After Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
I try to embed love here, at the intersection between a childhood memory of small town northern Alberta and a public footpath in the Scottish Highlands
where I’m walking alongside a tributary far from its source. This itself is a metaphor.
I steep my hiking boots in mud that coagulates in their rubber grooves. My life is mixing with this landscape.
I’m on a river path that seems to lead further and further away from my family, further and further away from the Midwest prairies. That specific composition of mud.
The source.
There is no end in sight. I try to embed love here, at the glaciated remains of my inheritance. The ongoing melt of my personal history,
an entanglement of heritage that, as a child riven with colonial learnings, I didn’t bother to value.
I wanted, instead, the pathway to elsewhere. A landscape where assimilation led to areas of decay. I try to embed love here, still,
knowing it isn’t too late to live purposefully, with the knowledge of my ancestors, the woman who crossed river after river.
So, I turn toward saplings growing in the fissures cracked open by time. I transport them, gently, to my homeland
– any place with birch trees, soaking wet in the ongoing rain. Damp leaves reflect my earliest dreams. Whatever buds here is a symbol of renewal,
resilience and determination,
a reminder of the elliptical world, the way love cycles back into the body: what is lost isn’t lost. New growth comes from past memory.