A living culture persists through generations like Sphagnum’s renewing surface.
Evidence
Memory, like peat, connects the long dead and the living. Spirit, like water, was wicked up from below, hand to hand from the watery depths to the parched surface where my grandfather lived in boarding-school barracks, sustaining him. They did not Kill the Indian. For today, I am dancing, on a Water Drum of peat in a country of vast blue lakes where loons are calling. Dancing, my feet sending the message of my presence in waves through the peat, and in waves of memory, they send back the message of their presence. We are still here. Like the living surface of the Sphagnum, the sunlit green layer at the top of a column of dark accumulated peat, individually ephemeral, collectively enduring. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 480
Categorization
- XREF: Reinforces the Kimmerer bridge and the polyad thread of Indigenous persistence and land/place; parallels the ‘two ways of knowing’ claim from ch2. — connects to: Only one in twenty cells in a Sphagnum plant is actually alive — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 452; Dance on quaking Sphagnum calls up living ancestral memory held in peat. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 480
- DEEPTHINKING: Peat-as-memory and the collective-enduring-versus-individual-ephemeral figure condenses the book’s whole observational-faith project into one paradigm image.
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
Broader Connections
- Dance on quaking Sphagnum calls up living ancestral memory held in peat.
#corroborates(0.85) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 480