Dance on quaking Sphagnum calls up living ancestral memory held in peat.

Evidence

The soft peat below responds to my step, compressing with the downbeat and springing back. It too is dancing deep beneath me, sending its energy up to the surface. Dancing on the Sphagnum, buoyant on the surface of the peat, I feel the power of connection with what has come before, the deep peat of memory holding me up. The drumbeat of my feet calls up echoes from the deepest peat, the oldest time. The pulsing rhythm, persistent, wakens the old ones and as I dance I can hear their faraway songs, the songs of the Water Drum in the medicine lodge, the songs they made winnowing wild rice on the shores of a vast blue lake, mingled with the voices of loons. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 480

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reinforces the Kimmerer bridge to Eco-Justice and the polyad’s land/place and listening threads — Indigenous embodied memory of place as a way of knowing against colonial erasure. — connects to: Embodied memory and felt landmarks constitute a profound knowing of place — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 40; A living culture persists through generations like Sphagnum’s renewing surface. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 480
• ADDENDUM: The ‘living like Sphagnum’ framework of permanence-through-collective-continuity could support the ‘Grafting & Growth’ trees-as-infrastructure article’s metaphor of enduring shared organisms.