(Image is from the Website "State of Eastern Ontario's Forests" LINK .)Monuments: The creation of a sense of space that is defined against its environment. For Christianity, the greatest monument is the crucifix, a seemingly permanent sign of sacrifice and promise to anyone of the faith. To people of other faiths, it can be either a benign or malignant signpost on the path of history. To others it is not Christian, but an intersection of ideas, discourse and most importantly of the direction of the cosmos. The significant thing about monuments is the idea that they outlast the living, they are signs of humanity's strive for immortality. Don McKay writes in Deactivated West 100:,
"One of our strongest and most primitive claims on land is probably the gravesite, a piece of property devoted, presumably in perpetuity, to the memory of one person, and to that person's story; it becomes, literally, a plot."
Graves: A few years back James Lovelock pointed David Suzuki to a 19th century gravestone in Britain, and they meditated on the lichens that had consumed the story of the person whose name had been etched into the stone. Whose monument is it now? I found part of the top piece to an old headstone on the ground, by the boundary of the cemetary. It sat by the fence, the border between the monumentalization of space for the dead and the utilization of space for the living. I looked for it's bottom section but couldn't find it, is it on the other side of the fence? I thought, buried beneath the field?
Border: The line or intersection between two or more spaces that are divided. Sometimes the division is political, sometimes it is economic, and sometimes it is metaphysical, say in the division between a cemetary and a field. Sometimes the borders do not intersect, sometimes they are physically defined and sometimes they are imagined. Sometimes borders define the utilization of space, say between monumentalization and food production. Other times borders are drawn by hedgerows, fences, or trees. Other times borders are so valued over other spaces that the borders are flexed, not fixed. Other times they are arbitrarily erased as new lines are drawn because of differing value systems. At other times borders are fluid.
Trees: Monuments carried by seed through wind, wing and gravity define borders that exist beyond the purveiw of human instruction. Human necessity creates lines by border design, say in the case of a cemetary, when a fence is bent over a line of trees is planted to reinforce the monuments of humanity. Where the trees fail to articulate their presence to unnatentive humans, signs are placed on them, a monumentalization that memorializes not humanity, but the tree itself. The tree marked with the designation "Heritage," that act of cosmological wonder that defines who we are.
Heritage: A tradition, cultural trait, or way of being that is passed down for generations. Heritage may divide cultures or it may unite them. Heritage may not even belong as the sole possession of humanity, say in the case of the Butternut Hickory, in a cemetary, by a broken piece of tombstone, defining the border between monuments and production, with a sign with specificity for unnattentive mourners. A heritage onto its own, you might say, that dictates the terms of engagment to someone who can read the language of lichens and butternuts, say as the nearby squirells and jays.
Butternut: A sense of presence in a crowded space that seeks occupation of the earth both above and below. On the border it is a thing to be sought, something that will only make its presence known to those who seek it out. It defines the terms by which the earth and sky are both connected and divided, a border between ideas both terrestrial and celestial. When sought out, its width demands attention. While fences bend by wind and water, the Butternut is fed by these ideas. As a border it is also an intersection, say as in a crucifix, a temporal sign of both sacrifice and promise.
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