I walk the same route most days with my dog, around a pond that lives amidst our neighborhood. I like the routine of it. Keeping familiarity with one route, the scope of focus becomes much smaller. I watch the level of the snow as it begins to melt and refreeze each day and night, notice the newly moose-browsed tree limbs, birds that occasionally come in abundance or are moving through. Drifts of snow moved back and forth by the wind, narrowing the path. And the many, many tracks that appear each day, a witness to the aliveness of many creatures spending time in the same place over the winter, or fresh from the night before. Boot tracks, fox, otter, moose (lots of moose), magpie, dogs. Tracks of former presence.
I've been in discussions with my friends from Swan Valley Connections, who do winter tracking classes (I took one this winter and now want to take All Of Them), for a couple years now about doing a workshop focused on tracks as storytelling. I plan to take it up with them again to make plans for next winter. What a timely post then on your part! I didn't know this bit of information as it relates to written language but it makes such excellent and perfect sense.
Can't tell you how much I love Alarcon. He might be my favorite poet.
I'm guessing since you lived in Europe you might have been to the British Museum and seen the Rosetta Stone? It's such a fascinating, obsessive thing: no matter how banal the content, it's clear evidence that people want to communicate with one another. The fact that it draws such crowds partly attests to that reality.
Language obviously fascinates me, being a copy editor, but it's the communication aspect that gets me most. Not written language really, but how people seek to understand, and be understood. To impart meaning to one another, and to ourselves about the world. Maybe it's odd, but the more I think about that, somehow the less the written aspect draws me. Which often feels weird, and yet not. This was beautiful. And also makes me wonder, as I often do, what water calls itself.
Loose me from hard care...
I've been in discussions with my friends from Swan Valley Connections, who do winter tracking classes (I took one this winter and now want to take All Of Them), for a couple years now about doing a workshop focused on tracks as storytelling. I plan to take it up with them again to make plans for next winter. What a timely post then on your part! I didn't know this bit of information as it relates to written language but it makes such excellent and perfect sense.
Freya,
I think differently each time I read your work. Thank you for that.
Can't tell you how much I love Alarcon. He might be my favorite poet.
I'm guessing since you lived in Europe you might have been to the British Museum and seen the Rosetta Stone? It's such a fascinating, obsessive thing: no matter how banal the content, it's clear evidence that people want to communicate with one another. The fact that it draws such crowds partly attests to that reality.
Language obviously fascinates me, being a copy editor, but it's the communication aspect that gets me most. Not written language really, but how people seek to understand, and be understood. To impart meaning to one another, and to ourselves about the world. Maybe it's odd, but the more I think about that, somehow the less the written aspect draws me. Which often feels weird, and yet not. This was beautiful. And also makes me wonder, as I often do, what water calls itself.