin to disappear.

❈

This piece sits alongside a longer essay I shared earlier this week on language, glaciers, and perception.

As an art teacher and outdoor educator, my professional life is a form of resistance to the scroll. My work, in many ways, is an architecture of the mind.

In the next essays of this series, I’ll share practices I use as an educator to help minds flow again, ways of turning over the many-colored stones so that we may rediscover our innate, wild intelligence.

Boreal Folkways is a space for weaving relationships between people, land, and our innate creativity.

Through essays, field notes, and practices, I explore traditional craft, ancestry, and ways of reconnecting with the natural world.

Part 1

We Are Losing the Words for the Living World

We are losing the words for the living world,
and with them, the ability to perceive it.

Words once moved like glaciers; slow,

heavy with memory,

and shaping the land of our minds.

What happens when that ice begins to melt?

❈

Words rolled over our tongues like glaciers polishing stones — condensed minerals of primeval seabeds carried slowly in the belly of dark blue ice.

Each word traces a path through the glacial stream of our collective memory, shaping the rivers of thought flowing within us.

What whispers from the time we breathed moss, when language rose from the damp earth itself and every word was the clay of the place that made it?

What Whispers from the Ages?

The day I learned the word bergschrund, I touched the sublime.

I shimmied up a crag hoping to glimpse Lake of the Clouds, a cirque beneath Daughter of the Sun in Montana’s Mission Mountain Wilderness, on the edge of the Grizzly Bear Conservation Zone.

At first I thought the glacier was nothing more than a lingering snowfield.

Wedged precariously between a chossy1 cliff of crumbling iron and the ice below me, I watched talus boulders bounce toward the valley floor. My hopes for a glissade2 were dashed.

At some point, the only path forward followed the edge of the glacier.

Then I saw it:

The bergschrund split the ice open—a gaping maw, toothy and wide, where the glacier pulls away from the mountain. I could hear the creaking of ice like my grandmother’s bones, the quiet trickle of meltwater threading through the frozen mass.

Before that day, I had only perceived the glacier from a distance, as a snow field.

❈

The glaciers are retreating, and our languages are retreating with them.

Ancestral ways of knowing seep back into the earth.

After work, on weekends, we follow that old water-worn path along the river’s edge. We pick the stones where melt water once carried our gnosis into light and scattered it across the floodplain of the Anthropocene.

Cupped in our hands, the wrinkles of deep time unfold beneath the whorled ridges of our fingertips.

Amid the hypnotic scroll of hot-takes and advertisements, can we still hear the pulse of water beneath the earth?

Do our memories pool like cirques beneath snowy nunataks3 ?

When our languages dwindle like our glaciers, how do we call the living world by name?

Wrinkles smooth to glass. The dance of photons in blue ice captures to blue light, and we lose ourselves in the flicker of our screens.

What whispers from the time we breathed moss, when language rose from the damp earth itself and every word was the clay of the place that made it?

❈

In Blackfeet, Ktunaxa, and Salish, grammar is shaped by kinship, relationship, and vocal intonation. In poly-synthetic languages, a single word can carry the weight of a sentence, even a paragraph, in English.

These languages were born in deep time, in the Pleistocene, or perhaps even earlier. Blackfeet oral stories speak of giant beavers and glacial Lake Missoula (Dr. Nieves Zideño et al., 2021),

The earth’s memory lives within our words.

Scholars Little Bear and Heavy Head note that the key to understanding Blackfeet metaphysics lies in the very anatomy of Blackfeet words.

The world revealed through their language is a fluid event manifestation. Within this living flux, relationships between humans and the world are continually formed and renewed. Knowledge flows through story, teaching, and lived experience, and from this cyclical movement a sense of harmony gradually emerges (Dr. Nieves Zideño et al, 2021).

Here, in the languages of Northwest Montana, old memory still speaks.

Ktunaxa is an endemic language, isolated like the white sturgeon dwelling in the deep pools below Kootenai Falls4.

The falls are a profoundly sacred site to the Kootenai Tribes, regarded as the center of the world and a place to commune with spirit for guidance.

N̓səl̓xčin̓ flows in thirteen dialects, like the lilting chortle of the meadowlark over a blooming prairie; each male singing his tiny heart in his own song.

Aspen Decker5, who is Bitterroot Salish, describes her language like water moving over the earth (Decker, 2025). It is water that revives the bitterroot and brings the flower to bloom.

The Salish word for bitterroot6, sp̓eƛ̓m̓, carries this origin story. During a famine, a grieving mother’s tears gave rise to the plant that would sustain her people (Dempsey, 2025).

Just as bitterroot rises from the mineral outcrops of the northern Rockies, these languages grow from their specific ecologies: rooted, alive, and singing the earth that shaped them.

❈

This is a landscape shaped by ice.

National Geographic Explorer Dr. M Jackson reminds us that glaciers are deeply entangled with human lives. They are shaping and being shaped by the communities around them. Wherever there are glaciers, there have always been people in relationship with them.

She recalls one man saying, “My father used to sweep the glacier from his door each morning.”

And yet today, she explains, “It is almost unimaginable in the face of the dazzling diversity of human beings…and the immense geographic diversity of glaciers, that we know ice today largely through a single story of melt… Just as no two people are ever the same, neither are two glaciers. (Jackson, 2019).”

The ice I met beneath Daughter of the Sun is technically no longer a glacier.

Too small to grow and breathe like a glacier, these bones of the Pleistocene are classified as a “stagnant snowfield”. In the 1880’s, about 150 years ago, over 80 true glaciers lived in the Mission Mountains. Today, two remain. Maps do not record that rather intimidating “snow field”. No one monitors the slow decline. The ancient ice hangs forgotten, quietly feeding the crystalline waters of the Swan River. For me, I hold the Mission Mountains in a special place in my heart, and I was honored to recognize that “snow field”.

How We Lost the Bundle

Bone bundles.

In Northern Plains traditions, these sacred bundles carry ancestral remains of animals considered kin, and are cared for across generations. They hold spiritual life: a connection to the past, to the Creator, and to the stories that shape a people.

Metaphorically this is what we carry in our bones- ancestral knowledge, memory, relationship, story - the whispers of our foremothers as we were cradled in our mother’s arms.

In many Indigenous traditions, these bundles are still carried, protected, and fought for.

But in others, especially within Western industrial culture, something was set down.

In Europe, Proto-Celtic breathes into the marrow of language. Words gather meaning in clusters of relationship: landscape, animal, season, kinship. Patterns carried in the tongues of Europe’s ancestral bone bundle (Hillyer, n.d.). The Celtic Ogham alphabet, rooted in trees, speaks from a time when words were carved into wood and stone, when language grew from the forest itself.

Botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger7 reminds us that the great forests of Ireland were cut to build the ships that carried settlers across the ocean to the New World (Beresford-Kroeger, 2020).

As the forests fell, something in the language fell with them.

On the North American continent, oral traditions shaped in the wake of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet now dwindle like our glaciers.

What happens when the species that nurtured these languages turn to dust beneath trampling cattle hooves?

Like a wild bison taken from a lingering herd and released into the fenced confines of the English language, these stories wander a landscape of barbed wire and cattle guards—hemmed in by state funding models and colonial systems of education.

What disappears is not only knowledge, but the ability to perceive the world as alive, responsive, and in constant exchange…

with us.

The Last Frontier is the Mind

Across Montana, communities are working fervently for language revitalization. As cultural historian Thomas Berry reminds us,

“The environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of the mind, a crisis of thought, a crisis of story.”

As a high school teacher, it sometimes feels like my students speak a different language—a digital-native dialect shaped by memes and trends.

I swear I am not that old.

If language follows culture, and culture is shaped by environment, my friends, we may be in ye olde proverbial skibbidi toilet.

Of course I could not resist the joke.

Children today can name dozens, sometimes nearly a hundred, corporate brands, but struggle to name even a handful of the plants growing around them.

We are beginning to see the effects of a generation raised on Apple, Google, Meta, TikTok and SnapChat.

Images scroll faster than rivers. Algorithms curate our perception, and the landscapes that once instructed the mind are reduced to aesthetics on a grid.

If colonial expansion once fenced the prairies and cut the forests, the newest frontier of enclosure may be the mind itself.

In January 2026, neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate that Gen Z may be the first generation in modern history to show measurable declines in memory, attention, and problem-solving compared to their predecessors. Whether the causes are technological, educational, environmental, or some tangled combination of all three, the warning resonates with many teachers: the environments shaping young minds have changed dramatically.

As an art teacher and outdoor educator, my professional life is a form of resistance. My work, in many ways, is an architecture of the mind.

Which makes the irony of this essay difficult to ignore: I am writing these reflections about language in English.

Many monolingual English speakers rarely consider the cognitive filters this creates.

English carries a deeply Cartesian inheritance—a mirror for how modern culture imagines the world. Subjects act upon objects in neat linear sequence, structuring reality as discrete things rather than the “fluid event manifestation” described in Blackfoot metaphysics.

The result is a grammar of separation: mind over matter, observer over observed, the self standing apart from the living world.

Contemporary cognitive science suggests that perception is also not a passive recording of reality. We do not see the world as it is, we see what we have been trained to expect. Language is one of the primary ways these patterns are formed: by influencing perception, memory, and cognitive habits, a concept known as linguistic relativity.

Robin Wall Kimmerer points to a similar truth in the language of plants and people: many Indigenous languages encode relationships directly into their grammar. As those languages are displaced, so too are the relationships they carry.

If much of what we see arises from within us, what happens when those inner prophecies are trained by an algorithm?

When our attention narrows, and memory sifts through us like sand?

Fluid Event Manifestation

Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of imagination.

How do we reopen the mind to wonder, to the intricate web of relationships that sustain life?

