ODE TO A GLACIER, 2021
This piece was made and named after an Atmos Magazine article I chanced upon some time ago, but that really moved me to tears. The article 'Ode to A Glacier', talks about the collective ecological grief that follows the deaths of glaciers. In writer Joal Stein's words, "Glaciers are alive. They move under their own weight. They glare back at you. They remember. They act on the environment in ways that people talk about for generations. They carry biomes, bacterias, fossils, rocks, and sediments. They are sculptors of the landscape—you can see their deep imprints in valleys, mountains, and fields.".
And "When we lose a landscape we lose a language that formed around it. And with the loss of language we lose an entire way of thinking, including all the stories that the landscape knows. Words recede from memory, while memories and archives are lost to history. Eventually we, too, recede into the earth. To grieve a glacial landscape is to grieve the loss of all of those stories woven into it. Of losing what the glacier knows." This second part articulates so well my own relationship to land that I have recently been discovering. I have never seen glaciers and would love to one day, but I do believe that all of nature – trees, plants, animals, the stray cats we feed at the void deck – watches, and thrives with us (when we are in a reciprocal relationship with it, of course).
Here's my ode, to a glacier.