I love what you’ve written here. Every time I find someone who has “long eyes” (who can see where humanity has stood for eons), I grieve for those who can only see the sliver of their own tiny lives on the ageless universe.
Perspective is everything. If you were thinking in “artistic” terms, you could see a graphic progression of thought that starts with stick figures, and ends with Michelangelo. Unfortunately, metaphors are always inadequate to reveal what “long eyes” see. When you see your own reflection, you are really looking at the entire human race. We all have more in common than we think.
I have never heard that term "long eyes" before -- what a wonderful perspective. I like to connect with a sense of geological time as much as possible, and that really resonates.
We do indeed have more in common than we think. It's the biggest lesson I hang onto from writing A Walking Life -- all the people I talked with who shared that lesson, that knowing and how they got there, with me. All the little niches and connections they've found that truth in. It really means something. Thank you.
"something about the side that leans into nurturing and caregiving, while finding a way to understanding the side that needs its knowledge and judgment respected and acknowledged" - the balance has always tipped for me toward the former at expense of the latter (there was no clear judgment or trust in my childhood), but lately, I've noticed it tipping back the other way. I think I'm trying to right myself. And then to add to this the trust in the land, that it will hold me. So much to be with. It feels like abundance. Thank you.
That resonates with me pretty strongly. I've always been tipped to the former more than the latter, too, and am finding my tenuous way toward more trust in and respect for my own judgment. It's not easy! Coming to that question as it relates to land was something entirely new, too.
What a marvelous marvelous essay. Moving and beautiful and evocative of — oh so many things and oh so many times I’ve been, or imagined myself to be, or worried about being stuck somewhere— be in deep in the woods on the “wrong” side of a snowy pass, across the country with my kid during a blackout when no planes were flying, or on the way home and wiling to risk crazy driving conditions to “have it over with.” Also the times I had plenty of food, no one was waiting, and I found myself to be relaxed and ever so slightly smug that I could wait the weather out. The contrast is huge and this lovely piece brings it into sharp focus
Being on any side of a snowy pass! Whew, that brings up a lot of older and more recent memories. Those situations are no joke and I'm glad you got them over with at the time. My sister and I once spun out and landed in the ditch during a blizzard -- might have been Lookout Pass but it was many years ago. The only other vehicles were semi-trucks going up and of course they couldn't risk stopping to help. We managed to dig the car out (had a shovel) and then rock it out, but it was lucky the ditch wasn't deeper.
The talk was great. Amazing panel and we all were able to tag off of one another's topics and expertise. And I got to bring up the evils of private land ownership! Helped by a great person from Habitat for Humanity who said in the short term what's really needed is for towns and cities to start donating land to non-profits like theirs because land prices are a huge barrier. I loved her, obviously!
How marvelous to have someone say it out loud: Towns need to donate land to non-profits like Habitat for Humanity. Brilliant. Sounds like a fantastic meeting. Well done you! (Also to get out of the various ditches. Oh the joy of shovels, ingenuity, and a little bit of winter driving recovery experience. Also —a sister.
This is so moving and works on so many levels, as does so much of your writing, Antonia. This will stay with me for a while, as I reflect on it all. Thank you.
Thanks for another wonderful, moving column and such powerful images! And "Buffalo for the Broken Heart" looks like a book I need and want to read. Thanks again.
Thank you so much, Paul. And I thoroughly enjoyed that book. I heard an interview with him by Hal Herring a few years ago and his worldview and perspective stuck with me. I'm glad I got a chance to read it. Maybe that's what the universe had in mind when stranding us! 🦬
Nia… stunning… I have read this and sections more than once… the part about generational trauma hit a note with me. Trust. So much depth to the way you write about trust. *Hat tip* to gumbo, the moon, a ribbon of stars, and landlines. 🙏
Thank you so much, Sean. I'm always grateful for the care and attention you give to words and ideas.
Generational trauma is something that affects a far higher percentage of the human population than I think most people realize. I hope in the coming years there is more research and awareness about it. So many of our problems, individual and societal, are echoes from the past. (Riane Eisler wrote about this in her book "Nurturing Our Humanity," especially about how children raised in domineering, authoritarian households are far more likely to vote for authoritarian leaders. We are, unfortunately, attracted to what's familiar to us.)
