I’m so grateful to find you, after Katherine May linked to this essay in a post, plus I’m especially delighted to discover we both live in Alaska! I look forward to reading more, and deeply appreciate and resonate with your voice. 🧶
Thank you for this essay Freya, and especially for footnote 2. I’m familiar with that blend of awe, gratitude, dismay and embarrassment when reading earlier writers.
Yes! Freya, this is just beautiful. Noticing as an act of reciprocity. Mmmm. I love this. And I do believe the world of the invisible has been speaking back to us. I’m glad you’re noticing.
Decades ago when I visited UK and was eating a hot breakfast with soft-boiled eggs, I was told that farther north they would caution you to carefully crush each shell after eating “so the fairies don’t use them to sail away from our land.”
I recently finished reading The Witch for my own research as I work on a novel inspired by witch trials. It was absolutely fascinating, and I picked up on that point you highlighted in part because of my own Manx ancestry (I'm immediately more intrigued whenever I come across the Isle of Man). This severing of people from their wilderness has had so many unexpected consequences. Have you listened to the BBC series The Witch? It explores a history of witchcraft, primarily in the UK, and features interviews with Hutton (which is how I first came across his book).
I'm also reminded of Changes in the Land by William Cronon, a spectacular piece of history I first encountered in college. It explores the impact European settlement had on the physical land of North America; I love bringing it to my high school students who often don't think of the land as being capable of change or being acted upon.
I love this--and I have listened to that BBC podcast too--I kind of became obsessed with witch history as abortion rights were revoked (*shakes fist at sky in a very witchy way*). Have you read Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici? It's an excellent, feminist lens on the history of witch hunts--and fascinating how so much about the shifts in the reformation directly tied to severing from the land, exploiting non white male bodies, etc.
So cool about the Isle of Man too--I have a lot of ancestry there too and was similarly intrigued by that discussion in Hutton's book. That's so great you are teaching that Cronon work--I have read it and was actually just reading something yesterday that referenced it and was going to search for it again! So many synchronicities--I love that. Thanks so much for reading and sharing! 💜🙏
Caliban and the Witch is on my list after listening to that podcast! Every time the host referenced that work I had this lightbulb moment in my head - "oh, THAT makes sense!" Thanks for the reminder!
You will love it--in a rage inducing type of way. :) It's really eye opening, the connections she makes and the history she focuses on. Can't recommend it enough. Also The Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (published by Feminist Press! 💜)--it's a slim study but equally eye opening when you examine the structures of medicine that we accept today, and what they originated in. Love that you're writing a novel! Brava!
I'll always have a huge soft spot for The Wilderness Act, but our understanding of the role of humans in wild landscapes has necessarily changed since 1964. Of course it has -- a great book on the topic is Emma Marris's Rambunctious Garden where she reports on the issues that trying to hold Yellowstone to the 1878 "baseline" has caused. And I ... like? the Elvia Wilk essay? I do worry that "wyrd" just becomes another binary "other" -- another way to maintain binary dualisms. It's such a hard human trap to get ourselves out of -- hence lifetimes spent on zafus -- although, having encountered the "wyrd," I'll not discount it! The faeries got me one night in my 20s in Dublin, led me astray during the 2 block walk I did every evening from the bus stop to the house -- it was an hour before I found my way back.
And yes to the light coming back! The light has come back -- we're terrifyingly warm and dry here, but it's so lovely to not have the day end with a thud into darkness at 4:30 anymore ...
Noticing. Wilderness. Wyrd. So many wonderful threads here.
“The intimacy with the world is what I feel most keenly when I read about traditions in deep relationship with place, of how much we have been conditioned to not think of place in terms of subjectivity, of being tied to it, of that being something to honor. To become perhaps not only what you study, but to become where you are.” I resonated so deeply with this. I want more intimacy with the place my family inhabits. I want to study, but I also want to inhabit and indwell and abide.
On a very comical note - have you seen will ferrell’s movie Eurovision? It’s hilarious and there is a very comical inclusion of the “good people” 🤣
So much in this Freya. Amazing how you assemble these offerings.
*I have just been writing about thresholds, times of change, and belonging myself this week.
*Scotland is so much like the Southern part of New Zealand. Very similar landscape.
*Love your little comments like, "I later picked up a history of the witch (as one does) to find a reference," which makes me smile and relate.
*It's Waitangi Day in New Zealand today so your post on belonging and the stories of the land and the memories and people she holds is so very relevant.
