ECODUCTION

I mostly grew up in West Park, New York, on shapeshifting land under and around a house built over lots of years, subject to change at the scale and speed of machines and specialized trade. Patches of new growth forest cleared and lawns leveled flat, dropping off at points and making clear the quick and blunt contortions of construction. This is also where the smell of fall is stunning and irreplicable and floods in memories across years.

Immediately to either side lived older women, dynamic and resilient in their own ways, one a dear friend who grew into family. Her home existed for years as I knew it unfinished, only subflooring, impermanent lighting, its outside wrapped in the stuff of yellow spongy insulation, with no discernible trajectory of completion. Each year a big tree drops daring green citrusy orbs along the already unnavigable driveway.

Our geographies together were of strategic manipulation, impermanence and non-closure, contaminated borders. We grew whole lives within them, mirroring these patterns and lighting sparks of possibility at their edges.

Young brothers and friends and I spent lots of time engaging with this place with an attentiveness and curiosity that felt reciprocal and held. With tall grasses and large branches we built whole worlds, trading systems with stones and services, notes and signs on flat rocks, small sturdy shelters. I don’t remember how we figured to build those, but they lasted throughout the winter under inches of snow and until the field was razed for construction again in the spring. 

Those strong, miraculous homes were work, but it felt like play to create something that we imagined. We met caves along the river to climb along nimbly and shelter us, small meadows to sit and watch the birds, pokeberries to mash for bursts of purple ink, gentle brambles of black raspberries, and moved confidently along and around a small creek, seeking out frogs, creating adventure tasks among us, swinging from vines until they snapped lightly, and leveraging goods through pulley systems across fell trees. Laughing across the iteration of the groomed lawn as it exists today playing legendary games of flashlight tag. 

Together we were at the edges creating ways we wanted to be together inside a world that seemed confusing and big and routines that seemed predetermined. Creating worlds together the way that we wanted.

We cultivated rigorous imagination practices that were diverted as we grew, but stayed a sturdy taproot in this place. In Highland, throughout school, we were so near to orchards, the river, big swaths of preserved land in the Shawangunks. These direct and intentional relationships with the land and other life dissipated, to me they felt overwhelmed by a cultural geography of sterile and severed product that came from far away. An intentional absence of knowledge of the land, its history and lineages of formation and stewards, food and community that could nourish us, and of healing and generative ways of being together. 

Still, the work my closest friends created together when given room amid these paradigms as brazen, perceptive teens gives me grounding and hope for the future. Still this feels like home.

Now, slightly north in the valley at the Place Corps house, it feels like we’re doing this work again to support and grow life, and imagining together what is and might be. Here old friends and colleagues have told me that the geography of my face has changed. When I learned the magic of Staghorn Sumac here, tasted its lemony seeds, it was like we had danced together once long ago but never were introduced. In so many of our practices here it feels like that, like an alignment and meeting in a place I dimly but deeply remembered possible. And in creating after our collective imaginations, it feels like play again.