The post from yesterday about Ghosts really was more about the spirit of place and how we associate people who have moved on from this world with places in it. Land and water have always been real entities to me, as real as people.
Time and space feel different to me than how they do to most people, I think. I grew up on a farm that was on a trail used for scores of generations of indigenous people to navigate through the high land of dense woods between swamp and lakes in the lower basin to the east of Mishigami, an Ojibwa word meaning great lake, and just west of the the Great Black Swamp.
I claim that as a small child I was watched over by Nerthus, proto-Germanic goddess of earth and water, bogs and marshes. I encountered a neopagan group many years ago who suggested a Nerthus connection for me. Places where water and earth join are liminal spaces. I’m not sure how to explain all this, but at some level I think I believe there are places that connect to a continuity of time, space, and life. Some people believe in the power of vortices. Perhaps this is quantum entanglement at some level. Who knows, but sometimes I feel that land shapes channel energies of flowing waters and the footsteps of those who have walked these paths. Some people can feel where these points of overlap bleed into and influence each other. That is enough about my mystical understandings.
I do feel that land shapes are underappreciated. The lakes and natural ponds around my childhood home were partially carved out by glacial ice and boulders bulldozing into the earth where the glaciers stopped moving during the last ice age.
As I drove up out of the Wabash Valley and headed east toward Jay County I realized I was headed into hillock country, the county of knobs and knolls and mounds. I was south of the swampy land I still remember pretty darn well, into the lands that were small hills, many of which were mounds constructed as ritual spaces and later burial sites.
My white-ass family took these lands, and the ancestral burial mounds on them, from the many groups descended from Adena and Hopewell cultures. Even though I was driving to find out who my Euro-American Grandmother really was, I felt what I always feel as I travel across land that’s been fought over for several centuries. I feel how the land seems to feel. These woods and roots and land tell me about the animals/peoples who once lived with him as an ecosystem. I can’t hear the land after that as it knows is is being carved, poisoned, and covered over. The gods of the land as they now call themselves won’t even allow themselves to talked about.
I didn’t get to the very southern part of Indiana, but I did go along the edge of where hollows start. I should have listened to this land but instead I oohed and aahed over the nice reconstruction of a historical Mineral and Hot Springs Hotel and Spa. The current groomed and carefully reconstructed Hotel Spa and Casinos are beautiful but the land that lies under them doesn’t say much.
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