This piece has given me so much to think about—it will stay with me for a long time. I paused in the middle to order the book on witches and the others you cited are in my list as well.
I really want to bring it into dialog with the (christian white-supremist) homesteader lore that shaped my upbringing. I grew up in Homer, Alaska, and my immediate community was a small country church on a dirt road 20 miles east of Homer. It was a church that organically grew out of a bible study in the 80’s and was pastored by the son of a homesteader. One thing that has been difficult to reconcile in my own psyche is the strong sense of place and local culture, so rare in modern America, that I grew up with, combined with a lore that divorced me from the place and from my own psyche.
I am thinking, particularly, about bears. I grew up in terror of bears. At potlucks third-hand stories of bear attacks would loom large. Women, in particular, fell victim, because they were on their periods, or because she awoke first, and when she lifted her hand to wake her husband she was pulled out of the tent by her feet. Only men ventured into the wilderness. Only with powerful guns and four wheelers and canvas wall tents. I was TERRIFIED of the forest. I remember venturing on a brief hike with a friend when I was 15, my body tense with fear. At one point she let out a little yelp because she tripped on a root, and with a blood curdling scream I took off running.
In my twenties the terrifying lore was slowly replaced with best practices that make hiking safe enough, the realisation that, statistically, my hike was less dangerous than my drive to the trailhead. I slowly became a woman connected to, shaped by the forest. I lived in Anchorage during this time, but would occasionally return to Homer, and it began to puzzle me. These men, who had lived at the edge of Alaskan forest since the 1950’s, who planted and harvested, knew its seasons and soil so much better than I, spoke with so much terror, required so much armour; when I would wander into the Chugach mountains with nothing but a bottle of bear spray and my own two legs. It was the lore.
A couple years after I moved from Alaska a teenage boy was killed by a bear while running one of Alaska’s most popular (and populated) mountain races (Bird Ridge). The lore invaded one of my safest (due to popularity) and most frequent hikes, and I wondered if the Alaskan forest was shut to me after all, if it was indeed only a region for men and their guns.
Forest lore functions differently in my history than in this piece. I just think it’s interesting how it takes shape to divorce us from ourselves and our world when connection to place is married to Christian white-supremist patriarchy, as it is among homesteaders in the west.
As a side note (or maybe burying the lede?) during my teen years my church turned toward the charismatic; and bears, when they turned up in dreams or stories or on your land, represented the demonic. They became literal representations of the shadowy regions of the psyche, to be feared and exorcised. There was no room, in our collective story telling and psyche, for the autonomous and dignified existence of a creature that reminds us of our vulnerability, of the shadowy side of reciprocity (we nourish and are nourish, know and are known, kill and are killed).
Shaina thanks so much for sharing this--I agree, there are aspects of learning that are so often presented as fear rather than a type of respect/deference. I was reading your words and couldn't help but feel too how much as women I was taught to fear, how we learn to hold our keys, how frightened I too have been at times in the forest, mountains. And I hear you on the bears--when I first moved up here I was terrified. I still am to some degree, but have had some experiences with them that makes me feel like that idea of the powerful stranger is true--how it's when we get tangled in their places is when it becomes dangerous. But it's never something we can control--but does require an amount of deference, to not be callous in how we are when we are in bear country. Kind of like "never turn your back to the ocean," that children are so often told ...
I wrote a while back how, like the 'good people,' there is a strong Indigenous tradition of never naming a bear, especially when out. When park service people give training to hikers to say "hey bear," in that sense it would actually be thought of as asking for a bear to come find you, or risking Bear's ire by presuming a familiarity that hasn't been earned. Many hikers who have lived here for a long time say "coming through" when hiking instead--which feels just a wee bit more like giving deference, that we know we are in their lands too and mean no offense, and aren't out with the presumption to traipse right through without honoring those who live there.
There's a fascinating book about how forests have functioned in psyches, traditions across history--it's called Forests by Robert Pogue Harrison--I think you might enjoy reading it, it's one of those (like his other books) that has stayed with me.
I think how we were conditioned to fear the land is so much a part of being part of a settler culture, where we are told to fear as a means to control us, that it's traditions that are not intimate with these lands and sees it instead as something to fight and conquer, not live and learn with. It's interesting what you said in your church about the bears showing up as signs of the demonic--because the fairies, sidhe, trolls etc. weren't considered demonic until the reformation, when heresy and witchhunts went hand-in-hand. Magic lived alongside the church in earlier times. We've been handed so much of a legacy of imperialism that believed the land and anything unknown is demonic, where in other traditions it simply is neutral. In that sense too, reciprocity is neutral--that it has to do with respect, with deference, with not putting human life above anything else, of being conscious that there are things more powerful than ourselves, etc. and they deserve our respect, and not our fight or need to conquer what is powerful...
thanks so much for reading and sharing this--and your experience of this place as well. 💜
There's a level of peace I feel in nature that doesn't exist in the city. When I go long distance hiking alone in a beautiful place, its as close to my true self as I have found so far...great read than you!
