Or should the heading more accurately read restatement?
Last call, maybe?
Who can say?
Which translates down to everyone deciding for themselves then having a say, should the individual choose. Opinions are funny that way.
We come equipped.
Gnawing away the precipice of mid-21st
Century providence like we were still tribes compelled by higher powers to scavenge/alter/evolve - ultimately exhaust - whatever earthly magic sustains nearly all life upon it is no good plan.
Getting over ourselves would be wise. There's but to look.
Truth is, construct
fails.
All construct fails, with time.
Living, breathing Earth then digests our myriad leavings and
evolves to suit, best it can.
The Superior Basin taught me that.
Even while granting me experiential lessons that've told the test of time.
What a bargain.
This creative project was conceived as strictly short term, right
down to the bone.
My supply of large format film exhausted and me too, the plan
was to hunker down, be quiet and for modest profit sell fine art prints @ appropriate
galleries around Superior’s basin well into my dotage.
Man plans, god laughs. It’s said.
In any event, what sustainably survives constantly evolves.
In Crossing Open Ground, the late, great
Barry Lopez wrote:
“The interior landscape responds to the character and
subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected
by the land as it is by genes.”
It's been awhile, since last I breathed Superior.
While perched silent beside my beloved Presque Isle River awash in song that predates us.
Yet these relatively few years softened what under crisis began as painful absence into existential embrace everlasting.
Till death do we…
At least one must believe.
Well prior my northwoods adventure decades, the tiny slices of forest and vestige wetland we ran rampant through as children were officially named Preserves. The label proved just barely true, given invasive species of bad disposition and sometimes razor-sharp teeth overrunning the place.
In hindsight, naming those remnants for long gone native peoples added insult to injury. More's the pity.
Yet along the small
river dragging its sorry blood wormed ass through that ragged landscape I first
met the frog & turtle families. Now, lifelong friends.
Scattered empty lots that remained at the burgeoning edge of the supposedly postwar city, we called those “prairies.”
No matter everything we knew about the genuine article derived from 1950's T&V westerns that played over and over again, relentlessly peddling revised foundational myth in ritual black & white to pivotal generations of children via newfound airwaves.
Besides, everyone then knew Indians were red. We'd learned that in Technicolor.
Widescreen.
That was then. This is now.
Today my childhood grass/wetland/wood lives on together in ways it hadn’t previous since 100 yrs. and more before I was born.
Intimate reacquaintance with that landscape proved instructive, constructive and long overdue.
Digital felicity cut fresh trail through regrowth.
The promethean E.O. Wilson wrote:
“Humanity is part
of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we
identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to
discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an
enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.”
Turns out, my every
lifetime moment spent reveling in real world wonder occurred at preserves. I’ve been
nowhere, otherwise unaltered by us.
Is there such a
place left on earth, really?
I can’t see how.
Remnants, all.
From the commonly overlooked…
To magnificence beyond capture.
These decades spent
chasing natural light’s ecstatic truth - which beguiling color
spectrum itself is mostly illusion - then with craft translating caught moments to lasting, universal language have by & large been a blast.
Whether reliant on organically imperfect but undeniably luminous film...
Or wielding light’s digital approximation with felicity and precision:
Always, for to see.
My curriculum vitae begins: "Rendered professionally obsolete no fewer than 3.5 different times by rampaging technological revolution."
Yet somehow, still here. As presently in evidence.
Is what passes for my success
despite of or due to the tsunami of radical change I was made to navigate?
Who can say?
And we’re back to
that.
What’s indisputable is that remnant landscapes continue to collectively inform and will in real time tomorrow only at our discretion today, exercised with cogence informed by uncommonly common human wisdom.
That's a hard row to hoe even without being terminally distracted by compiling graveside grievance
lists while transcribing some Other obsolescent tribe’s names and value to narrative
stone.
Rewriting history is a malign exercise in failure. Authenticity exists to educate.
And it will. Despite us.
The life we claim
to cherish lives on by the skin of our too sharp steel teeth because these few natural treasures
have endured our wrath.
No sustainable
living truth can be found looking backward, regardless how enchanting that might appear.
Worshipping @ the
altar of ghosts because they arguably exist is fatally counterproductive.
So it’s full face forward or nothing, eyes up and wide to the light.
Collectively winging toward an undiscovered country, ever in our hands.
Searching for signs of indisputably perfect light.