I sat with this essay for long Nia. I cried at parts where you wrote about existential fears for your child and the collective struggle of being a parent in midst of war, rampant hate, and climate crisis engulfing the world. The immensity of it all hits harder as it reminds of the constant flooding of the sudarban region lying on the floodplains of Bay of Bengal. I wonder about the families who have lost way too much because of this now insidious shifts of climate cycles. I imagine about their last strings of hope that they cling to so dearly to survive.
I am so glad that you and your kid are safely out of the precarious situation. The local micro-climates are becoming more and more unreliable these days to say the least, as if the earth herself is retaliating to the changes we have been imposing on her landscape. Like you said, we need to develop a deeper more sustainable relationship with her rather than subjugating her to our will. It’s high time we undo the colonial lens of seeing her as inert. It is directly going to impact the life of our children and the generations to come. The awareness is prevalent but there is still so much to be done on policy side of things. This is why I believe so much in your advocacy against privatisation of wild land. It has to start with stop assuming that earth can belong to people with a lot of money.
It is really hard over here Nia. The subcontinent has lost a lot since the last few centuries. Our loss was countered using immense hard work, courage, sweat and blood of our ancestors and ours. The struggle is ongoing, the disparity is stark, there are many ingrained discrimination. The poor people have it the worst. And that’s why the humanitarian advocacy can never stop. There will never be too many voices that demands equity, justice, and accountability.
US media seems very self absorbed, trying to always defend the status quo and in UK it is even worse. I cannot help but feel that lens of prejudice and condescension whenever they come to a head with talking about problems of the global south. Helping others sustain wars have always ensured US trade and policy dominance. As you said, there is never enough grief for it all. The irony is American people are starkly aware of these circumstances and the silence about it all baffles me.
I keep learning so much about ownership and relationships of people with land and all the natural world that it encompasses. I had no idea about these books Nia, thank you as always for being a passionate advocate of all these issues. 💜
Thinking of fireflies on a chilly full moon night 🧚🏽♀️💜
I think about those families all the time, too, Swarna. And every time I turn on my car, literally every time, I think about Bangladesh and all the people there just trying to survive while lifestyles like those most common in my country make that survival almost impossible. It's one of the reasons it's such a travesty that in the U.S. we get very little news from outside of our own country. I live an hour's drive from the Canadian border, and I have trouble getting news from there, even when there are wildfires that couldn't care less about international borders!
When my son was a baby, in around 2008, I used to sob while I was nursing him because I couldn't stop thinking of mothers in Iraq trying to keep their own babies safe while American bombs fell on them. There always seem to be American bombs falling on someone, and violence inflicted on people within these borders. Never enough tears and grief for it all.
That book "Wild Service" was uplifting for me. The essays in it went straight for that land relationship, how we all need access to land to build relationship with it, and only by building that relationship can we start changing the way we think about nature and our place in it. Really good. And Nick Hayes, the editor, wrote "The Book of Trespass," which I LOVED because he kept trespassing on these wealthy private estates and detailing the historical ways in which the land they enclosed were stolen from the people. We need more of those stories! Land ownership is theft (excuse me repeating myself for the gazillionth time!), and until we start facing that reality, it's hard to shift things much.
Off my soapbox, back to thinking of fireflies! ❤️🔥
Holy cow. This was stirring and resonant. That time outdoors, even the exposure to risk and fear, is so important for learning to trust ourselves and trust nature. At the same time, I think often about how people can practice trusting themselves and nature when it is so challenging to access nature or to understand what is truly oneself. I'll be thinking of this piece for a while.