Mycelial networks pulse through the soil beneath our feet, threads of communication older than any language we speak. These webs look like the neurons in our brain, and Neuroscientist Srini Pillay notes that our neural networks mirror the cosmos.

Our thoughts carry as much electricity as a supernova.

(Pillay, 2017)

Wonder is not a luxury of childhood but a biological capacity; the mind remembering its kinship with the living world.

“Glaciers are not solid ice; they are riddled with tunnels, channels, and all sorts of other features. As the glacier morphs, the internal geography of the ice is always transforming (Jackson, 2019.)”

We too are like glaciers. Impressionable, ever changing, and complex. When we open ourselves to wonder, our mind begins to flow, opening channels of attention and restoring our experience of the world as a fluid event manifestation.

❈

In the next essays of this series, I’ll share practices I use as an educator to help minds flow again, ways of turning over the many-colored stones so that we may rediscover our innate, wild intelligence.

Small rivulets gather and water finds its path.

Slowly, together, we begin to build soil on the floodplain of the Anthropocene.

Part 2:

Bibliography

Beresford-Kroeger, D. (2020). To speak for the trees : my life’s journey from ancient Celtic wisdom to a healing vision of the forest. Vintage Canada.

Cahoon, Heather. “Horsefly Dress.” (2020). Horsefly Dress: Poems. University of Arizona Press, pp. 3–3.

Decker, Aspen & Cameron. (2025, Feb 2). Our Belongings: Sqelixʷ (Salish) Art and Toolmaking [John White Series:Lecture]. Northwest Montana History Museum, Kalispell Montana.

Dempsey, L. (2025, May 8). CSKT Gathers for a Community Staple: Bitterroot. Char-Koosta News. https://www.charkoosta.com/news/cskt-gathers-for-a-community-staple-bitterroot/article_3127b5fa-b576-4c2f-8d2b-482af1cb0a41.html

Hillyer, Carolyn. (n.d.). Her Bone Bundle/si knâmi grendyo. Braided River Books.

Jackson, M. (2019). The Secret Lives of Glaciers. Green Writers Press.

Dr. Nieves Zideño, María, Pickering, Evelyn & Lanoë, François. (2021). Oral tradition as emplacement: Ancestral Blackfoot memories of the Rocky Mountain Front. Journal of Social Archaeology. 21. 146960532110198. 10.1177/14696053211019837.

Dr. Pillay, Srini. (2017). Tinker Dabble Doodle Try. Ballantine Books.

Solcomb, Steve, director. The Story of the Bitterroot. Looking Glass Films, 2004.

Cottonwood Lore -European, American

How to Identify and Gather Cottonwood Buds

Harvesting Notes

The Act of Gathering as Medicine

Making Medicine- Choosing an oil, hot Infusion vs. cold infusion & instructions

March’s Invitation

I love March. The twilight lingers as the earth spins towards the equinox. Dusky pinks and blues in the sky refract in the ice crystals on the mountains and the lakes. The moon rises, an earth-egg cradled in the cosmos, milky and full. The land is still quiet under a restful blanket of snow. But the birds begin to stir: owls mating, flickers ki-ki-ki-ing, snow geese returning in long v-flying formations. I imagine the sun returning on the snow geese’s brilliant white backs.

This is the time I collect my base for my most vital medicine, from the bud of the cottonwood tree. Timing is everything. I pick them right as the sap starts running, and before they break into leaf.

Even while snow still lingers, the buds, fat and sticky, swell with the promise of what’s to come.

They are spicy sweet and resinous like honey.

These buds carry potent healing properties: they’re rich in salicylates, the natural compound that inspired aspirin. Used as an infused oil or salve, they can ease swollen tissue and overheated conditions of the body, like sore muscles and joint pain. They also promote wound healing and can soothe and speed the healing of herpes sores, dry skin, and minor burns.

I have scoliosis, a rod, 5 metal screws in my top lumbar, lower thoracic spine, and a severe pelvic rotation. You know you’re in trouble when the technician shows you mercy after an x-ray. I use this salve on a daily basis to help fight inflammation and pain. Believe me, it works. I like to gift the medicine I make, and have received feedback and a guarantee on all of the ailments I listed above.

Cottonwood Lore

European

In the damp hush of early English spring, medieval gatherers reached for the swelling buds of Populus nigra and Populus alba. Monastic healers and village apothecaries steeped them slowly into rendered fat, coaxing out their balsamic scent to make Unguentum populeum, a salve for bruised skin, aching joints, and the wind-chapped hands winter leaves behind. Herbal writers like John Gerard and Nicholas Culpeper recorded the medicine’s virtues carefully in ink made from oak galls and rusty iron:

Gerard, in his 1597 Herball notes: “The clammy buds hereof before they spread into leaves are used in ointments, and are good to take away inflammation and to ease the paine of the gout.” He records the salves inclusion in remedies for hemerrhoids…(It’s a relief for me just knowing it’s an age-old problem).

Culpeper wrote in 1653, in the Complete Herbal: “The ointment of the buds is very effectual for all heat and inflammation in any part of the body, and for piles.” Culpeper also frames poplar as governed by Saturn, giving it a cooling and restraining quality in mideival humoral medicine.

Four hundred years earlier, in the cloister gardens along the Rhine, the Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen wrote of poplar as a tree of coolness, a quieting presence in a body overheated by fever or rage. Though she did not linger over the sticky buds themselves, she understood the tree’s gentle power to soften inflammation and settle excess fire. In her vision of medicine, every plant carried temperament and spirit. Poplar, growing near water and wind, held a kind of damp mercy.

Poplars, which often grow along rivers and floodplains, move such tremendous volumes of water through their bodies. Each summer day, a full-grown cottonwood draws up hundreds of liters of water and exhales it to the sky. The river climbs through the tree, leaf by leaf, returning to the air. This is an ionic (electric) process. Roots absorb mineral nutrients like calcium, potassium, magnesium and nitrate as charged particles. When ions move across root cell membranes, they create tiny voltage differences. These electro-chemical gradients power transport. Inside the tree, every cell maintains a voltage across its membrane. This potential allows for signaling, growth regulation, wound response, and stress adaptation. When a branch is cut or a leaf is damaged, electrical signals propagate through the plant tissue within seconds, coordinating a response.

So when we speak of a tree’s “field,” we are not speaking metaphorically. A living tree produces measurable bio-electric activity as part of normal metabolism. When we stand among trees, we are in the presence of living systems pulsing with charge and exchange.

In parts of rural England and across lowland Europe, black poplar (Populus nigra) often stood along riverbanks, hedgerows, and the edges of cultivated land. It is a tree of thresholds. Growing where water meets field, where floodplain meets village, boundary trees in European folk tradition stood between the tended and the untamed, holding the line where one world softened into another.

American

Across many Indigenous nations of the Plains, Plateau, Subarctic, and Great Lakes regions, including the Salish, Kootenai, Blackfeet, Crow, Cree, and Ojibwe peoples, cottonwood and balsam poplar have long been gathered as medicine. The rich and fragrant resin is infused into animal fat for salves used on cuts, burns, wind-chapped skin, and aching joints, and in some traditions prepared to support the lungs during lingering winter illness.

Yet the medicine is not only in the chemistry of the resin.

Cottonwood plays a huge role in daily traditional life for many of these people. Along the river bottoms of the northern Plains, cottonwood is an essential tree in Blackfeet life. As described in People Before the Park, Blackfeet gathered the wood for fuel to burn inside tipis, where a steady, manageable fire kept the lodge safe and warm and the people well fed. Cottonwood does not flare or spark like many conifers, which is well suited to a hide lodge. In the book the Kootenai Cultural Committee describes eating cottonwood cambium in the spring time as a food source.

In some Plains traditions, including among the Blackfeet Nation and the Crow Nation, cottonwood is recognized as a tree of deep ceremonial importance. While specific ceremonial teachings are held within communities and not shared publicly, it is widely acknowledged that cottonwood can be used in the construction of ceremonial lodges in certain contexts. This significance extends beyond utility; the tree is approached as a living being, and their use is governed by protocol, respect, and responsibility. What can be said, and what must remain unsaid, is part of the teaching itself.

I’ve personally used cottonwood to make burn bowls- using coals from a fire to carve a bowl in a round of wood. Spoons made this way are also beautiful. In friction fire, the soft, even wood powders easily beneath a spindle, forming the ember. The shredded bark cradles that coal and carries it into flame.

The wood is soft, lightweight and sturdy. Along river valleys, cottonwood’s workable wood became what was needed: a fire-board, a cradle, a drum frame, sometimes loom parts. Shaped by hand because they yielded to the knife. In this way the trees are an intimate part of life along the rivers where they grow.

To gather these tree buds is to move slowly and to tune into small shifts. The way the light lingers just a little longer, the way birdsong returns in threads. Somewhere out there, the bears are waking too. I’ve witnessed bears eating the cottonwood buds after coming out of hibernation, seeking the rich medicine their bodies need to ease back into motion. This is medicine for the body waking up after winter. It helps us prepare for the work that needs to be done in the year to come.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge across the Americas regard bears as a guide to medicinal wisdom. Bears have long been recognized by Indigenous peoples across the Northern Hemisphere as kin, as healers, and as keepers of knowledge. In many cultures, it is said that people first learned about healing plants by observing bears. Bears treat themselves with plants. We come to our wild medicines through observation, relationship, and lived experience.

If you would like to know more about this connection, I have a blog post here about wild crafting ethics and our relationship with Bear. To follow the bear’s path is to walk with reverence, with listening, and with deep-rooted memory.

I would not advise gorging on cottonwood buds as a human, but do invite you to nibble or try one cottonwood bud. You will experience a fire in the belly!

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How to Identify and Gather Cottonwood Buds

Look for black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa) or balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), both common in North America along rivers and moist valley bottoms. If you don’t get to harvest cottonwood buds on time, you can chase spring up the mountains by finding cottonwoods along creek beds and wet meadows.

