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Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Wildness We Have Forgotten


“Leaning down to sniff a wild rose, I smell instead the dew-damp ashes. It is as though we have built a great bonfire, and we are heaping onto it everything we can seize— hawks and herrings, swamps and mountains, rivers and soil. If I open a book written in our time, and I do not hear the crackle of flames, I soon close it again, not because I enjoy the reminder of havoc, but because I cannot take seriously an art that ignores this holocaust.”
-Scott Russell Sanders

I heard on the radio this morning that the cherry trees are blooming New York City. It is January 8th.

There is something important that we have forgotten, knowledge necessary that we have left behind, there is a language we speak but brokenly, in fragments, in words we no longer know the meaning of. The green tongue of this earth, of the plants writhing from the ground to meet the rain, of the rocks shattering from heat, of our skin planted on earth, our bodies against the ground to share tears, saliva, blood and the cyclic fluids of love. We will forget who and what we are without this certain language, the one with no words.

The moon shines through my cabin window, full but waning. The river is singing to the alder trees with their roots dipping and tangling in the water, their silver bark a glint in the moonlight, their green catkins apparent, even under the snow.

“Again, you say, why do you not become civilized? We do not want your stinking civilization!”
-Crazy Horse

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All writings & posts (c)2007 Kiva Rose
All artwork & photographs (c) 2007 Jesse Wolf Hardin