And yes -- barriers to things like nature and places to walk are something I think about constantly. I am lucky to live in a place where I have easy access to places like this, but have lived in many places where I didn't, and that's the reality for most people. Not just physical access, but time and money, too. This doesn't cost me much because it's right there, but if you have to travel somewhere to get to nature, that's a huge barrier. I'm running into more writing right now looking at the reality that if we want humanity to care for nature, humans need to know it, to have a relationship with it. (That book I mentioned "Wild Service" starts out along those lines, after a UN report came out putting the UK at the bottom of nature access for all European countries.) 💚
Nia, I have goosebumps. Your weaving of the micro and macro is riveting. And this:
M
M”What I really wished for was other people. Not because they could rescue us or change what had happened but because the community of others, even or maybe especially in the face of fear, is humans’ most effective evolved survival strategy. Extreme individualism might work in the short term for a rare few people competing on a TV show, but it’s not a trait that has helped humanity survive and evolve, and not one that gets us through the dangers and heartbreaks that span our lives. That would be community. Solidarity. Putting energies to work for one another, not solely ourselves, that’s what has enabled our species’ most powerful problem-solving, creative endeavors, cultures, and survival. Care, not competition.” 🙏🏻❤️
"the nonchalant ways in which dominant culture both takes nature’s, this-world’s, care and bounty for granted and yet doesn’t trust her at all." I love this quote it is such a powerful point and so elegantly put!
Thank you! I'm thinking a lot more about this idea this week. I often think that ownership and domination started thousands of years ago with water, seeds, and women -- life, in other words -- which I've read hints of in some scholarship, but I hadn't really linked it to trust before. I hope more people share their thoughts about it. Thank you for reading!
Wow, I love your reflections on instinct and judgment. I feel like as a woman raised in Christian patriarchy, there was an initial challenge of learning to trust/perceive my instinct, and for a while as I explored this inner world, I felt like I had begun to walk through the world underwater. Like I was making space for my own breath for the first time, and felt sentient in ways I had never felt before, but there was no way for me to be seen or move through the upper, public world. As I advocate for my daughters unique needs, and as I work on a piece of writing I’ve been working on for nearly a year, I have felt that shift toward trusting my judgment, allowing myself to make a way through the physical, shared world, pulling that deep inner world of instinct through the funnel of real-time decisions with real-life consequences, and owning each moment.
Also this intersects profoundly with my own moment of motherhood, navigating the labyrinth of my daughter’s disability, through medically complex challenges. I’ll be reflecting on this while camping in the Uintas over the weekend.
I'm so glad to read this. You're describing some of the deeper thoughts I was having this week, and during the stranded days, about judgment and women (mothers in particular) and how intertwined refusal to trust women is with the refusal to trust nature, only you're describing it better. I think that the parents I know who are handling their child's chronic illness or disability embody this more than anybody else. I've only had a taste of it in a few short-term medical crises and my first baby being born premature. But finding that internal self over and over again through these challenges ... it's so much more. Someone I was describing it to said that when we talk about coming up with a feminine version of the Hero's Journey, what always gets left out is motherhood, when it is in fact a core of the Heroine's Journey.
While I don't get back here as often as I was in the past, I always marvel at how your prose and your photos create such a vivid image of the place you call home. I also enjoyed your fun (since everything turned out) odyssey to conquer the clay.
It seems only fiting to share a pun. It seems that a Montanan "rues" the day when they get caught in the gumbo. Any lover of food knows that you can't make a decent gumbo without a great roux.
I'm glad to see you here, Mark. (I was thinking of you the other day because I had some hash browns and can never forget what you told me about hash browns.) And thank you! It will develop into a great story for my kid, at least, as they grow older.
"you can't make a decent gumbo without a great roux" 😂😂😂
Rob and I followed some friends to the Sweet Grass Hills to spend a few days. On the drive in it started to rain and we got stuck in the gumbo. It was clear the roads had become unusable. The old man with the rental place suggested we pull off and wait until the road firmed up again. :) Instead we managed to get off the gumbo and drive home. Will check out the Sweet Grass Hills another time.
I hope you get there! I was there a few years ago, but on private land. I keep meaning to go back to where there's public access. Pretty incredible place. I'm glad you got off the gumbo! No joke, that stuff.
I love what you’ve written here. Every time I find someone who has “long eyes” (who can see where humanity has stood for eons), I grieve for those who can only see the sliver of their own tiny lives on the ageless universe.
Perspective is everything. If you were thinking in “artistic” terms, you could see a graphic progression of thought that starts with stick figures, and ends with Michelangelo. Unfortunately, metaphors are always inadequate to reveal what “long eyes” see. When you see your own reflection, you are really looking at the entire human race. We all have more in common than we think.
