The Field Guide for Next Time

Archivist’s note: This textile has been gifted to the Community Archive by Auntie Cade Persaud before her airship travels east. It is a collaborative record of lessons shared, and she wishes for the piece to be kept with the neighborhood. Unfolded, the dimensions of the Field Guide are the width of a grown man’s embrace and the height of a child’s open arms, rounded in a roughly asymmetrical galaxy shape. The patchwork sections have been translated into text to the best of this archivist’s ability—starting from the center and spiraling out—with the fabric’s quilted seams, embroidery stitches, and weave patterns transcribed as sentence rhythm. Some details may have been lost due to the limits of written language.

• • •

I

When a child learns to speak, their first word is a gift. It is a butterfly wing that swirls the dust motes ignited by the sunlight.¹ A snowflake that shatters an arctic sea to match its fractal pattern.² The glitter on sand in the desert at dusk.³ A distant star shifting its color.⁴

The word is the manifestation of a self, an intention made into action. Doesn’t matter the language, or how it enters the world—as sound passing through the child’s lips or a deliberate gesture to focus attention. It is the moment a child joins the extended family of the living world.

And what if no one is there to receive this gift? To witness that instant when joyful babble transforms into an announcement of the person’s becoming? Wouldn’t happen. Someone is always paying attention to the child. Never impatient, always expectant.

• • •

II

After the child speaks, they then learn to communicate. They are taught. Not only by their parents and peers or aunties and manties … cousins, siblings, storytellers … neighbors and neithers, for they are also people and still learning themselves. The child is taught by the living land.⁵

The cricket’s plaintive chirp, discerned from the chorus.⁶ Shapes of starlings, weaving and folding.⁷ The sweet scent of the tree’s blossom and the burn of its sap.⁸ The guilt of the hound who dug up the stoat’s home.⁹ The enjoyment of flies in the heat of fresh poo.¹⁰ The child learns from them all.

The wolves are caregivers. Slime mold, the city planners. Mycelia are educators. 

Through these studies, the child will also find their role on the Earth.

• • •

III

They learn the temperament of the sky. To read the emotions of its face. The contentment of cirrus clouds. The malaise of the nimbostratus. The giggle of a single cumulonimbus in an otherwise blue sky, and the warning formation of its anvil-shaped incus when the heavens are done fooling around. 

Before storm clouds roil on the horizon, the neighborhoods already know it’s time to reel in the kites and secure them for the storm. The conductive cable is winched in; turbine blades slow as they’re pulled from the windstream. This close to the ground, the child can reach up to touch the sensitive skin of the hydrogen-filled blimp. Fungo decorations the local children painted during the previous ceremonial re-release still glow bright. The child locates the butterfly they drew the last time the generator was brought to ground, and now watches the luminous lepidopteran get shut back up inside its cocoon, protected by the generator housing as they all batten down for the storm. The batteries carry enough of a charge to supply emergency electricity to the surrounding families and kin-packs, but if the ferocious anger of a multicell storm rages past capacity, they’ve all learned to help each other make do in the near dark.

The supports of the city are best seen in the dark times. Bioluminescent accents line the major thoroughfares, “painted” with spores in shades of white-violets and foxfire greens. Some artists have chosen to work exclusively in cultivating strains of illuminating fungo. Like authors of bonsai forests, their craft relies on the delicate art of keeping their work alive. Exterior murals glow at dusk. Interior accents brighten living spaces. They illuminate until the storm passes, as all storms eventually do, and the cloud cover recedes to expose the stars. They are the lights that never go out.

• • •

IV

The child learns not to fear destruction, since all things are built to be repaired. And those things in constant need of repair get the opportunity to be redesigned. Shelters are constructed from materials that adapt to forces rather than attempting to withstand them. They give when the wind blows; they float when the waters rise. Home is a resilient place when built on fertile ground.

Those frequent “storms of the century” of centuries past had long picked at the scabs of concrete slabs on which people used to build their cities. Common sense and construction efforts further helped to remove faulty asphalt that tended to transform streets into filthy rivers. Once unearthed, the soil better absorbed and more safely diverted those heavy rains. New pathways emerged, as trails often do, along the routes where people want to go.

Footprints furrowed more direct paths once the grids had been erased (along with divisions and subdivisions). Toppling economies fell in the changing breeze as hollowed-out infrastructures started to freeze. Impromptu mutual aid networks remained nimble and could stretch further than a spider in the center of a damaged web. People sent up the first generator blimps designed to be used in disaster areas and found their neighbors to be more reliable than anonymous cost-benefit analysis spreadsheets on a far-off energy company’s desk. Cooperating like ants, they built and dismantled and reshaped. Necessity gave them a taste of opportunity; frustration and anger gave strength to conviction. Through the same emergent navigation process that slime mold uses to build its networks, a new organizing principle took shape. Disaster cleared the ground for what would come next to grow. And that fragile sprout was built on and strengthened, like the growth marked by rings on a tree trunk, outward and up.

