Page 150 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

specific family. For the first time in many years, I have no desire to leave in fall. On the autumnal

equinox, we gather friends to a potluck supper. Night falls, and we stand in a circle around the fire. As

I watch the rising smoke, I promise myself to kindle the home fires in honor of the voices that speak to

me in these woods and from my ancestral past. I listen to the geese and do not wonder where my next

migration will be.

***

An Apache man once told the anthropologist Keith Basso that he repeated the names of wild places

aloud simply because “they are good to say.”

They are good to say. And we need to say the names of our wild places - chant them, sing them, call

to them literally - so that their sounds flow easily off our tongues, become a part of the daily language

we speak. In my sleep, on my woods walks, as I drive my car to work, I practice calling to the wild

places being cut, flooded, and dried up. Deep in the forest, at the edge of the lake, on the banks of a

river where wild leeks grow, on the top of the bare mountain summit, saying all the names of the

things I love is the beginning of breaking a deafening silence and rooting myself in my home, the

earth.

*The Practice of the Wild. Gary Snyder. New York:

Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1990. Page 93.

Anne Bergeron is a free-lance writer who lives with

her husband in an off-grid house they built together in

West Corinth, Vermont. She teaches literature and

yoga at the Blue Mountain Union School in Wells

River, Vermont, a rural pre-K through grade 12 public

school of 400 students. In 2011, she received a

Rowland Foundation fellowship to promote global

awareness by developing a curriculum that integrates

cultural diversity and wellness throughout her school.

As part of this work, she was granted a sabbatical to