I have never heard that term "long eyes" before -- what a wonderful perspective. I like to connect with a sense of geological time as much as possible, and that really resonates.
We do indeed have more in common than we think. It's the biggest lesson I hang onto from writing A Walking Life -- all the people I talked with who shared that lesson, that knowing and how they got there, with me. All the little niches and connections they've found that truth in. It really means something. Thank you.
"something about the side that leans into nurturing and caregiving, while finding a way to understanding the side that needs its knowledge and judgment respected and acknowledged" - the balance has always tipped for me toward the former at expense of the latter (there was no clear judgment or trust in my childhood), but lately, I've noticed it tipping back the other way. I think I'm trying to right myself. And then to add to this the trust in the land, that it will hold me. So much to be with. It feels like abundance. Thank you.
That resonates with me pretty strongly. I've always been tipped to the former more than the latter, too, and am finding my tenuous way toward more trust in and respect for my own judgment. It's not easy! Coming to that question as it relates to land was something entirely new, too.
No, not easy. And I love the question in relationship to the land and that it came to you. I’m glad you shared it!
What a marvelous marvelous essay. Moving and beautiful and evocative of — oh so many things and oh so many times I’ve been, or imagined myself to be, or worried about being stuck somewhere— be in deep in the woods on the “wrong” side of a snowy pass, across the country with my kid during a blackout when no planes were flying, or on the way home and wiling to risk crazy driving conditions to “have it over with.” Also the times I had plenty of food, no one was waiting, and I found myself to be relaxed and ever so slightly smug that I could wait the weather out. The contrast is huge and this lovely piece brings it into sharp focus
Good luck with your Community walking talk today!
Being on any side of a snowy pass! Whew, that brings up a lot of older and more recent memories. Those situations are no joke and I'm glad you got them over with at the time. My sister and I once spun out and landed in the ditch during a blizzard -- might have been Lookout Pass but it was many years ago. The only other vehicles were semi-trucks going up and of course they couldn't risk stopping to help. We managed to dig the car out (had a shovel) and then rock it out, but it was lucky the ditch wasn't deeper.
The talk was great. Amazing panel and we all were able to tag off of one another's topics and expertise. And I got to bring up the evils of private land ownership! Helped by a great person from Habitat for Humanity who said in the short term what's really needed is for towns and cities to start donating land to non-profits like theirs because land prices are a huge barrier. I loved her, obviously!
How marvelous to have someone say it out loud: Towns need to donate land to non-profits like Habitat for Humanity. Brilliant. Sounds like a fantastic meeting. Well done you! (Also to get out of the various ditches. Oh the joy of shovels, ingenuity, and a little bit of winter driving recovery experience. Also —a sister.
Especially a sister ;)
This is so moving and works on so many levels, as does so much of your writing, Antonia. This will stay with me for a while, as I reflect on it all. Thank you.
That means the world to me, Jeffrey, thank you.
Thanks for another wonderful, moving column and such powerful images! And "Buffalo for the Broken Heart" looks like a book I need and want to read. Thanks again.
Thank you so much, Paul. And I thoroughly enjoyed that book. I heard an interview with him by Hal Herring a few years ago and his worldview and perspective stuck with me. I'm glad I got a chance to read it. Maybe that's what the universe had in mind when stranding us! 🦬
Nia… stunning… I have read this and sections more than once… the part about generational trauma hit a note with me. Trust. So much depth to the way you write about trust. *Hat tip* to gumbo, the moon, a ribbon of stars, and landlines. 🙏
Thank you so much, Sean. I'm always grateful for the care and attention you give to words and ideas.
Generational trauma is something that affects a far higher percentage of the human population than I think most people realize. I hope in the coming years there is more research and awareness about it. So many of our problems, individual and societal, are echoes from the past. (Riane Eisler wrote about this in her book "Nurturing Our Humanity," especially about how children raised in domineering, authoritarian households are far more likely to vote for authoritarian leaders. We are, unfortunately, attracted to what's familiar to us.)