The buds:

• Appear reddish-brown and are resinous and sticky to the touch.

• Have a strong, sweet, almost intoxicating smell—like honey and cloves.

• Are found at the ends of twigs before the leaves emerge.

Harvesting Notes

• Look for wind-fallen branches. The most sustainable and abundant harvests often come from what the wind has already offered. Walking up a creek or river wash often reveals fallen limbs or whole trees that have slid from the bank. I prefer whole trees, because they have enough stored energy to keep growing. These are gifts of timing and terrain.

  

• If you do take from a living tree- always harvest ethically. Never strip a tree. Take buds from “suckers”—those twiggy clusters that sprout from the trunk—or from shaded buds that won’t receive enough light to thrive. Think of this like pruning. Prioritize gathering from older, well-established trees that can spare the abundance.

• Reciprocity is a responsibility, and it is a lived relationship. I often tend the tree in return by removing deadwood or broken branches, offering care as I receive medicine. Tending the wild is a skill all of our ancestors understood and practiced out of necessity. Learning how to care for the plants we are harvesting ensures their perpetuity, and more vital medicines for generations to come. Speak to the tree. Leave a gift, sing a song, or offer thanks in your own way.

• Timing is everything. Late winter to very early spring is the ideal window—typically February to March depending on your climate- when the sap begins to rise. In northwest Montana, I begin harvesting Cottonwood buds around mid-March. You can also harvest buds in the fall, or any time you find a fallen branch in the winter.

• Know what to look for. Healthy buds are sleek, shiny, and resinous to the touch. When you gently pull them apart, you’ll find tender green leaves tightly folded inside, waiting to unfurl.

  

  

• Avoid unhealthy buds (and prune them when you find them!). Buds that are past their prime or affected by fungal issues often appear swollen or brittle. Their resin may be dry, flaky, or have an off-smell—less like honey and more sour or musty. Some fungal infections are bright orange. If you peel them open, the leaves inside may be brown, black, or shriveled. Leave these behind; they’re not viable for medicine and are a signal to look elsewhere on the tree.

  

The Act of Gathering as Medicine

Much of the healing in medicinal salves begins with the act of harvesting itself. Gathering Balm of Gilead can be a prayer of patience and presence. It is an invitation to gently awaken after a season of stillness.

Spending time in the woods engages your body, mind, and immune system. Walking outdoors supports physical health, and simply being among trees can help regulate your nervous system. Whether through chemistry, light, pattern, or something we do not yet fully measure, our nervous systems tend to soften in their presence.

When we move through the forest with respect, pausing to thank a tree or tend to a broken branch, we’re participating in relationship with our more-than-human kin. The ego-driven “self” softens. This can be useful if we find ourselves stuck in thinking loops. We remember that the self is not solitary but shared, no longer the center, but a thread in a living web. The act of caring for our environment can help us feel that we belong, have meaning and purpose.

Then there is the practice of gratitude itself. Regular gratitude practice has been shown to lower cortisol (the stress hormone) levels. It helps re-frame negative thinking and promotes resilience during difficult times, which can lower our risk of depression. These qualities also benefit the body: grateful people often experience lower markers of inflammation, likely tied to reduced stress and improved emotional states. Lower stress also enhances immune function. Some research links gratitude with better cardiovascular outcomes, including lower blood pressure and improved heart rate variability.

It can be hard to do these practices on your own, especially if there is no stimulus to elicit gratitude or tending something outside of our relational “sphere”. Trees can be great companions in these practices.

Let this be a time to reawaken after winter. Move slowly. Notice the details. These buds formed over many months. They ask for our presence, not our speed. Let your thoughts soften. Let your breath match the rhythm of the river.

Making Medicine

Infused oil:

Choosing your oil and handling it properly is of the utmost importance. Most folks don’t realize that oil can go rancid. Balancing choice of oil, cleanliness, climate and organic matter can be a delicate process.

Luckily the cottonwood resin is anti-fungal and can help, but there are a few more tricks to ensure success.

1. Choose an oil to work with:

   1. Jojoba- shelf life: 3–5 years. Extremely stable. Resistant to rancidity. Absorbs well without feeling greasy. Excellent for facial salves or chest rubs

   2. Olive Oil (extra virgin, fresh)- shelf life: 1–2 years. Traditionally used in herbalism. High in oleic acid (stable). Easy to source. Choose high-quality, fresh oil — old olive oil goes rancid faster than people think.

   3. Fractionated Coconut Oil- shelf life: 2+ years. Very stable. Liquid at room temperature. Lighter feel than whole coconut oil, good if you want a non-greasy finish.

   4. Tallow (Rendered Fat)- shelf life: 1+ year if properly rendered and stored cool. Extremely stable saturated fat. Historically accurate for both European and Indigenous preparations. High in vitamins and deeply nourishing for dry or cracked skin.

   5. Oils to avoid, these go rancid faster due to high polyunsaturated content:

      • Grapeseed oil

      • Hemp seed oil

      • Rosehip oil

      • Flax oil

   6. You can insure against rancidity by adding vitamin E oil or rosemary antioxidant extract (ROE) to any carrier oil.

2. Choose a method for extraction:

   1. Cold infusion:

      1. Maximum oxidation control: Lower temperatures mean slower oxidation. Heat accelerates oxidation reactions — even mild heat — so removing heat removes that variable.

      2. Longer potential shelf life: Because you’re not increasing molecular movement through heat, you reduce early-stage oxidative stress on the oil.

      3. Preserves volatile aromatics: Cottonwood buds contain fragrant balsamic compounds. Slow extraction preserves subtle top notes better than heat.

   2. Hot Infusion:

      1. Faster resin extraction: Heat increases molecular motion, helping oil penetrate plant tissue and dissolve resins more efficiently.

      2. Stronger immediate potency: Cottonwood resin is sticky and dense — gentle warmth helps pull more of it into the oil.

      3. Useful in humid climates: Shorter infusion time can reduce exposure to ambient moisture over weeks. Less risk of rot or fungus.

      4. Can Speed up Oxidation in Fats- Tallow is heat rendered, so can handle a hot-process more effectively than a vegetable oil. An extra virgin olive oil must be warmed very carefully. All oils must be warmed carefully, stored cool, and used within the year.

3. Prepare the Buds

   1. Spread them out for 24–48 hours to allow surface moisture to evaporate. Pick a towel you don’t mind getting sappy, or use paper towels.

   2. Do not wash them.

   3. Lightly bruise or crush just enough to expose resin (optional but helpful).

   4. Moisture is the main enemy of shelf life.

4. Cold Infusion Process

   1. Fill a sterilized glass jar to 3/4 with fresh buds (do not pack tightly).

   2. Cover with oil of choice.

   3. Weight the buds below the oil. I like to use a steel spring for fermentation purposes, to keep the buds below the oil. This can be a shot-glass or small dish in the jar.

   4. Place in a warm spot in the house and stir every other day for 4-6 weeks, although I’ve seen some salves go for a year (not recommended though).

5. Hot Infusion Process:

   1. Place a cloth or jar ring at the bottom of a pot.

   2. Set jar inside. Add water to reach halfway up the jar.

   3. For vegetable oils: keep water temperature between 100–140°F (38–60°C). Do not exceed 140°F.

      1. Maintain for: 4–8 hours total
         OR

      2. 1–3 days at lower heat (in a yogurt maker or dehydrator set to ~110°F)

   4. For Tallow: Tallow tolerates higher heat than vegetable oils, but for infusion it’s still best to keep temperatures below 200–250°F (93–120°C) to preserve the resin’s aromatics.

      1. Infusion process can be anywhere from a half hour or as a long as you like.

6. Straining:

   1. Strain through fine mesh.

   2. Press buds firmly — cottonwood resin is thick. Any leftover plant matter shortens shelf life.

   3. Then strain again through muslin or coffee filter. (optional)

Isopropyl alcohol will help clean your pot or jar of the sticky resin.

Uses:

• Balm of Gilead oil is anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and pain-relieving.

• It soothes sore muscles, dry skin, wounds, and sunburns.

• Many people use it topically to support healing of herpes sores (Type I and II), and I’ve received encouraging feedback from friends who have tried it.

• The scent alone is calming: an excellent anointing oil for transitions, grief, or renewal.

March’s Invitation:

If you’re in a moment of transition or awakening March can be a pilgrimage month. The month is liminal, held softly between ice crystals and rays of light that linger ever longer. Draw from the quiet like a deep well. Bathe in the sun beams when you can. Cradle those tiny hopes and dreams, as Mary Oliver says, close to the bone. Let your walks be rituals. Let your hands learn from the trees. Listen for what is just beginning to stir beneath the bark, and within your own heart.

In Blackwater Woods

In Blackwater woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
-Mary Oliver, American Primitive, 1983.

If this medicine speaks to you, I’d love to share more. Your subscription supports a working artist dedicated to her community, both locally and through the web.

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• End Times Fascism- and How the “New Earth” Narrative is Co-opted

• Anger as a Fire that Consumes

• The Alchemical Processes of Grief and Rage in Personal and Social Transformation

• Joanna Macy and the Intersection of Grief and Justice

  • Grief is Feral

  • Grief as the Antidote to Fascism

• Folkloric Practices for Grounding Grief

  • Water- Water as Relative, Water as Witness, Baltic Folk Rituals

  • Stone - Death Ceremony, Teen Rites of Passage, Women’s Circle

  • Ancestors- Healing Robe Ceremony, Keening and Song, Play and Nature Connection

• Conclusion- Parting Ways

I’m in a class titled Native American Resistance for Everyone through Chickadee Community Services, moderated by Chris La Tray, who is Little Shell Chippewa. He served as Montana’s Poet Laureate from 2023-2024.