• • •

V

The child understands that their society is structured like fractals rather than in a hierarchy. From playing with intricate nesting doll toys instead of stacking building blocks, to lying in the shade beside their parents and looking up together to watch branches cut the sky in precise patterns. The child’s mind delights in the sight of the tangled canopies, recognizes itself in dendrites branching and chemical messages carried on the wind. The child identifies more with these ever-present patterns when they haven’t been trained to see themselves only in similarly symmetrical faces looming from above.

A snowflake is a jewel prized not for its uniqueness, but its talent for embodying the glorious variation of surprising repetitions, those intricately expanding patterns that all natural systems, inanimate and otherwise, share. Just as the child’s body is made up of a symbiosis between its own cells and cooperative microbes, the child and their kin-pack exist in alliance with a family. Their family is a loosely defined and often changing constellation of kin-packs, maybe one hundred individuals, human and otherwise, who share emotional bonds, reciprocal responsibilities, and/or cordial collaborations. Some kin-packs may include chipmunk children, fox brothers, or blue jay drinking buddies (they laugh at the bawdiest jokes). Love is indiscriminate. Sincere and surprising. There might be limits to family size—a Dunbar number of sorts—but like all ecosystems, these are the result of forces nudging things into balance rather than arbitrary lines drawn. 

Many families in close proximity make up neighborhoods. These, too, can’t be mapped out, but contours can be discerned. Like crown shyness in tree canopies, there are natural shapes and structures organisms organize around. Neighborhood culture is shaped by particular adaptations to shared challenges. Flooding, drought, wildfire, frost … Common cuisines, expressions and dialects, architectural styles, music, and attitudes are shaped by regional troubles and triumphs. Local culture, like the climate everywhere, is always in flux. Some cities sway in treetops, built to burn and be reborn. Houseboats float on river deltas, tethered to each other rather than the shore. Mound houses dot the open plains; nomadic camps call their travel routes home. And like those intriguing iterations found in nature—the spirals of snail shells and cyclones, the veins of leaves and blood vessels the child sees when they close their eyes—cultures spanning geographies share surprising similarities. The fisherwomen in the floating city of Cai Beo weaving their basket boats, the sea-steaders in Chesepiooc Bay gleaning seagrass meadows, kelp farmers of Sør-Trøndelag hauling in their harvest.

The child is less fascinated by the distances between places than they are by how closely all communities are connected.

• • •

VI

Like anyone growing up in land-based neighborhoods, the child is attuned to the rhythms of the farm. Rural or urban, the sounds are the same. Birds berating each other. Wild honeybees in their heavy flights. Musicians tuning their instruments to call in the cows. Cattle are enthusiastic audiences and come running at the first strains of music. Children feed them treats laced with red seaweed from the sea-steader kelp farms, giggle as the tongues tickle their palms. Some cows give milk in appreciation, but the child knows that’s not why musicians vie for their attention. Cow turds are wealth, if properly cultivated, and when the music ends, the cattle graze the land, revitalizing soil in their wake. The wide-ranging herds mimic the memories of bison or buffalo, wapiti and caribou, mouflon, wildebeests; rewilded cattle fill in the role of whichever herding ruminants had been native to the region before they were lost to the anomaly of colonialism.

Though the term “farm” is a remnant from the vernacular of the blip generations—that brief four-to-six-hundred-year history when people believed their role was to extract from and exploit the land, to conquer and to own—the neighborhood farms more closely resemble the “untouched” wildernesses of the carefully cultivated pre-colonial ecosystems. People have long changed the landscape, but only during those temporary centuries did their designs tend toward devastation. Beavers alter the flow of rivers, which creates spaces for other creatures; wild boars break up the bracken as they trample and root, making room for young trees to breathe. Through their innate, daily social activities, people, too, can build and thrive and co-create. Those lost generations told their children it was their nature to destroy what they touched, that annihilation was inescapable. This was the lie that caused the most damage. How to love the land was easy to relearn. Accepting that the land could love them back was, for a time, beyond their ken. 

But every child feels the affection in the cradle of mosses, the gleeful mischief in the splash of mudwater. Each has an instinct to take the dirt in their chubby fists and taste the soil. Healthy soil has a complicated flavor. The children continue to remind their elders: the land feels better when touched by human hands.

• • •

VII

Children are often seen and always heard. Some move and play in packs; others sit in the laps of storytellers, or braid dough with the day’s bakers. Some sit at the sides of witchcrafters, learning the recipes of colors and techniques to work fibers. Others prefer the designs of technicians, to explore mysterious chemistries or intuitive mathematics, to rethink the sources of materials for making kites or enzymes or resilient shelters. Children swarm the farms, race up and down the steps of greenhouse towers, rock the boats harvesting kelp. A man may holler for a passing child to come help; a child may wander, following the call of warblers.