So many themes you have touched upon in this beautiful piece and innumerable favourites quotable lines. I love the most the part about celtic lores, Scotland resisting witch hunts and the correlation between wilderness and weirdness. Deeply witty and prolific observations you jotted her Freya. I so love this piece. Specifically this line here, “Part of traditions that believe what is invisible is powerful, a reminder that perhaps the shape of our lives is more wyrd than we know.” Yes absolutely yes. To know the power of the invisible one needs to surrender to the presence. 💜🌼
I just love how you wrote that--to know the power of the invisible one needs to surrender to the presence. So beautifully perfect--the theme of surrender and what it means, how it gets coerced into the language of battle and combat, when really it is a giving over, of being in reciprocity fully to whatever is the paired subject of surrender... Been thinking about it a lot. Thank you for reading dear friend. 💜🕯
I agree how the historical vocabulary used ‘surrender’ in context of battles and coercion is completely different than the intended meaning of the word. You explained it perfectly here Freya. And the pictures of Scotland- I just cannot help but yearn for it 💜🌼
This is beautiful, thank you! Reading it feels a bit like a meditation, or perhaps contemplation.
💜🙏
This led to an interesting conversation with my wife who has visited Kirk’s grave and that area.
So interesting--did she hear the stories then?
Oh, yes, she even went and looked to see if his manuscript is available beyond the two edited versions that have been released (apparently it's not).
I would so love to be able to see that manuscript too!
I’m so grateful to find you, after Katherine May linked to this essay in a post, plus I’m especially delighted to discover we both live in Alaska! I look forward to reading more, and deeply appreciate and resonate with your voice. 🧶
Somehow I missed your kind comment on this earlier--but I love that it found you and that you too are in Alaska. 💜
Thank you for this essay Freya, and especially for footnote 2. I’m familiar with that blend of awe, gratitude, dismay and embarrassment when reading earlier writers.
It is hard, and how to hold the balance is...sometimes way too much of a privilege. I question it constantly. 🤦🏻♀️💜
Definite baby and bathwater vibes. The questions never end but that’s ok even if uncomfortable.
I loved this. Thank you for writing and sharing it.
💜🙏
Yes! Freya, this is just beautiful. Noticing as an act of reciprocity. Mmmm. I love this. And I do believe the world of the invisible has been speaking back to us. I’m glad you’re noticing.
💜 🙏
Decades ago when I visited UK and was eating a hot breakfast with soft-boiled eggs, I was told that farther north they would caution you to carefully crush each shell after eating “so the fairies don’t use them to sail away from our land.”
I love that so much--it's keeping mystery alive. 💜
I recently finished reading The Witch for my own research as I work on a novel inspired by witch trials. It was absolutely fascinating, and I picked up on that point you highlighted in part because of my own Manx ancestry (I'm immediately more intrigued whenever I come across the Isle of Man). This severing of people from their wilderness has had so many unexpected consequences. Have you listened to the BBC series The Witch? It explores a history of witchcraft, primarily in the UK, and features interviews with Hutton (which is how I first came across his book).
I'm also reminded of Changes in the Land by William Cronon, a spectacular piece of history I first encountered in college. It explores the impact European settlement had on the physical land of North America; I love bringing it to my high school students who often don't think of the land as being capable of change or being acted upon.
I love this--and I have listened to that BBC podcast too--I kind of became obsessed with witch history as abortion rights were revoked (*shakes fist at sky in a very witchy way*). Have you read Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici? It's an excellent, feminist lens on the history of witch hunts--and fascinating how so much about the shifts in the reformation directly tied to severing from the land, exploiting non white male bodies, etc.
So cool about the Isle of Man too--I have a lot of ancestry there too and was similarly intrigued by that discussion in Hutton's book. That's so great you are teaching that Cronon work--I have read it and was actually just reading something yesterday that referenced it and was going to search for it again! So many synchronicities--I love that. Thanks so much for reading and sharing! 💜🙏
Caliban and the Witch is on my list after listening to that podcast! Every time the host referenced that work I had this lightbulb moment in my head - "oh, THAT makes sense!" Thanks for the reminder!