I enrolled for many reasons, but mostly because—like many people right now—I am feeling the collective surge of rage, fear, and grief.

In class on Sunday someone asked for resources that were “nice” and “easy” to share, because they were having a hard time bringing these (honestly difficult) topics up with friends.

La Tray, in a candid and intimate conversation, said he’s done being nice.

I get it. La Tray tells many stories of other writers talking over him, misinterpreting him…people have been handled gently and still aren’t listening.

I’ve spent most of my academic life studying Indigenous worldviews, however imperfectly. I’m lucky to belong to a state that has written Indigenous Education for All into its constitution. It is a lifelong unlearning. I am deeply embedded in an extractive colonial culture that shapes the structures that I live in and take for granted as “normal”, meaning that it governs ways of thinking and behaviors: how I think about time, productivity, how I relate to people, how I relate to the land. We’ve been taught to believe that justice is something administered by institutions rather than practiced in relationships.

So when I hear people talk about “the world ending,” I think about how the world has already ended—many times over—for First Nations people.

End Times Fascism- and How the “New Earth” Narrative is Co-opted

What we are calling “collapse” is, for many, simply the long tail of an ongoing one.

And yet, here we are, watching the illusion crack. The wizard of Oz exposed. Institutions failing in ways that are now undeniable to the people they were designed to protect.

The question is not whether we are waking up, but what are we waking up into?

A spiritual friend recently sent me a video about “the collapse.” It was framed as ecological truth, dressed in the language of nature and inevitability. The message was that humans have violated natural law and that nature will now correct us.

It sounded ecological. It sounded spiritual.

It was also, on closer listening, a familiar story:
hierarchy is natural, suffering is inevitable, and mass death is simply a re-balancing.

This is what Naomi Klein calls “end times fascism”—the idea that climate catastrophe and social breakdown will justify abandonment, borders, extraction, and the sacrifice of entire populations.

Honestly her work remains one of the more eye-opening commentaries on our current times that I’ve found. Here is her interview with Democracy now:

Trump, Musk and End Times Fascism

If the future is already lost, then cruelty becomes rational. If collapse is inevitable, then solidarity becomes naïve. If we are in the “end times,” then democracy, mutual aid, and justice are luxuries we can no longer afford. Despair becomes a political technology.

And our anger, rightful, necessary anger, is redirected away from systems of power and toward each other, toward scapegoats, toward fantasies of purification and survivalism.

Anger as a Fire that Consumes

Our last class session was with Robert Hall, who works in Blackfeet language revitalization.
He talked about how unprocessed trauma keeps people in fight-mode. Limbic system activated. He explained how on the Blackfeet Reservation there’s a lot of quick, irrational conflict. And then he laughed and said—"we see that in the U.S. too. America has a lot of trauma.”

Maybe you feel that too. I do.

Let’s be honest, the system can handle all of our rage. All of it. We live in one of the most powerful countries in the world. What is our rage going to do against a government that has psy-oped the world? Rage is the point. The system profits off of our rage and then disassociation. That’s why it’s called rage bait. We can doom-scroll, rage-post, say ‘burn it down’ all day, but really we just rattle the cage.

Like that Smashing Pumpkins Song— ‘Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.’”

And we’re still perpetuating these myths. Notice that everyone talking about the “Year of the Fire Horse- go, go, go” is not Chinese and has very little lived experience with that knowledge, nor do they have a relationship with an actual living, breathing horse. If anything they’re adding fuel to an already Yang culture, to a house that’s already on fire.

The system does not fear our anger, but I do think it fears our grief.

The Alchemical Processes of Grief and Rage in Personal and Social Transformation

I’ve been thinking about this all alchemically.

Alchemy provides a language for transformation: describing how breakdown, purification, and reintegration are necessary phases in the making of something whole. Metaphorically, of turning lead into gold.

Anger is fire. It burns away the dross. It’s the first stage in transforming lead into gold. It’s necessary and powerful, but the vibe is low. It’s dealing directly with lead.

There’s 4 major stages of alchemy, and 7 operations within them. This stage is called Nigredo- Decay, rot, shadow, dismemberment of the false self. Everything that was taken for granted collapses. Confusion, anger, despair, confrontation with reality. Psychologically it deals with Shadow work. Loss of identity. Naming trauma. Rage.

It’s also known as calcination- burning and heating to ash.

Grief begins here but is not yet processed.

If we apply this idea to a social movement lens, this stage is the exposure of injustice, protest, rupture, refusal and naming harm.

However, this is where many movements get stuck. Rage is necessary, it breaks denial. But if there’s no container it burns people out or turns inward into factionalism. My case in point is how COINTELPRO targeted the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, civil rights groups and anti-war organizers in the 50’s and 60’s. The stated goal by the FBI was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” movements by intentionally creating internal conflict.

Sound familiar? How do the “Techno-Fascists” use their platforms to socially engineer us?

The second phase in the alchemical process requires water.

Albedo- the Water stage. Cleansing. Separation of what is essential from what is toxic. Mourning. Reflection. Slowing down. Psychologically it involves grief, integration, nervous system regulation, learning to sit with pain without discharging it as violence. It makes the next stages of alchemy possible- awakening, reorientation and then integration and embodiment.

Collectively this could look like truth-telling, listening, historical reckoning, relationship repair.

This is where people learn to stay instead of react. It’s also where positionality, land acknowledgments that are lived (not performative), and material accountability begin.

This stage builds the emotional literacy needed for long-term work. Without emotional and relational capacity, movements collapse before structural change can occur.

It’s still winter.
There’s snow on the ground. Water is everywhere.
We’re in a watery season. If you look at astrology we just entered Pisces season.

This is the grief season.
And if you tune in and listen to the land, grief is unavoidable.

The most powerful writing I’ve found on grief, indigenous grief, is in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Noopiming: the Cure for White Ladies. The opening chapter is a powerful metaphor for grief (if calling the narration a metaphor is even at all appropriate anyways) …In the book the main character is frozen in ice.

When we (and I mean generally white folks) are confronted with Indigenous rage, I urge us to remember the grief they and their communities have carried for hundreds of years. My first “awakening” one could say directly witnessed Indigenous grief, at the Baker Massacre Ceremony outside of Shelby, Montana.

Joanna Macy and the Intersection of Grief and Justice

Joanna Macy, one of my heroes, writes that anger is often the first doorway we walk through when we begin to see clearly. Anger tells us something is wrong—it is a boundary emotion, a signal of violated relationship. But it is not the destination. When we stay with it long enough, it opens into grief, which Macy describes not as something to get over, but something to move with. Grief is the natural response to loss when we are still connected to what we love.

Martín Prechtel teaches that we can only grieve as deeply as we love.

Another one of my teachers, Jon Young, understood that collective grief was also necessary. Jon Young is a naturalist, tracker, and founder of the 8 Shields cultural mentoring model, developed from decades of studying how intact land-based cultures transmit knowledge, identity, and belonging. I’ve worked in the 8 Shields model for about a decade now and have experienced first hand how grief processing can work as a social architect.

His central question was:

Why do some cultures produce deeply connected, resilient people—and others produce isolation and burnout?

Young led workshops designed around “Village building”- something that he called Cultural Repair. Within these workshops, collective grief was expected and planned for. With this model, grief is not personal therapy, but a communal regulation process.

When held in community, grief functions as a form of cultural technology rather than a purely private emotion. It metabolizes the shock of injustice, loss, and historical rupture so that people are not left cycling in isolation, where unprocessed grief hardens into rage, numbness, abuse or lateral harm. When we are held in community our capacity to experience grief expands. It helps us see each other for who we really are. Grief restores relational connection.

In many intact land-based societies, grief has structured roles, witnesses, and timelines; it restores belonging, re-sensitizes the body to relationship, and reorients individuals toward responsibility within the collective. Young observed in his research ( he spent a lot of time with the San Bushmen) that grief not only encompassed profound sadness, but also hysterical laughter. Grief restructures brain patterning when supported in community.

For social movements, this means grief is not a detour from political work but a precondition for it: without shared mourning and truth-telling, communities fracture under pressure. With it they develop the emotional coherence needed for strategy, mutual care, and long-term commitment. In this way, grief becomes a vessel that carries movements from reactive rupture toward grounded, durable transformation. Macy understood this well, and designed social gatherings centered around grief.

Let’s apply this idea through the four stages of alchemy: grief opens the body (Albedo), embodiment creates relational capacity (Citrinitas), that capacity allows for durable political work (Rubedo).

The numbness we are encouraged to cultivate—the irony, the detachment, the constant scrolling—that is what severs relationship. Culturally, we avoid grief at all costs. We medicalize it, privatize it, pathologize it, compress it into three bereavement days and a return to productivity.

I’ve facilitated grief circles with women, using Macy’s teachings, and even then some women have opted out because it’s “too heavy” -but the scale of loss we are living inside cannot be processed privately.

And so it leaks out:
as anxiety,
as rage,
as doom,
as dissociation.

Grief is Feral

Now even the wellness influencers are declaring, “the era of light and love is over,” as if grief were a trend cycle. But grief is not aesthetic, grief is feral.

If you really let it in, it will dismantle you. It will undo your timelines, your goals, your sense of control. It will reorder your values without asking permission. It will make you care about things that do not make you money.

It is uncharted because it cannot be optimized, it is immeasurable because it is relational, it is wild because it refuses hierarchy. Grief does not ask which species mattered more. Grief does not calculate which community is most deserving.

It simply says “this mattered” and in saying that, it reveals what relationships we tend.

This is why grief is politically dangerous.

A culture that allows itself to grieve land cannot treat land as resource.
A culture that grieves stolen children cannot accept carceral systems as normal.
A culture that grieves languages cannot accept assimilation as progress.

Grief as the Antidote to Fascism

Grief makes extraction unbearable. Relationships are the opposite of fascism.

