Coming Fall 2023
Playful Light
This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.
Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.
But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
- Gwendolyn MacEwen 'Dark Pines Under Water' -
We live in a time of great global awareness, and of great uncertainty.
From our armchairs we feel the death of coral reefs, the deforestation of the Amazon, and the plight of the Tiger, but our actions seem limited to online debates and single-click donations. Our impact unseen and unfelt.
In the presence of our inability to act, and of our shared guilt and loneliness, we are driven us to escape. We find solace in worlds beyond our own; where enemies are tangible and individuals are empowered. Where technology and science has thrived and saved us from ourselves.
Space, with all of its possibilities, has resurfaced in our popular media with force. Providing a future and an escape.
We need to find our way back to the present and to the beauty and fragility of our own natural homes. Our power lies in the connections we form with our local communities and in the actions we take in learning and loving our local environments.
In this time of isolation and uncertainty we have found ourselves reunited with our local environments in a way unseen for decades, but is this enough?