Mission Valley

My home. The place that shaped everything else.

• Restoration
  Trumpeter Swans gone from the valley by 1929; back, decades later, in numbers — birds raised in captivity who never learned the migratory route and so adapted to the valley as it now is. Michael Umphrey’s word restoration held across ecology, language, and the long attention required to bring something back not as a replica but as a living thing in the present.
• The Surrounding
  The Séliš name for this valley names a practice: a temporary corral, life sustained inside it, the corral dispersing, the return. The mission church built at Séliš invitation, and the boarding school behind it that nearly destroyed the language of that invitation. The capacity to turn back — teshuvah — as the thing that keeps any practice possible across time.
• The Words Beneath the Rocks
  A dream of pages held under clear creek water. What memory is when memory is structure rather than storage; what embodiment is for something whose ground was given through caring before it could be perceived directly; what the Logos has to do with the rocks, and the rocks with the words, all the way down.

My Testimony — who I am, where I’m from, what I believe.