Fascism requires disconnection: from land, from history, from each other, from consequence. It thrives on speed, certainty, and hierarchy. It cannot function in a culture that knows how to sit beside loss without needing to dominate it.

This is why Indigenous survival is so threatening to collapse narratives. Because it demonstrates continuity.

It demonstrates that even after genocide, boarding schools, land theft, and criminalization, people are still here—speaking language, tending ceremony, revitalizing governance, raising children.

That is not apocalypse, that is endurance. And endurance is not passive. It is relational, adaptive, collective.

So when we move from anger into grief we are not becoming softer, we are becoming harder to manipulate.

Folkloric Practices for Grounding Grief

Water

Water as Relative

I find nature a powerful ally in grief processing. The land can hold grief in ways that other humans aren’t ready for. When we treat land as a relative, we can go to the land when we need a friend.

In working with albedo, the purification process in alchemy, I find cultivating a relationship with water is helpful. This can look like greeting a body of water when you meet them. I personally say a prayer of gratitude every time I cross a body of water- even on the highway. When I traveled to hotsprings in Mapuche territory in Patagonia,Chile, we had to cross a lake. My Mapuche guide instructed me not to touch the lake immediately. First there was a song. Then offerings. Then a greeting. The lake was a being that required ceremony.

Worldwide, there is a growing movement to recognize bodies of water as living entities with legal standing. The Whanganui River in Aotearoa has personhood. There have been efforts by tribal nations to advocate for similar recognition for rivers in what is now the United States. The book Is a River Alive? asks us to reconsider what it means to be in relationship with water rather than in control of it.

Water as Witness

Intuitively, I have always gone to water in the hardest moments of my life. Simply watching water can be a powerful meditation.

Different bodies of water hold different emotional textures.

A lake invites stillness. It asks you to sit, to listen, to feel how much is held beneath the surface. My relationship with Lake Superior holds an unfathomable amount of grief, I can’t quite explain it. There’s something about the vast expanse of lake and the icy cold water. I’ve stood among her icebergs in winter, mourning the loss of my grandmother, listening to the hollow sound of water carving caves in the ice. I’ve watched storms brew over her water in the summer, my heart with a friend who had just lost her brother.

Running water is different. If your mind is already racing, a river can feel overwhelming—too much motion, too much sound. But if you stay long enough, if you let your breath find the rhythm of the current, the water begins to carry some of the excess thinking away. And of course there’s the ions too, that can help boost mood and promote a sense of well being.

Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula is an old and familiar friend. In the same way the water rushes down the mountain, I find that it rushes through my mind- moving the boulders and logs and polishing the edges of my heart smooth.

In Peru I needed to cultivate strength and a sense of myself. I would stand underneath waterfalls, leaning into the rushing water beating against my back.

Something about the flow of moving water gives grief somewhere to go. There’s something about the darkest depths of a lake that can hold the deepest longings in your soul.

Baltic Folk Rituals

In Baltic folk practice, water is often used to soothe states of agitation, fear, or what we might now call nervous system overwhelm. One traditional action involves slowly ladling water, sometimes over the hands, sometimes into a basin, sometimes onto the earth, while speaking quietly or remaining silent. The emphasis is on repetition, rhythm, and cooling. We can think of this as a somatic practice.

In Latvian folk belief, water gathered at specific times, like morning dew, spring water, water taken before sunrise, was considered especially potent for calming and clearing. The act of handling water deliberately, rather than splashing or rushing, was itself part of the medicine.

There are also traditions of washing the face or hands three times, or pouring water across thresholds to release what should not be carried into the home. In some accounts, water is poured while naming what is being let go.

What is important in Baltic contexts is that water is relational and animate.

For me, this resonates with grief work because anger dysregulates the body. It creates heat, pressure, and looping thoughts. The repetitive motion of ladling water gives the mind something to follow that is not the grief story itself.

Stone

One of the most enduring practices I’ve learned from Joanna Macy is the building of grief cairns. I have used this practice as a guide, with teenagers and women’s circles, and I’ve been guided into this practice in fasting ceremonies.

Joanna Macy speaks about grief needing form, needing containers that allow it to be expressed collectively. One of the practices she offers is the building of grief cairns—small stacks of stones where each stone represents something mourned.

A species.
A place.
A relationship.
A version of yourself.
A future that will not happen.

You place the stone down. You say it out loud or you don’t. You let the weight register in your hand before you release it.

I have found that stacking stones externalizes what otherwise stays lodged in the chest. It makes grief visible without making it a spectacle. It creates a temporary monument that can return to the land without becoming a permanent claim.

The impermanence is important.

Death Ceremony

I participated in a four-day, four-night fast with the Animus Valley Institute as part of a week-long immersion in grief work. A death ceremony. During the fast my guides instructed me to build a wall from stone. Each stone represented a way I had been hurt.

This worked for a while, until I ran out of stones. Spontaneously, I began placing stones for the ways I had hurt others.

That shift changed the entire structure. The wall stopped being a record of injury and became a field of relationship. Grief moved from something that had happened to me into something I was accountable within. As I mature and come to terms with my own pain, I realize that in order to heal from the past, the parties involved must relinquish their side of the story.

Grief cairns are not about fixing anything. They are about witnessing what has been lost and what we are responsible to now.

Teenage Rite of Passage

I have facilitated this practice with teenagers in rites-of-passage contexts. In one ceremony we asked each teen to choose a stone that represented their grief and carry it up Nassukoin, the tallest mountain in the Whitefish range, in silence. Silence was a ritual boundary rather than a punishment; it created a container where no one had to perform their pain for others and we needed the kids to really focus on what they were carrying.

Not everyone summited. Staying behind with those teens taught me as much about grief as the cairn itself. Grief is not a summit experience.

In later years I witnessed the stacking of the cairn and the power of this ceremony. For those teens the cairns marked their sorrow of stepping into adulthood. They were cognizant of a threshold- of a childhood now only a memory for them. As guides, we trusted in the power of witnessing, the bonds of friendship in the group, and the nature Connection practices we facilitated, to alchemize their grief. When we build a cairn with other people it becomes a form of solidarity that does not require agreement, only care.

Women’s Circle and How Our Hands and Hearts Transform Grief

In a women’s circle, I instructed everyone to sit with Flathead lake, meditate on their grief, and ask for a stone. We then wet-felted wool around the stones. Through water, friction and warmth we encased their sadness in a soft layer of wool. Hair and fiber have long been vessels for grief in many cultures. Once the stones were encased in felt, we cut them out to create a pouch: a soft and furry amulet holder. The stones were then placed together in a cairn and the grief was shared across the circle. What struck me was how often the size and shape of the chosen stone seemed to mirror the grief the holder carried.

That is the intelligence of this practice: the body knows what it is holding long before the mind can articulate it.

Ancestors

Healing Robe Ceremony

Years ago I walked into a circle with a buffalo robe laid out on the ground. My small group was to participate in a healing blanket, or robe ceremony, and I was the one to be wrapped in the buffalo robe. The practice draws from several different traditions that have sometimes been brought together in inter-tribal or cross-cultural healing spaces. There isn’t one single universal name for the ceremony, and the specifics vary a lot depending on who is holding the practice. A Black woman from the Southern U.S. in our group understood the ceremony.

I will explain my experience and the knowledge I gained from this particular, individual experience, and how it relates to my understanding of how grief work intertwines with ancestor work.

As we stood in the circle our guide explained what we were to do, and why we were doing it. I was to be wrapped in the buffalo robe. The other people in our group would walk in a clockwise circle around me and cry their grief for the destruction of the natural world. Their wailing was intended to call the ancestors into the space for healing. To aid in the ceremony, participants took a shot of vodka. Understanding my personal lineage and ancestral trauma, I politely declined the vodka.

The buffalo robe felt like the best hug I’ve ever had. Warm, enveloping, safe. It evoked a bodily memory older than language, something like the feeling of being in a cave or deep shelter. People started crying. I remember intense feelings of grief welling up in me: despair for their pain and suffering and also an incredible sensation of love. If you’ve experienced magic mushrooms, perhaps you know what I’m talking about. This was a full-bodied, relational sensation of connection rather than an altered state; I was completely sober, yet it carried the clarity and depth that people sometimes associate with entheogenic experiences.

I understand that immense love to be the ancestors responding to our group’s collective grief.

Keening and Song

Across many cultures, grief is expressed in sound. Keening, wailing, and communal song function as technologies of the body that move sorrow through breath, vibration, and rhythm. In Irish traditions, keening created a sonic container where the bereaved did not have to hold their grief alone.

Keening was a recognized and skilled role within Irish society. The bean chaointe—the woman of the keen—served as a ritual grief specialist who gave voice to the loss on behalf of the entire community. She was often invited to wakes and funerals, sometimes compensated for her work, and expected to know the genealogy, stories, and character of the person who had died. Through improvised poetic lament she named the dead, called their ancestors, praised their deeds, and articulated the rupture their passing created. In doing so, she carried cultural memory at the threshold between life and death.

The structure of a keen created a container for grief. Moving between chant, speech, and wail, it synchronized breath and emotion across those gathered. The keener held the intensity so that others could join without becoming overwhelmed, redistributing the weight of loss across the social body. In this way keening functioned as communal nervous system regulation long before we had language for such a thing: it allowed grief to move, to be witnessed, and to reintegrate the community after rupture.

The suppression of keening in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under both ecclesiastical pressure and colonial regulation, represents the loss of a relational technology for processing grief. When communal lament was replaced with privatized mourning, individuals were left to carry sorrow alone, and the social function of shared emotional release diminished. Remembering keening is therefore not an exercise in nostalgia but a recognition that grief was once vocal, collective, and structurally supported.

