This is a love song to the moss-hung swamp forests, their crystal clear springs, their winding tannin rivers, and to the people, now passed, who once were its native stewards, their spirits still meandering through these cypress knee hammocks as ancestors keeping watch.... if only we remember them.

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If you are one of those few humans who has slipped past the trance of capitalist culture and tasted the lifespring of an animist universe — this living place you call home — you are a very fortunate being... with an important role to play in the Great Remembering.

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In various mythologies around the around, there is a common story about a world tree that stands at the center of the universe running throughout the upper, middle, and lower worlds. In Norse mythology that tree is known as Yggdrasil, with its tall branches tangled in starlight, and its roots dipping into the Well of Memory. This tree is Life itself. The flowering of this tree is the present time. And when the flowers wither off, such as when a person or tree or animal dies, they become the past, falling into the well of memory. What this means is that it's memory, or remembering, that feeds the tree of life, allowing life to regenerate and continue. And it's when we as a collective people stop remembering — stop remembering the forests, the rivers, the moss-hung canopies, the crystal clear springs, the prairie plains, the wild horses, the buffalo, the sandhill cranes, the damsel flies, the youpon holly, the river frogs, the bidens pilosa, and all the native people who were once the indigenous stewards of this land — that the well of memory dries up, and the tree of life withers away.

 

All it takes is simple remembering, of holding onto the ancient thread of memory, so easily forgotten by the amnesiac trance of modern culture. ​In this spirit, we remember the living land, the other-than-human beings that fill it with their song, the Timucuan and Seminole people who were its original keepers, and the black slaves on whose backs this little town was first built. We acknowledge the blood and sweat of these people fallen on this land through genocide, slavery, and wars, the many still buried in its earth like secrets in known and mostly unknown places, and the continued devastation of the colonial project that is still very alive all around the world today. We recognize that our little life story in this little place we call Gainesville, FL lies within the wider story of betrayal, violence and total loss of these people, and that even this story exists within the "Big Story" of humanity — the great denigration of the human spirit happening throughout time initiating the collective return to soul. We pray that this body of work aids in the collective healing of the world-soul and human spirit, so wounded by the patriarchal thirst for power, and that it serves the Great Re-membering that nourishes the tree of life for the benefit of all beings. 

This Land Acknowledgement is a work in progress in ongoing relationship with this land and its stories. Thank you for reading.

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