You will love it--in a rage inducing type of way. :) It's really eye opening, the connections she makes and the history she focuses on. Can't recommend it enough. Also The Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (published by Feminist Press! 💜)--it's a slim study but equally eye opening when you examine the structures of medicine that we accept today, and what they originated in. Love that you're writing a novel! Brava!
Ha, I also teach a course on the history of medicine in America and that's one of the texts I reference. It's so good!
yay! it’s so maddening and good, i wish more people would read it! but hooray you are teaching it! 👏 💜
I'll always have a huge soft spot for The Wilderness Act, but our understanding of the role of humans in wild landscapes has necessarily changed since 1964. Of course it has -- a great book on the topic is Emma Marris's Rambunctious Garden where she reports on the issues that trying to hold Yellowstone to the 1878 "baseline" has caused. And I ... like? the Elvia Wilk essay? I do worry that "wyrd" just becomes another binary "other" -- another way to maintain binary dualisms. It's such a hard human trap to get ourselves out of -- hence lifetimes spent on zafus -- although, having encountered the "wyrd," I'll not discount it! The faeries got me one night in my 20s in Dublin, led me astray during the 2 block walk I did every evening from the bus stop to the house -- it was an hour before I found my way back.
And yes to the light coming back! The light has come back -- we're terrifyingly warm and dry here, but it's so lovely to not have the day end with a thud into darkness at 4:30 anymore ...
Noticing. Wilderness. Wyrd. So many wonderful threads here.
“The intimacy with the world is what I feel most keenly when I read about traditions in deep relationship with place, of how much we have been conditioned to not think of place in terms of subjectivity, of being tied to it, of that being something to honor. To become perhaps not only what you study, but to become where you are.” I resonated so deeply with this. I want more intimacy with the place my family inhabits. I want to study, but I also want to inhabit and indwell and abide.
On a very comical note - have you seen will ferrell’s movie Eurovision? It’s hilarious and there is a very comical inclusion of the “good people” 🤣
Hey, have you seen my socks? You knocked them off again!
😂 💜
So much in this Freya. Amazing how you assemble these offerings.
*I have just been writing about thresholds, times of change, and belonging myself this week.
*Scotland is so much like the Southern part of New Zealand. Very similar landscape.
*Love your little comments like, "I later picked up a history of the witch (as one does) to find a reference," which makes me smile and relate.
*It's Waitangi Day in New Zealand today so your post on belonging and the stories of the land and the memories and people she holds is so very relevant.
Thank you. 💜
This piece has given me so much to think about—it will stay with me for a long time. I paused in the middle to order the book on witches and the others you cited are in my list as well.
I really want to bring it into dialog with the (christian white-supremist) homesteader lore that shaped my upbringing. I grew up in Homer, Alaska, and my immediate community was a small country church on a dirt road 20 miles east of Homer. It was a church that organically grew out of a bible study in the 80’s and was pastored by the son of a homesteader. One thing that has been difficult to reconcile in my own psyche is the strong sense of place and local culture, so rare in modern America, that I grew up with, combined with a lore that divorced me from the place and from my own psyche.
I am thinking, particularly, about bears. I grew up in terror of bears. At potlucks third-hand stories of bear attacks would loom large. Women, in particular, fell victim, because they were on their periods, or because she awoke first, and when she lifted her hand to wake her husband she was pulled out of the tent by her feet. Only men ventured into the wilderness. Only with powerful guns and four wheelers and canvas wall tents. I was TERRIFIED of the forest. I remember venturing on a brief hike with a friend when I was 15, my body tense with fear. At one point she let out a little yelp because she tripped on a root, and with a blood curdling scream I took off running.
In my twenties the terrifying lore was slowly replaced with best practices that make hiking safe enough, the realisation that, statistically, my hike was less dangerous than my drive to the trailhead. I slowly became a woman connected to, shaped by the forest. I lived in Anchorage during this time, but would occasionally return to Homer, and it began to puzzle me. These men, who had lived at the edge of Alaskan forest since the 1950’s, who planted and harvested, knew its seasons and soil so much better than I, spoke with so much terror, required so much armour; when I would wander into the Chugach mountains with nothing but a bottle of bear spray and my own two legs. It was the lore.
A couple years after I moved from Alaska a teenage boy was killed by a bear while running one of Alaska’s most popular (and populated) mountain races (Bird Ridge). The lore invaded one of my safest (due to popularity) and most frequent hikes, and I wondered if the Alaskan forest was shut to me after all, if it was indeed only a region for men and their guns.
