I’m reading a book, Do Glaciers Listen? by Julie Cruikshank.  She’s looking at how differently Westerners and the local Indigenous peoples in the area of the Saint Elias Mountains where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory meet, view and respond to glaciers.  

One woman, Mrs. Annie Ned, speaks about “human and environmental history from her own experience of hunting, trapping, and living there for almost a century”.  Her advice is to “listen for different stories”. The author then writes, “Eudora Welty, an American writer who, like Annie Ned, lived well into her nineties, also maintained that there is a distinction between listening to stories and listening for stories. “Long before I wrote stories,” she reflected in her autobiography, “I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.”

The Indigenous people in this book view glaciers as living entities.  They interact with them and treat them with respect.  Perhaps we, too, can listen for stories in what surrounds us where we live.  What speaks and resonates?

I was at Rodeo Beach this morning. The Snowy Egrets were feasting and enjoying the low tide as the tide rolled in.