Field Notes: Glacial Awareness

Lessons from Painting a Glacier

Welcome to field notes!

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

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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.

What we are able to perceive is not neutral. It is shaped, limited, and trained, by an empire built on monetizing attention.

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.

What is lost when those languages disappear is not just words, but entire ways of perceiving,

and therefore entire ways of relating.

Attention does something to the boundary between observer and observed. It softens. 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.

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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.