To Marsh
To Marsh is a collaborative project between the Marsh, also known as Cootes Paradise, and the many beings who live there, together with Andrea Vela Alarcón and Nicholas Hernández-Brown. It’s a web-based space where we share the stories, feelings, and creative sparks that came from spending time with the Marsh. Through writing, audio, and video, we offer our responses and gentle invitations for others to carry these experiences with them and bring them to life in their own ways, wherever they are and with whomever they gather.
This project begins from a simple but powerful belief: that humans are deeply connected with the more-than-human world, and that we need to unlearn the colonial ways of thinking that place humans above everything else (Betasamosake Simpson, 2014; Wall Kimmerer, 2013).
We were especially inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s idea of learning the “grammar of animacy”, a way of shifting how we speak so that we’re not just describing nature with static nouns, but recognizing its aliveness by turning those words into verbs. Saying “to be a bay,” for instance, invites us to see the world as full of life and movement, rather than something to observe or control.
We took slow walks across the land known as Cootes Paradise, paying close attention to what called to us. For Nick, it was the birds and the bark; for Andrea, the sapling and the cattails; and for both of us, it was the Marsh itself. These encounters became verbs, actions we could feel in our bodies, and we tried to respond not from what we already knew, but from what we experienced in those moments.
To Marsh, assumes that language comes not just from thinking about a place, but from living and feeling within it.
