Attention is something people teach one another.
I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve hung about in Northern climes; I may be hard at it in my library research (as a HMML Carpenter Fellow; more on that in other posts), but my weekends are filled with new-to-me experiences.
To take an example (or two): I worked a prairie refurbishment day up by Poplar Grove IL at Kinnikinnick Creek Forest Preserve and Conservation area, Caledonia IL last weekend, and, oh, was it lovely!
Often the tasks there are to cut back invasives, but here at the end of the season it was time to collect seed for next year’s new patches of rewilding lands. So a group of half-a-dozen volunteers went out on a Saturday for a supervised “pick” on the soon-to-be-closed-for-winter patch of prairie at the conservation area. When I say supervised, I speak as the novice; everyone else had definitely been out there before, and most of them were professional or quasi-professional preservationists of one type or another.
For our morning’s labor, we were collecting two major types of seeds -- pagoda plant (in three species: downy wood mint, hairy wood mint, and horse-mint bee-balm) and silky wild rye. Pagoda plant really does look a set of piled pagodas on a stalk. We started off just wandering the field up on the hillside, but once someone had actually found a plant, we grouped up for a mini-lesson in plant identification, and then each person took off on their own wander to play “I spy.”
Once we started finding the plants, an abundance mentality set in. They grow in patches, so if you find one set of seeds, you usually find between 20 and 50 sets of seeds. Of course, as good conservationists we took the top half so the rest could re-seed for next year. Caring for the local prairie patch is priority number one, leaving enough seed for new plants, but also for the animals that need to overwinter.
I actually did not-half-bad on the hunt-and-find for pagoda plant; I was mostly responsible for downy wood mint, but turned up a great deal of horse-mint bee-balm as a result. (Those seeds went in the other bucket so I didn’t get to count them as MY totals!) Still, every once in a while I would find a patch of the downy wood mint, enough so that I noticed that I had used my bending over muscles a good bit while out on the hillside!
The silky wild rye grew in a giant and quite obvious patch, as you may have noticed in the picture above. So harvesting there was a matter of pick a large handful, drop it in a bucket, pick another large handful, drop it in a bucket. Rinse and repeat. We had such abundance that we wound up having to combine buckets to make way for the seed bag, designed to hold about 40 lbs of animal feed. We got that bag more than half-way full, so it definitely felt like success!
By the end of that second picking, I understood the idea that one could put in an order for “75 lbs of such-and-so seed” and the main office wouldn’t actually blanch at the request. I also learned that every year, they obtain a selection of seeds, and those go into targeted refurbishments elsewhere. Every little bit helps.
Listening, I though I'd notice wind and birdsong, and it was certainly there, but I found myself instead drawn to the people telling stories -- the community they'd built, their friendships, their stories of leadership and not wanting leadership on firelines, and restorative burns and the ways in which the newbies (me?!!!) interact, particularly in "those" moments, and motivations and the ways that people respond to nature. About the building where during winter months our seeds would be cleaned and further sorted and prepared for next use.
I wasn't listening to nature, I was listening to nature being managed. And that, for me, was pretty cool. The prairie’s abundance had people behind it, people with knowledge and friendships and stories worth hearing.
Of course, I mainly took pictures of flowers instead of the dead stalks of mint plants, so my flower pictures from that trip are better. Oh well.
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Common Blue Wood Aster, Aromatic Aster, and Coreopsis |
What the flower pictures indicate – what our labors show – what a morning of close inspection taught me – is that the nature of the prairie is in its abundance. That abundance is not to be measured just plants-per-foot, but in kinds of plants-per-foot. Of course there were grasses, and sedges, and little vines which seemed to want to trip you. But as Jessie, our leader, gave us our instructions, she taught us to use the shapes of things – to look for a pile of pagodas, or for the waving stalks of rye – to see one shape among many, so that its shape could go on to re-seed new plots of land with similar diversity when the time comes.
Isn’t that a sweet meta-lesson on how the earth should be?
