Restoring a place requires abandoning protection and entering it fully

Evidence

I simply gave myself up to the task. I remember the liberation of just walking right in to my waist the first time, the lightness of my T-shirt floating around me, the swirl of the water against my bare skin. I finally felt at home. The tickles at my legs were just wisps of Spirogyra, the nudges just curious perch. Now I could see the algael curtains stretched out before me, much more beautiful than dangling at the end of my rake. I could see the way Cladophora bloomed from old sticks and watch diving beetles swim among them. … I developed a new relationship with mud. Instead of trying to protect myself from it, I became oblivious to it, noticing its presence only when I would go back to the house and see strands of algae caught in my hair or the water in the shower turning decidedly brown. I came to know the feel of the gravelly bottom below the muck, the sucking mud by the cattails and the cold stillness where the bottom dropped away from the shallows. Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 302

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves listening/observation-as-method across the polyad: knowledge of a place comes from immersive presence, not distanced study — connects to Soundscape’s deep listening and Reading the Landscape. — connects to: Preservation requires removing something from its immediate existence — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1059; Having a place requires not being wholly absorbed in that place — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1169; Preservation can kill a place by removing its living use — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2919 (+2 more)
• APHORISMS: ‘Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge’ reads as genuine life-advice about commitment to any task of repair.

Broader Connections

• Preservation can kill a place by removing its living use #corroborates (0.90) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2919
• Preservation requires removing something from its immediate existence #expands (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1059
• Having a place requires not being wholly absorbed in that place #qualifies (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1169
• Restoring artifacts to original sites is more artificial than keeping them transplanted #corroborates (0.80) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 42