I sat with this essay for long Nia. I cried at parts where you wrote about existential fears for your child and the collective struggle of being a parent in midst of war, rampant hate, and climate crisis engulfing the world. The immensity of it all hits harder as it reminds of the constant flooding of the sudarban region lying on the floodplains of Bay of Bengal. I wonder about the families who have lost way too much because of this now insidious shifts of climate cycles. I imagine about their last strings of hope that they cling to so dearly to survive.
I am so glad that you and your kid are safely out of the precarious situation. The local micro-climates are becoming more and more unreliable these days to say the least, as if the earth herself is retaliating to the changes we have been imposing on her landscape. Like you said, we need to develop a deeper more sustainable relationship with her rather than subjugating her to our will. It’s high time we undo the colonial lens of seeing her as inert. It is directly going to impact the life of our children and the generations to come. The awareness is prevalent but there is still so much to be done on policy side of things. This is why I believe so much in your advocacy against privatisation of wild land. It has to start with stop assuming that earth can belong to people with a lot of money.
It is really hard over here Nia. The subcontinent has lost a lot since the last few centuries. Our loss was countered using immense hard work, courage, sweat and blood of our ancestors and ours. The struggle is ongoing, the disparity is stark, there are many ingrained discrimination. The poor people have it the worst. And that’s why the humanitarian advocacy can never stop. There will never be too many voices that demands equity, justice, and accountability.
US media seems very self absorbed, trying to always defend the status quo and in UK it is even worse. I cannot help but feel that lens of prejudice and condescension whenever they come to a head with talking about problems of the global south. Helping others sustain wars have always ensured US trade and policy dominance. As you said, there is never enough grief for it all. The irony is American people are starkly aware of these circumstances and the silence about it all baffles me.
I keep learning so much about ownership and relationships of people with land and all the natural world that it encompasses. I had no idea about these books Nia, thank you as always for being a passionate advocate of all these issues. 💜
Thinking of fireflies on a chilly full moon night 🧚🏽♀️💜
I think about those families all the time, too, Swarna. And every time I turn on my car, literally every time, I think about Bangladesh and all the people there just trying to survive while lifestyles like those most common in my country make that survival almost impossible. It's one of the reasons it's such a travesty that in the U.S. we get very little news from outside of our own country. I live an hour's drive from the Canadian border, and I have trouble getting news from there, even when there are wildfires that couldn't care less about international borders!
When my son was a baby, in around 2008, I used to sob while I was nursing him because I couldn't stop thinking of mothers in Iraq trying to keep their own babies safe while American bombs fell on them. There always seem to be American bombs falling on someone, and violence inflicted on people within these borders. Never enough tears and grief for it all.
That book "Wild Service" was uplifting for me. The essays in it went straight for that land relationship, how we all need access to land to build relationship with it, and only by building that relationship can we start changing the way we think about nature and our place in it. Really good. And Nick Hayes, the editor, wrote "The Book of Trespass," which I LOVED because he kept trespassing on these wealthy private estates and detailing the historical ways in which the land they enclosed were stolen from the people. We need more of those stories! Land ownership is theft (excuse me repeating myself for the gazillionth time!), and until we start facing that reality, it's hard to shift things much.
Off my soapbox, back to thinking of fireflies! ❤️🔥
Holy cow. This was stirring and resonant. That time outdoors, even the exposure to risk and fear, is so important for learning to trust ourselves and trust nature. At the same time, I think often about how people can practice trusting themselves and nature when it is so challenging to access nature or to understand what is truly oneself. I'll be thinking of this piece for a while.
Thank you! Those are kind words.
And yes -- barriers to things like nature and places to walk are something I think about constantly. I am lucky to live in a place where I have easy access to places like this, but have lived in many places where I didn't, and that's the reality for most people. Not just physical access, but time and money, too. This doesn't cost me much because it's right there, but if you have to travel somewhere to get to nature, that's a huge barrier. I'm running into more writing right now looking at the reality that if we want humanity to care for nature, humans need to know it, to have a relationship with it. (That book I mentioned "Wild Service" starts out along those lines, after a UN report came out putting the UK at the bottom of nature access for all European countries.) 💚
Whew, squeezing my baby during this one.
Oh, I feel you, Kelton. Everything changes, doesn't it? (I feel a strong urge to hug babies right now -- congratulations!)
A scary trip. Glad you made it home.
