This short writing is in response to my (me being Anastasia) favorite map and honestly an excuse to share it in video above. The current view is of winds that blew during narration.
I’d like to tell you another story. It’s a story of what was but also simultaneously what is and what remains to come. There is a time when land was not owned but known. Known in the way you know the shape of a loved one’s hands, or the way the air becomes heavy before rain fall. All over the world, the law of place emerges not from texts, but from a knowing, a knowing of the water, wind, animals and ancestors. These relationships are lived with all the beauty and uncertainty that comes with life tightly bound to place. Land’s rhythms hold people accountable: its seasons, dangers, and cycles demand care, respect, and attention. Life and death as parts of the same whole. The legal systems humbly bow their heads to correspond to these landscapes and protocols are developed in response.
Then came the rupture.
It does not arrive all at once. It unfolds slowly, through trauma, enclosure, conquest, map, and measure. It comes with new words for land (survey, title, deed, estate) and a new way of seeing the world: not as an extension of ourselves, but as disembodied property. Where once place was lived with, land is now something to be owned as a unit of value, a thing to be held in fee simple and to passed on without memory. And though these new systems claim universality as a natural right, but they are neither natural nor inevitable. They are constructed, maintained by force, artificial scarcity and forgetting.
Still, all is not lost, my love.
The quiet memory of what was and is carries forward in the language itself. The word for ownership shares a root with the word for oak. In ancient Indo-European tongues, the oaks (aiks) are a sacred tree of life. They are the tree of thunder gods and holy groves, of boundaries and burial sites.1 Perhaps, to own something, in this old sense, does not mean to control it but to know a place and to hold that place across generations. Slowly, impossible to replace, and always more than itself. Let us sing to this meaning of ownership. In the idea that care is stronger than claim. That law is written in the land, it’s whether we choose to see it.
The rupture is so very real. But the root runs deeper and so do you.