Forest lore functions differently in my history than in this piece. I just think it’s interesting how it takes shape to divorce us from ourselves and our world when connection to place is married to Christian white-supremist patriarchy, as it is among homesteaders in the west.
As a side note (or maybe burying the lede?) during my teen years my church turned toward the charismatic; and bears, when they turned up in dreams or stories or on your land, represented the demonic. They became literal representations of the shadowy regions of the psyche, to be feared and exorcised. There was no room, in our collective story telling and psyche, for the autonomous and dignified existence of a creature that reminds us of our vulnerability, of the shadowy side of reciprocity (we nourish and are nourish, know and are known, kill and are killed).
Shaina thanks so much for sharing this--I agree, there are aspects of learning that are so often presented as fear rather than a type of respect/deference. I was reading your words and couldn't help but feel too how much as women I was taught to fear, how we learn to hold our keys, how frightened I too have been at times in the forest, mountains. And I hear you on the bears--when I first moved up here I was terrified. I still am to some degree, but have had some experiences with them that makes me feel like that idea of the powerful stranger is true--how it's when we get tangled in their places is when it becomes dangerous. But it's never something we can control--but does require an amount of deference, to not be callous in how we are when we are in bear country. Kind of like "never turn your back to the ocean," that children are so often told ...
I wrote a while back how, like the 'good people,' there is a strong Indigenous tradition of never naming a bear, especially when out. When park service people give training to hikers to say "hey bear," in that sense it would actually be thought of as asking for a bear to come find you, or risking Bear's ire by presuming a familiarity that hasn't been earned. Many hikers who have lived here for a long time say "coming through" when hiking instead--which feels just a wee bit more like giving deference, that we know we are in their lands too and mean no offense, and aren't out with the presumption to traipse right through without honoring those who live there.
There's a fascinating book about how forests have functioned in psyches, traditions across history--it's called Forests by Robert Pogue Harrison--I think you might enjoy reading it, it's one of those (like his other books) that has stayed with me.
I think how we were conditioned to fear the land is so much a part of being part of a settler culture, where we are told to fear as a means to control us, that it's traditions that are not intimate with these lands and sees it instead as something to fight and conquer, not live and learn with. It's interesting what you said in your church about the bears showing up as signs of the demonic--because the fairies, sidhe, trolls etc. weren't considered demonic until the reformation, when heresy and witchhunts went hand-in-hand. Magic lived alongside the church in earlier times. We've been handed so much of a legacy of imperialism that believed the land and anything unknown is demonic, where in other traditions it simply is neutral. In that sense too, reciprocity is neutral--that it has to do with respect, with deference, with not putting human life above anything else, of being conscious that there are things more powerful than ourselves, etc. and they deserve our respect, and not our fight or need to conquer what is powerful...
thanks so much for reading and sharing this--and your experience of this place as well. 💜
There's a level of peace I feel in nature that doesn't exist in the city. When I go long distance hiking alone in a beautiful place, its as close to my true self as I have found so far...great read than you!
Yes--I'm with you. It's kind of amazing how quickly we have to ignore it in so many of the urban places we live in. 💜
"Noticing is an offering..." is so perfect. The story of Mr Kirk is haunting as well...
I think so too--and love the wyrd and the mystery, allowing it to just be for the feeling of questioning and curiosity it gives. 💜
So many themes you have touched upon in this beautiful piece and innumerable favourites quotable lines. I love the most the part about celtic lores, Scotland resisting witch hunts and the correlation between wilderness and weirdness. Deeply witty and prolific observations you jotted her Freya. I so love this piece. Specifically this line here, “Part of traditions that believe what is invisible is powerful, a reminder that perhaps the shape of our lives is more wyrd than we know.” Yes absolutely yes. To know the power of the invisible one needs to surrender to the presence. 💜🌼
I just love how you wrote that--to know the power of the invisible one needs to surrender to the presence. So beautifully perfect--the theme of surrender and what it means, how it gets coerced into the language of battle and combat, when really it is a giving over, of being in reciprocity fully to whatever is the paired subject of surrender... Been thinking about it a lot. Thank you for reading dear friend. 💜🕯
I agree how the historical vocabulary used ‘surrender’ in context of battles and coercion is completely different than the intended meaning of the word. You explained it perfectly here Freya. And the pictures of Scotland- I just cannot help but yearn for it 💜🌼