Me too! Could have been a Subaru advertisement in the end, LOL.
The storytelling in this essay is wonderful. Full of experience, insight, and feeling. Pure gold. The best writing is this outcome.
That means a lot to me coming from someone with a gift for narrative and a great writing voice! Thank you.
Nia, I have goosebumps. Your weaving of the micro and macro is riveting. And this:
M
M”What I really wished for was other people. Not because they could rescue us or change what had happened but because the community of others, even or maybe especially in the face of fear, is humans’ most effective evolved survival strategy. Extreme individualism might work in the short term for a rare few people competing on a TV show, but it’s not a trait that has helped humanity survive and evolve, and not one that gets us through the dangers and heartbreaks that span our lives. That would be community. Solidarity. Putting energies to work for one another, not solely ourselves, that’s what has enabled our species’ most powerful problem-solving, creative endeavors, cultures, and survival. Care, not competition.” 🙏🏻❤️
So grateful for you, Greg, always. 💖
"the nonchalant ways in which dominant culture both takes nature’s, this-world’s, care and bounty for granted and yet doesn’t trust her at all." I love this quote it is such a powerful point and so elegantly put!
Thank you! I'm thinking a lot more about this idea this week. I often think that ownership and domination started thousands of years ago with water, seeds, and women -- life, in other words -- which I've read hints of in some scholarship, but I hadn't really linked it to trust before. I hope more people share their thoughts about it. Thank you for reading!
Wow, I love your reflections on instinct and judgment. I feel like as a woman raised in Christian patriarchy, there was an initial challenge of learning to trust/perceive my instinct, and for a while as I explored this inner world, I felt like I had begun to walk through the world underwater. Like I was making space for my own breath for the first time, and felt sentient in ways I had never felt before, but there was no way for me to be seen or move through the upper, public world. As I advocate for my daughters unique needs, and as I work on a piece of writing I’ve been working on for nearly a year, I have felt that shift toward trusting my judgment, allowing myself to make a way through the physical, shared world, pulling that deep inner world of instinct through the funnel of real-time decisions with real-life consequences, and owning each moment.
Also this intersects profoundly with my own moment of motherhood, navigating the labyrinth of my daughter’s disability, through medically complex challenges. I’ll be reflecting on this while camping in the Uintas over the weekend.
I'm so glad to read this. You're describing some of the deeper thoughts I was having this week, and during the stranded days, about judgment and women (mothers in particular) and how intertwined refusal to trust women is with the refusal to trust nature, only you're describing it better. I think that the parents I know who are handling their child's chronic illness or disability embody this more than anybody else. I've only had a taste of it in a few short-term medical crises and my first baby being born premature. But finding that internal self over and over again through these challenges ... it's so much more. Someone I was describing it to said that when we talk about coming up with a feminine version of the Hero's Journey, what always gets left out is motherhood, when it is in fact a core of the Heroine's Journey.
I hope your camping trip is lovely!
While I don't get back here as often as I was in the past, I always marvel at how your prose and your photos create such a vivid image of the place you call home. I also enjoyed your fun (since everything turned out) odyssey to conquer the clay.
It seems only fiting to share a pun. It seems that a Montanan "rues" the day when they get caught in the gumbo. Any lover of food knows that you can't make a decent gumbo without a great roux.
I'm glad to see you here, Mark. (I was thinking of you the other day because I had some hash browns and can never forget what you told me about hash browns.) And thank you! It will develop into a great story for my kid, at least, as they grow older.
"you can't make a decent gumbo without a great roux" 😂😂😂
I sincerely hope the industry has figured out a less absurd approach to making hash browns than what I witnessed…if we have them, we shred our own…
Homemade is the only way I want hashbrowns now!
Rob and I followed some friends to the Sweet Grass Hills to spend a few days. On the drive in it started to rain and we got stuck in the gumbo. It was clear the roads had become unusable. The old man with the rental place suggested we pull off and wait until the road firmed up again. :) Instead we managed to get off the gumbo and drive home. Will check out the Sweet Grass Hills another time.
I hope you get there! I was there a few years ago, but on private land. I keep meaning to go back to where there's public access. Pretty incredible place. I'm glad you got off the gumbo! No joke, that stuff.