the one wild place

 

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Venus flower baskets, a type of marine sponge, often house two spongicolid shrimp, one male and one female. They live their whole lives in the sponge. The two will produce tiny larvae, whose small size enables it to escape through the sponge’s holes to find a flower basket of their own. 

The two species have a mutual symbiotic relationship. The sponge gives food and protection and in turn the shrimps clean it.

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I study the lives on a leaf: the little

Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions,

Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes,

Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds,

Squirmers in bogs,

And bacterial creepers

Wriggling through wounds

Like elvers in ponds,

Their wan mouths kissing the warm sutures,

Cleaning and caressing,

Creeping and healing. 


—Theodore Roethke
The Minimal

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Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim.

The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.


—G. K. Chesterton

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Indigenous property conceptions reflect Indigenous belief systems, which are rooted in the divine interconnectedness of all things in the universe. This concept is referred to in Potawatomi as “Jagenagenon” (“for all my relations,” literally) and is similarly captured in Indigenous theologies across the continent and the globe.


—Angela R. Riley in Harvard Law Review.
Before Mine!: Indigenous Property Rights for Jagenagenon

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