Contemporary research echoes what traditional cultures have long known: when people sing together, heart rhythms and breathing patterns begin to synchronize, creating a physiological sense of safety and belonging.

Play and Nature Connection

A part of grief work can be lineage work. For many of us, this is where the root of most personal grief resides. My relationship to ancestors has not come through genealogy charts or archives, but through landforms.

At Loughcrew Cairn T in co. Meath, Ireland, my mother and I climbed over the portal stone and into a neolithic passage tomb where a small group of German pagans were singing and drumming inside the chamber. They invited us in. Outside, Catholic school girls in uniforms ran up and down the mound, laughing, climbing, turning the ancient tomb into a playground.

It was one of the clearest expressions of continuity I have ever witnessed: ritual and recess happening at the same time. The sacred was not separated from the everyday. The dead were not separated from the living.

As adults we tend to approach grief and ancestry with a kind of heaviness, as if reverence requires solemnity. But children understand something we forget: care and play are not opposites.

I learned this while teaching outdoor education to young children. Through free-play, I discovered the joy of fairy houses. I was particularly moved by how these children treated their fairy houses with so much care. They would find the most precious treasures and arrange them so delicately: tiny offerings—feathers, petals, bits of moss—were arranged as if the fairies truly lived there.

Reading Max Dashu’s Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion later, I found language that resonated with what I had witnessed. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic tradition, the beings that English later called fairies are known as the Aos Sí and the Sìth—names that are inseparable from the landscape itself. The word sí/sìth refers to a mound, hill, or ancient earthwork, often places of burial and deep time. These were understood as inhabited sites, thresholds where the human world meets what is older and unseen. To speak of the “people of the mounds” is to acknowledge a cosmology in which land holds memory: the ancestors, their presences, and their stories dwelling within the earth. From this relationship emerges the enduring association in folklore between burial mounds, the dead, and the hidden folk.

I began making a small dolmen form as a fairy house-stacking three stones and a capstone, a miniature megalith -as a personal grief practice shaped by what I had learned from land, from children, and from story.

I would wash the stones with water, as one washes a body. This was long before I was aware of the Baltic water rituals. I would leave small offerings inside my mini dolmen: a flower, a chocolate, a lock of wool.

In play therapy, we understand that children process what they cannot yet speak through arrangement, repetition, and miniature worlds. A child places a stone, a leaf, a feather with great deliberation. They build, they undo, they rebuild. Nothing is permanent, but everything is meaningful. The scale makes the feeling manageable; the act of making gives form to what is otherwise diffuse in the body.

When my grandmother died I constructed this fairy house for her:

Seen this way, cairns, fairy houses, and small offerings externalize relationship so it can be touched, moved, and shared. They allow grief, curiosity, and reverence to coexist without needing to be explained.

In Conclusion- Parting Ways

These practices make a grammar for grief.

Water teaches us to move through our emotions fluidly, and stone teaches us to hold our emotions without collapsing.

If anger is the fire that shows us what is wrong, grief is the water that keeps that fire from consuming everything. Grief slows us down enough to remember relationship. It returns us to accountability. It asks: what do we love enough to protect?

A people who know how to grieve together cannot be easily divided.
A people who know how to sit beside loss cannot be easily manipulated by collapse narratives.
A people in relationship with land cannot be convinced that extraction is inevitable.

Grief reorganizes value. It makes certain kinds of work impossible: work that requires us to ignore suffering, to treat land as dead, to treat each other as expendable. And it makes other kinds of work unavoidable: mutual aid, language revitalization, tending water, raising children who know where they belong.

This is why grief is dangerous to fascism: It restores memory and it restores relationships.

Not apocalypse.
Continuity.

We are not at the end.
We are at a threshold.

Winter is the season where water holds its breath beneath ice.

When illusion melts, what remains is relational responsibility: to each other, to the land, to the futures that are still possible.

The new year, as we like to say, is like a baby—fresh and new and full of possibilities. Like the Sun tarot card in the major arcana: a shining child astride his steed, illuminated by divine and holy light. We did it. The sun is returning. Let us make ourselves new again in the darkest depths of winter—lest the labor pains required to birth this child become too painful, too dangerous, too bloody.

Lately, I’ve been mulling over the myth of Taliesin, the Welsh poet nicknamed Shining Brow, whose words and knowledge have survived for over a millennium. Frank Lloyd Wright built a grotto named for him. This myth is the first lesson Phillip Carr-Gomm teaches in the worldwide Order of Ovates, Bards, and Druids. Taliesin was born from the womb of the mother goddess Ceridwyn. The story, of course, is more complicated than this. Taliesin tricked her, and Ceridwyn was bound and determined to kill him—but upon seeing the fair face of the poet, she instead sealed him in a hide bag and cast him out to sea.

But it is not Taliesin who has held my attention.

No, the figure who spurns this old myth forward is the darkness itself. Avaggdi, Affagdu, Morfran. His name means Utter Darkness, derived from y faggdu, ‘a night of unordinary darkness’. A child born as one of a set of twins to the mother goddess Ceridwyn. His twin sister is exquisitely beautiful. Avaggdi is hideous—so ugly that no one can bear to look upon him. Ceridwyn is heartbroken for her son, seeing only an eternal life of pain and suffering before him.

If only she could grant him divine wisdom, something to bring peace to his malignant brow.

She gathers specific herbs under specific moons and brews a potion in a cauldron to call upon the AWEN, the sacred union of masculine (au) and feminine (wen). The cauldron must be brewed for a year and a day. But Ceridwyn, being a mother goddess, cannot toil over it herself. She finds a beggar boy in the forest, collecting wood for an old man, and beguiles him with warmth, shelter, and food in exchange for watching her wisdom stew. A year and a day pass, and Ceridwyn returns to the cabin with Avaggdi.

Here is where the myth leaves Avaggdi.

The boy is startled, or perhaps nervous, by their arrival. He burns his thumb on the brew and instinctively sucks three drops of the potion. In other versions of the myth he steals it outright. The cauldron wails and shatters. Its poisonous contents flood the valley below, sowing chaos and destruction in their wake. The boy, granted knowledge of all things—shapeshifts to escape the raging pursuit of Mother Ceridwyn.

Eventually, he is reborn as the shining poet Taliesin.

But what of Avaggdi?

We become so distracted by the hero and his transformation, how he beat the odds and emerged triumphant. Avaggdi remains. Not redeemed. Not transformed. Not even killed. His home is poisoned, and his mother now carries the child she once tried to destroy.

Utter Darkness later appears on the battlefield in Arthurian legend as Morfran: a demon of war and devastation, a figure of hideousness and beastliness.

I know Avaggdi well. When I read myths, I understand that every character can be an aspect of myself. And when twins appear in story it is often a sign that we are being shown the full spectrum of human nature, both what we celebrate, and what we abandon so that something shinier can survive.

Perhaps it is my own struggle with darkness that makes me think of Avaggdi. The years of pain and addiction that have made me brittle. The darkness that I carry that I tried my best to ignore. It is shameful to have a life so beautiful and blessed and still to be consumed by pain, anxiety and depression. My family’s patterns are to sweep it under the rug and perform, and finally generations of that behavior caught up to me.

My own mythic cauldron shattered in a house fire.

I watched everything I had collected, built, made, and loved reduced to cinders. What hurt most was not the loss itself, but the knowing: I had caused the accident. I carried the weight of having harmed others, of having brought fear and trauma into the lives of my friends. In the year that followed, my nervous system lived on edge. Panic rising at every small mistake, convinced I had burned something else down, convinced I would always be the one who ruined things.

This is how Avaggdi survives in us.

This is the part of us deemed too dangerous, too unsightly, too inconvenient to be included, and we fix, fix, fix it until it erupts, until the cauldron breaks, until poison floods the valley.

During that horrible year I read a book that has much to do with Avaggdi. Martin Shaw’s Courting the Wild Twin—the idea that each of us carries an untamed, often exiled counterpart who holds our vitality, grief, and unassimilated truth. The Wild Twin is not the self we present to the world, but the one who lingers at the edge of the forest, carrying what could not be made acceptable.

Shaw suggests a regimen of baths- the first of lye, the second of milk, and to repeat until our beastliness is shed. The image stays with me. Not of purification, exactly, but of contact. Of staying with what burns and what nourishes, again and again, until something changes.

Taliesin does speak of Avaggdi in his poetry. From the Book of Taliesin:

Until death it shall be obscure -

Afagddu’s declamation:

skilfully he brought forth

speech in metre.

Avaggdi became a poet. How, we will never know. When I enter the myth as Avaggdi, I see the cauldron break and my home destroyed with the poison of the brew.

There is nothing to do but to walk among the suffering.

Perhaps here is where Avaggdi gained his wisdom.

The horrors of the past year ask to be witnessed. No magic potion will grant us divine wisdom, no turning of the calendar will undo what has already happened. I recognize Utter Darkness now—not as something to be eradicated, but as something that demands our presence. As we step into another year marked by war, ecological collapse, and collective grief, perhaps our resolutions need not be promises of self-improvement or brightness. Perhaps they can be quieter vows: to stay awake, to tend what has been broken, and to refuse the comfort of forgetting.

My resolution is not to transcend it, but to remain in relationship—to walk among the suffering without turning away, to refuse the old bargain that trades wholeness for a patina shine. If Avaggdi is still with us, then perhaps this is the work of the year ahead: not to become new, but to become honest

.

Where will they den? I wonder. Grizzlies usually dig into deep snow on north-facing slopes, using it like a blanket. They should retreat about now, the first week of December, after slurping up the gut piles left from rifle season.

Lately, I feel like a bear myself. I’m strung out from a long fall—starting school, moving into my rental, harvesting, hunting. I am satisfied. The freezer is full of elderberries, golden chanterelles, venison, and whitefish. My hyperphagia has culminated in feasts with friends.