And speaking of earth, the other thing we did was to attend E(ART)H, a “Land Art” show at Nature at the Confluence, South Beloit, IL. Nature at the Confluence used to be a dump, for decades, with just piles and piles of debris on top of once had been an important tribal meeting ground. (Says something about respect and its lack, eh?) The land has been reclaimed, and a community park made through extensive efforts. There are winding trails and an interpretive center with picnic areas.
The idea behind the show was for the artists to use found materials placed within the context of this reclaimed land to make statements about the connection we all have to the earth around us. It was really well attended; in the three hours we were there I counted more than 130 people, and it had been running all day (including while we were out doing our prairie refurbishment). The opening included live music and performance – including a movement choir – as well as remarks by the artists.
Each of the artists had chosen a different array of materials and a different array of techniques. They were linked by eco-awareness; positioning their work in the landscape was a choice, and the guided tour took us variously along stream-bank, into the shaded woods, and around the circle of mown land as it edged up against prairie grasses. Place is part of art’s perception, and each artist spoke to why this spot – the fallen log which landed in the crook of the tree; a favored spot where the murmur of water joined up with the mosaic flower image to create a fibonacian meditation; the shaded nook where creation seems to both spring up from the earth and come down from the trees above.
The other reality is that art can become a way of asking us to think about place in new ways. “Mother Bison” by Jenny Mathews, for instance, creates the image of a bison but is made out of things like willow branches and grapevine, with prairie grasses and gourds for eyes. It is held together by string. Jenny placed it so that it is emerging from the taller grasses, which seemed particularly symbolic given both the history of the landscape around it and the history of the bison and its reintroduction.
Fun aside: the bison is in part a meat animal, and bison ranching for food is integrally tied up with its successful management, yet ranchers and indigenous peoples have very different views of how the animal should be treated. “Bison”-branded meat in the store is good for the animal because ranching has maintained biodiversity among the herds; we are still at the point where more animals is better for the species.
And yet, “bison” then becomes a ladened term, associated more with what can be read as exploitative culture. “Buffalo,” though colloquially familiar to us in the USA, is technically not the right word for these animals, because, as wikipedia taught me, bison are yak relatives, genus Bos, and buffalo are in two genera, the African Syncerusand the Asiatic Bubalus. All kinds of species in this world, eh?
Anyhoo, we have tended to use the misnomer “buffalo” for these majestic animals (“Where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play…”), and so the label “bison” is doing some heavy lifting in the world these days. Enough so that when Jenny approached members of a local tribe, they at first shrugged her off, because she was using the technically correct term “bison” and they thought that stood in for a way of thinking about the animal. She now leads with the term “buffalo,” and has been much more successful at connecting with them out of shared philosophy of what these majestic creatures mean for us and our mutual – if not always amicable – history.
Jessie Crow Mermel, “Ecology of a Breath” uses the echo of dendritic patterns with their branching structures – in the hand, in the lungs, in the nerves, and in the river systems. She used images on cloth, but also incorporated moss lungs, since moss actually put out more O2 than trees do! “Patterns,” she says “can serve as a mirror and remind us how deeply we are interwoven with the rest of the Earth.” Plus, I have a particular affection for Jessie’s work since she’d been the Person In Charge of the morning’s Prairie work. It brought a real sense of the nature (pun intended) of community.
The artistic statement used to advertise the exhibit seemed in keeping with the spirit of the weekend: “Our collective goal is to spark wonder, acknowledge eco-anxiety, and inspire new connections.” “Spark wonder” is a phrase I might ordinarily pass over in an exhibit announcement. This time, though, I’d spent the morning discovering how much there really was to find in a patch of prairie, and the afternoon discovering how many ways artists could ask us to look at reclaimed ground. Wonder had acquired both very particular and very memorable shapes.
It had also come with something to do. Learn a plant, gather seed, leave enough behind for an envisioned future. Listen to an artist explain why a piece belongs beside this stream or among these grasses. I can’t claim that a Saturday settled my eco-anxiety, but it did give me a few useful places to put my attention—and, for part of the day, my hands. My bending-over muscles have registered their opinion too.
NOTES
The E(ART)H Land Art exhibit is installed through 17 Oct. 2026 in South Beloit, Illinois; more details are available at https://natureattheconfluence.com/event/earth-a-land-art-exhibit/
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