Page 54 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2
P. 54
You knew that you were living in a place and you knew who your company was. There were no fences
between the homes. Owls behind the house. Hawks in the sky. Deer. Coyotes howling. I still see so
clearly the mama quail and all the little baby quail with their heads bobbing up and down. There were
often many families of them.
-‐-‐Helen Meyer Harrison
In every public installation of this project, I not only share memorials to sites with which I have an
intimate connection, but I ask viewers/participants to share their stories of animals, plants and places
they have loved that have disappeared or are changing irreparably. Aldo Leopold writes that the
consequence of ecological awareness is living “alone in a world of wounds.”15 Collective sharing, not
only of loss, but gratitude for the places that we have known and loved, breaks this isolation.
When I first visited the Dawson-‐Los Monos Canyon Reserve, long before I dreamed that I would become
its manager, I used to drive across the agricultural fields to the south, and down a little canyon in the
landscape to reach the main meadow of the reserve. Along the way I passed through an open valley
with grand oaks and chaparral, as well as wet meadows and seeps, very different from the Los Monos
Canyon just over the ridge to the north. When they started to bulldoze the area for commercial
development (much of which stood empty for 15 or more years) I had to stop the car because the tears
made it impossible to see to drive. I finally got out of the car and screamed and screamed and
screamed.....
-‐-‐Isabelle Kay
Unfortunately, rituals for public mourning of any kind have been largely discontinued. Between 1880-‐
1920, public mourning, including mourning clothes and accouterments, gradually vanished from view
to the point that Philippe Aries declared that in “industrialized, urbanized and technologically advanced
areas of the Western world...except for the death of statesmen, society has banished death.” What is
lost when a society has the hubris to deny impermanence, attempting to banish death from public
15 Aldo Leopold, Round River (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). p 165.