I haven’t spent a full weekend at my rental since September. Torpor sets in with the dwindling light. My instinct to sleep pulls stronger than the need to do the dishes. I long for slowness, for stillness—but there is always more to do in the incessant hum of modern life to keep myself alive.

I feel like an ambulatory bear with no place to den.

Humans and bears have been shaped by the same topography, watersheds, food sources, and life-ways for millennia. A recent study on the central coast of British Columbia found that genetically distinct groups of grizzly bears map almost exactly with Indigenous language territories. Where one group of people lived, spoke, and traded, the bears in the same area formed their own genetic group. (Berge & Class, 2025).

The study is groundbreaking. It supports an Indigenous understanding of our ecosystems as kin-centric. Jennifer Walkus, a Wuikinuxv Nation council member and one of the study’s co-authors, explains in National Geographic: “Our elders said that bears taught us a lot about how to live here—what we could eat, where we could stay. We just have a lot of the same needs.(Berge & Class, 2025)”

It’s no wonder, then, that across the northern hemisphere, there are stories of a human woman marrying a bear. The oral tradition stretches from Siberia to the Pacific Northwest and may be one of the oldest stories from the boreal north. In these tales, a woman enters the bear’s community, learning that bears are not simply animals but people with relationships, responsibilities, and teachings of their own. The story reminds us that you cannot live well on a land you have not learned from (Mann & Kailo, 2023).

This story ends tragically. It has haunted me from the first time I heard it, as a fourth-grade student in Bigfork Public Schools. My teacher had returned to Montana after he taught in rural Alaska to pay off student loans. That same year we made a quinzee in the school yard. Years later, I would teach Outdoor Education for him and ask him to tell the story again, hoping to hear it with adult ears.

As with all stories, the lessons must be lived.

While working with Ravenwood Outdoor Learning Center, I taught survival skills—shelter-building, friction fire, hunting, and tracking. I learned to harvest roots, bark, and staves, make herbal medicine, and turn clay into cooking pots. In that container I felt comfortable sharing this knowledge, but I find it difficult to share these skills to a broader audience. I have gained skills that I will not advertise, nor teach.

One of my teachers came from Alaska. He had stories of living in the bush with only his knife. He taught me how to open a birch tree carefully, when to wait and when to harvest. He taught me to dig roots, clean them, and fold bark into a basket, stitching the rim with the root we dug.

Good birch is increasingly harder to find in my bio-region. We are witnessing the recession of our glaciers and the slow decline of the forests that grew in their shadow. One glorious May day, at the edge of a forest burned the previous year, I plunged my knife into a mother tree’s bark. Red sap welled out like blood and tears. In that moment, I felt her presence, her life, and the weight of taking. I happened to be mushroom hunting with one of the Flathead National Forest’s most experienced tree biologists, who assured me the tree wouldn’t survive their injuries from the fire…yet I still wonder if the tree would have survived if I had spared her my knife.

“What do you think of this?” My friend sent me an article with a photo of a beautiful young woman with a willow basket full of acorns. The subtitle read- “Middle class foragers are desecrating the countryside by copying influencers who romanticise berry picking- and are even poisoning themselves in the process. (Sachdeva, 2025)”

I immediately thought of Bear Root- Ligusticum porteri - a lovage with similar qualities to lomatium like our Big Medicine, also known as Osha. Osha’s roots are pungent and resilient, warming the lungs and opening the sinuses. Bears dig it up after hibernation, chewing the roots or rubbing the mash into their fur—behaviors thought to cleanse and protect them. In many Native traditions, observing bears taught people how to use the plant medicinally (Sewell, 2024).

Osha cannot be cultivated domestically. It is slow-growing and sensitive to overharvesting. The root’s popularity surged with the herbalism trend and is now a threatened species. Centuries ago, Romans did the same with similar Mediterranean roots, ignoring the Greeks’ careful traditions. They dug, dried, and exported without attention to timing or abundance. The plant eventually became extinct, remembered only on a Roman coin (Mark, 2023).

In The Woman Who Married a Bear, the young woman lived for many seasons among the bears, learning their ways and raising a child in their community. Her brothers, worried for her after she did not return from berry picking beneath the midnight sun, eventually tracked her to the bear village. To their horror they saw her living with the bear and his family.

In fear and anger, they ransacked the village, killing the bear husband and other members of his community, and dragged their sister and her child back to the human world. What was meant as rescue became devastation.

I think of being raised Indigenous, and how these stories must have been told to my foremothers as they grew into womanhood—lessons woven into daily life, rhythm, and ceremony. They were not warnings on a page or rules to memorize; they were lived teachings, stories that shaped their understanding of the land, of kinship, and of responsibility. Going back to these stories, listening to them, learning their rhythms, I feel like a toddler again: curious, eager, and unsteady in my understanding.

As a modern white girl, so far removed from these ways of knowing, I am a toddler. I stumble through the woods with ego: self-centered, hungry for experience but unaware of consequence. How much have I taken from the land without giving back, performing rituals for an algorithm, curating a version of myself that seems exotic, adventurous, wise? I see it constantly on Instagram: berry-picking influencers, aestheticized foraging, wildcrafting reduced to content, disconnected from the relationships, responsibilities, and reciprocity that sustain life.

Mitakuye oyasin—“all my relations.” There’s a handful of times a white dude, fresh from Standing Rock, has thrown this phrase at me like a talisman, as if it alone could grant him wisdom. This is not how Oceti Sakowin understand the phrase. All my relations is not a gesture for performance. The phrase underpins their social structure, identity, and spiritual practices, teaching that being a good relative to all beings is essential. It is a commitment, a responsibility to honor and maintain the relationships that sustain life—between people, animals, plants, and land. It is active, lived, and demanding. Words alone do not suffice; presence, care, and action are required.

For the Blackfeet, the teachings and knowledge were there- the ceremonies, the stories and the values- but the bison had been hunted to extinction. Without the physical presence of the animals, the lessons could not fully take root. To bring the bison home required unraveling the fences that held the cattle industry on the reservation together. Bison directly challenged ways of relating to the land under modern colonialism—a system the community depended on to survive. Over the course of decades, tribal members gathered people to commune with the bison in hopes to foster connection. They maintained an essentially wild herd using cattle-ranching techniques, navigated land ownership, leases, and federal oversight, and slowly, deliberately, released the bison into their natal habitat. Bring Them Home documents this process on film and is streaming on PBS.

So how do we, like bears without a den, find our own way home? What stories will guide us—the pink circles of our Instagram feeds, or the ancient myths and teachings buried beneath the rubble of modern culture?

I believe returning to mytho-poesis is where we begin.

Mytho-poesis is the practice of making and inhabiting myths—not as dogma, but as living guides. It asks us to engage with stories actively, to let them shape how we move, act, and relate to the world. Through mytho-poesis, we reclaim imagination, ethics, and agency: learning from the lessons encoded in traditional tales, like The Woman Who Married a Bear, while cultivating our own stories rooted in place and relationship. In wildcrafting, this means attending to the land, the plants, and the animals with care, creating a dialogue between ourselves and the more-than-human world. Myth becomes a teacher, and story-making a practice of ethical presence, guiding us from ego-driven taking toward reciprocity and kinship.

Make your own stories with the land. When I taught nature connection practices, I rarely gave someone the name of a plant outright, because we often stop at the name. Once we know a “name,” we can show it off—a done deal, botanical trivia won. But to name something in your own way, based on your own experience, is entirely different.

We’ve recently lost a canon of local herbalism. Tom Tracy of Swan River Herbs passed away in the first week of December, leaving behind The Forest Pharmacy, a treasure trove of knowledge. What I most appreciated about Tom was his connection to the energies of plants. He opened a world to me where I could intuitively tune in to a plant’s presence and embody their energy. Tracy was a Vietnam Veteran, and healed his PTSD in this way.

Learning to read the stories on the land is also essential for wild crafting. I’ve been harvesting the same golden chanterelle patch for most of my life, for about 25 years. Over that time, I’ve watched logging fragment the forest, sequential lobster mushrooms parasitize the chanterelles, and land be privatized. I am extremely protective of this patch. When I visit, I carry all this knowledge with me, along with awareness of the deer that feed on the mushrooms. I pick a few to share, toss bits of mushroom gills to the edge of the patch, leave the mushrooms on the edge alone and let the next flush be.

In many ways, mytho-poesis asks us to become like the bear again. Like the bear-woman, although we may be more like the bear who can’t quite find her den. The one who circles the hillside again and again, sniffing for a place that feels like home, pawing through roots and leaf litter, trying to remember what her ancestors once knew by instinct.

That’s where many of us are now—wandering, relearning, returning to skills and stories that once lived in our bones. We fumble. We make mistakes. We feel like toddlers in the forest, unsure of our footing, naming things wrong or not at all.

Being a toddler in the woods isn’t wrong.The land exists as a teacher, a relative, a mirror. We are learning, growing, stumbling, and discovering how to relate responsibly to the world around us, moving from a culture of consumption to a culture of kinship. Eventually we will grow into maturity- learning boundaries and carrying more knowledge and responsibility. We learn to move slowly, to pay attention, to sustain the cycles of life. We braid together story, presence, and care until our actions—harvesting, walking, observing—become prayers of reciprocity. Like the bear, we too are a keystone species.

Wildcrafting, like mytho-poesis, asks us to inhabit a story. We become, in our own imperfect ways, stewards of life, participants in a network of kinship older than us, wider than us, and far more enduring than our short human lives. Step lightly. Listen deeply. Make your own stories with the land, and let the land make its stories with you. Gather not to take, but to belong. Let your knife, your footprints, your hands and your stories leave traces that honor what has been given and invite what will come. Let your gathering be a prayer, your presence a witness, and your life a myth worth inhabiting.

Berge, C., & Class, J. (2025, August 19). How Indigenous knowledge is helping to protect Canada’s grizzlies. Travel. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/indigenous-conservation-could-mean-richer-wildlife-tourism-in-canadaf

Mann, B. A., & Kailo, K. (2023). The woman who married the bear. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197655429.001.0001

Mark, J. J. (2023, July 10). Silphium. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Silphium/

Sachdeva, M. (Ed.). (2025, October 22). Middle class foragers are desecrating the countryside by copying influencers who romanticise berry and mushroom picking - and are even poisoning themselves in the process. Daily Mail. Retrieved December 12, 2025, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-15208363/Middle-class-foragers-desecrating-countryside-copying-influencers-glamourise-berry-mushroom-picking-poisoning-process.html

Sewell, R. (2024, September 27). Bear medicine. NiCHE. https://niche-canada.org/2024/08/09/bear-medicine/

I once studied with a teacher, Don Elzer -of the Wildcraft Forest School, in Lumby, British Columbia. I respect his teachings deeply, and if you would like to learn more, here is the link to his website: http://www.wildcraftforest.com/ForestSchool.html

In an off comment, Don admitted he really didn’t associate with mushrooms. I was floored. How can you not like mushrooms? We humans are totally obsessed. I’ve chased kids through the woods trying to wrangle them back from a mushroom hunt. I’ve lost myself in the woods looking for them. Mushrooms are everywhere in pop culture (and in my classroom! the kids’ art is full of them)...in later years I would even have an Amanita muscaria tattooed on my arm.

His reason? They are decomposers. They decompose through digestion and then consume. He explained in our modern world, our recent obsession with mushrooms is a symptom of a colonial culture that is rotting from the inside out. It was a powerful argument; a kind of sticky mushroom slime that permeates your soul.

It stuck to me. In trying to wipe off the slime I decided to embrace it instead. What if we re-framed our own biological role as humans in our ecosystems? What if our greatest strength as humans are not as biological consumers, but as decomposers?

Let me break it down:

Not as rot or fungus, not as worm or mold... but as hands that disassemble with care. As hearts that offer back what we’ve taken. Decomposers are organisms that break down what has died and return its nutrients to the environment. It’s the dispersal of resources that is so vital for our ecosystems, and decomposers are the crux of that process.

When I lived in Condon, Montana, I would hang my hunted deer for about a week in cold temperatures. During that time, I’d cape the deer and carry the hide into the adjacent woods to flesh and clean it in preparation for tanning. Under the shelter of spruce trees, chickadees would flock to feast on the bits of fat I scraped away. I’ve learned that this hardy little bird can barely find enough calories to survive a winter’s day. In the late November fall that deer fat provides vital sustenance.

Our close brother, the bear, also feasts before the long winter famine. No matter where I’ve hunted in Montana, the gut piles we leave behind are gone within a couple of days—often overnight. I’ve wondered what the human-bear relationship might have looked like before colonization. While information is scarce, I imagine the buffalo jumps and the richness of carcass left behind for the roaming prairie grizzly bear.

When I tan hides with others—scraping, stretching, smoking—our role as decomposers becomes a cultural act. Hides are the oldest human textile on earth and one of the most durable textiles. In hide tanning we are caretakers of a cycle. Each tendon pulled, each bit of grain scraped away, reminds me that decomposition is creative. It asks us to notice, to respond, to handle the leftovers of life with grace.

We break what was whole and give its pieces to the world again: bones become tools, fat melts into tallow, organs feed the pot, the dogs, the bears. Scraps nourish the soil. Even the hide finds new shape in our hands.

To take on the role of a decomposer is a choice, a radical act of participation. In a time when human systems often disrupt, extract, and discard, this role offers a different way of going about it—one grounded in reciprocity, resourcefulness, and regeneration. Choosing to give back, to break down, to redistribute, is a form of resistance.

I recently found a fantastic article titled The Art of Dying:Notes on Collapse and Transition, by Julian Norris. The article explores the restructuring of societies in the face of apocalyptic collapse…because yes, we’ve been here before as a species. Are our systems truly rotting from the inside out like Don said?

The “end times” we cry about won’t be a monolithic, catastrophic end-all be-all like the movies would like us to believe. Civilizational collapse is multi-generational and happens in multiple phases. It’s dynamic, complex and multi-layered. Norris defines different kinds of collapse even- Dissapative and Regenerative. I believe we can use our role of decomposers to restructure these times into a regenerative collapse.

Julian’s Substack

The Art of Dying: Notes on Collapse and Transition

The fallen leaves that jewel the ground…

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9 months ago · 23 likes · 6 comments · Julian Norris

Norris defines Regenerative collapse as “complexity- transforming, pattern shifting…the system sheds unsustainable complexity to reorganize at a different scale or with new emergent properties.”

Imagine your neighborhood has raised enough sheep for each household to have sustenance for one dinner a week for the coming year. You gather, singing, laughing, sharing stories, celebrating the harvest and sustained life these animals have gifted your families. Together you butcher and put away the steaks in a weekend. While you’re packing the meat, another family member or friend is washing the hides, and stringing them up to soften by your hearth as the winter draws in.

As SNAP benefits are canceled and people go hungry, we already see this redistribution happening in profound ways. This year I’ve cleaned 4 hides that came from hunted deer donated to our local food bank.

Decomposers are essential to ecosystem health. Without them, nutrients stall, cycles break, and waste accumulates. The same is true in human systems. When we tan hides, render tallow, compost organs, or return scraps to the soil, we’re restoring balance. We’re reducing waste, deepening local knowledge, and building resilience into our lives and landscapes.

To live like a decomposer is to close loops. To turn excess into offering. To ask: How can I return this in a good way?

As humans, we’ve always had a role in that. It’s what our ancestors did with patience and purpose. After harvesting life, we return it, piece by piece, in gratitude.

Decomposition is emotional, spiritual, and cultural. Humans have long held rituals around it: burial practices, ceremonies around death, composting, even food preservation through fermentation. These are all ways we consciously partner with decay.

Like any skill, decomposition takes practice. I wasn’t born knowing how to scrape a hide, render tallow, or compost organs. I’m disconnected from local, tribal-like organizing and economies based in barter. But these are skills our ancestors honed, and they’re worth relearning. Not just for survival, but for belonging.

The more I learn about ancestral skills, the more I see the symbiotic relationships between humans and decay. Fermentation preserves food, the stinkiest deer hide (within reason) turns into the softest buckskin, burying pottery clay ages it to perfection, indigo has to decay to release the vibrant blue hue. We could even say that mushrooms contributed to our evolution as a species. To practice decay in our lives is not only to participate with our environment and keep resources flowing, but to continue the skills and remember what it means to be human on earth.

In these times we are seeing historical colonial systems teetering on their own demise. Naomi Klein wrote an excellent piece on “End Times Fascism“ and it’s an insightful look at the multiple movements coalescing around the end of the world: the rapture, leaving earth for mars, the sixth great mass extinction. Here in the U.S. we are watching our systems be challenged in unprecedented ways.

I am reminded of one of the lessons I learned in Chile. During the upheaval Pinochet’s dictatorship people would gather in the streets with Ollas Communes (Communal pots). Like soup kitchens and Black Panthers. Like Food Not Bombs and the Occupy Movement. All of these carry the sense of decomposition: take the excess and distribute to the network.

To decompose within our colonial systems is to notice where excess, waste, or concentration of power sits—and to return it, carefully, to the networks that need it most. Land holdings can be decomposed from private accumulation and returned through rematriation, land trusts, or shared community gardens. Knowledge, once hoarded within institutions, can flow freely through mentorship, skill shares, and inter-generational teaching. Food, wealth, and material resources all hold the same potential: when we redistribute them, we allow cycles to continue instead of stagnating under systems built to extract and contain.

At Making Place Montana, a community tool library, hammers, drills, saws, and more circulate through shared hands—breaking down the system of ownership that demands each person purchase everything themselves. By lending, borrowing, and teaching each other how to use the tools, the library supports shared abundance.

Seeds, too, can embody this practice. At Free the Seeds, hosted by Land to Hand Montana, community members spend the year donating, cleaning, and packaging seeds, culminating in a massive gathering and skill share. Knowledge and labor are pooled and redistributed, ensuring that plants (and the skills to grow them) reach new hands, new gardens, and new networks of care.

These gatherings are part of a larger ecosystem of cultural decomposition. Across the country, events like Rabbitstick, Wintercount, Between the Rivers, Saskatoon, Acorn, Elkhorn and so many more, bring people together to share skills, stories, and resources. At these events, nothing is hoarded—every lesson, tool, and craft is broken down and scattered, building networks of care, resilience, and creativity. I want to give a big shout out to Sea Stone Gathering, who has taken these gatherings a step further by raising both funds for, and awareness of, the Chinook Nation’s journey towards federal tribal recognition. Sea Stone is just starting out and leading these gatherings in so many ways.

Community fairs like Barter Fair or the Okanogan Family Faire demonstrates a barter economy. At this gathering, goods, skills, and labor are exchanged without money, creating a system that values reciprocity over profit. Surplus—from handmade goods to food, tools, or crafts—is broken down into shareable pieces and redistributed to others who can use them.

In these circles, excess becomes access. Knowledge becomes nourishment. Skills become networks of care. Through this practice, we begin to see how humans can belong not by consuming, but by returning, sharing, and sustaining the cycles we are part of. Decomposition becomes a radical form of stewardship, a quiet resistance, and a way to belong to each other and the land.

When we honor decomposition in our bodies, minds, and circles, we stop pretending everything must be preserved or pristine. We learn to trust in cycles. We remember that nothing truly disappears, everything becomes something else, and it is our true role as decomposers that allows for this transformation.

In what ways do you see yourself or our community acting as decomposers—breaking down old systems, ideas, or materials to make way for new growth?