The responsibility for childcare is shared, but there are some who have particular abilities to nurture a child’s wellbeing. Aunties are dedicated adults who care for children. It’s not exclusively or even predominantly women who provide this care, and for a time men who tend to children’s emotional growth were referred to as uncles and coaches and “manties,” but those terms are fast becoming old-fashioned and outdated. Most people consider “auntie” to be gender neutral or multi-gendered, simply a term of endearment for a trusted adult. 

The auntie is the raven or wolverine, cougar or bear, with close ties to the child’s wolf pack. The auntie is the guide who leads the child out of their kin-pack and into the rest of the world. They see the child and are shape-shifters, molding themselves into the support each particular child may need. And through this process, the aunties are the first people to show children the power they have. To create how they relate, to understand the force of a ripple. The child is both the core of the community and not the center of the story.

The auntie weaves the child into their living culture. Demonstrates how a life can be a single line of poetry: beautiful in itself, but its placement in a passage is what gives the final composition its meaning. Some aunties are the trusted adult for up to eight kids at a time, so over the years, they will contribute to the countless scriptures and ballads that make up entire families. And when at last the earth calls for their return, they may have co-authored the culture of whole cities.

• • •

VIII

The child’s auntie listens more than they instruct. Questions and never criticizes. They’re careful to model the behavior their community will come to expect. But mostly the auntie calls attention to the lessons the world wishes to share with a child.

Bees teach governance.¹¹ Bears practice compassion. Birds inspire adventure.

Water embodies imagination, shows the child endless possibilities of what they can be. The water reminds them that they are always changing, adaptable. Trickling, flowing, flooding. Ice-hard. Capricious as clouds.

• • •

IX

Trees are gods who require no worship, though the urge to kneel at their roots may be indulged. They are a force of creation, manufacturing matter from the literal air and a few chemical equations. Their many blossoms encourage abundance and model creativity. Inspire the production of many ideas: even though only a few may take root, and one might bear fruit, nothing is wasted. The process itself provides. Trees are immortal beings not only by virtue of their many-centuried lifespans, but through the grace of amaranthine rot arising from their dying bodies. Reborn.

There are zealots, people whose honor of the arboreal take some controversial forms. Ones who anoint themselves worthy of practicing the process of photosynthesis, seeking to achieve the power of the gods by altering their skin. Nettling their bodies with green chlorophyll tattoos designed to feed from the sun itself, rather than humbling themselves into the role of trusting the land to provide. Women who seek the ecstatic intimacy of lichen, insisting their bodies to be life-sustaining structures, more nourishing than fruit. They encourage baby squirrels to lick their lactating breasts, decorate their areolas to entice hummingbirds to sip from their nipples.

More traditional members of the community might take issue with the extremists’ goals or methods, might find their actions misguided or repulsive. They might consider their refusal to accept the gifts the earth offers to be selfish, as egotistical as the self-enlightenment and mindfulness movements of the past. Some might consider the intention to remove oneself from their ecological role to be offensive or heretical. What is an auntie to do when holding their child’s hand and passing a person they find so affronting? 

They thank the green-skinned weirdo. Express gratitude for their existence, since being confronted with a perspective so at odds with their own hones their understanding of themselves and their relationship to the world. It shapes them. And that is a gift.

The shaping power of conflict is constant in the treetops, where twigs snap against each other in the wind. It forms a peek of sky between the canopies, a border of air that delineates individual trees, and the shapes are beautiful. Exposure to those wilder ideas might renew the auntie’s conviction in how they wish to honor their god, to mimic its teachings rather than imitate the tree itself. 

Auntie leads the child up the spiraled greenhouse, where the seasonal sunlight splashes the glass before soaking their skin. They divulge the dramas of the sister squash and sweet peas and glass gem cornstalks. Chronicle the lineages of vanilla orchids and cocoa beans, chili peppers and coffee plants. The cuttings shared in spring festival gatherings. The seeds smuggled close to the heart, with whispered instructions of how to ensure their care. The auntie regales the child with tales of survival. How, like them, the ancestors of the plants once grew in far-off places, before their home climates changed too quickly. It is a story the child knows. They are all descended from migrants who had to take to the air like seeds on the wind. 

The auntie cautions against harvesting when a plant is in contemplation, philosophizing … how to recognize when it’s worked out its puzzle and is ready to share. The child knows to ask permission before picking fruit, not from the auntie or the gardeners, but from the plant itself. Though gardeners are often so attuned to the needs of a hungry child, fruit is placed in their hand before they need to ask.

• • •

X

Attention is paid to the voice that differs from the rest. In a room of elders, the child’s voice is the one they bend to hear. In a room of children, they listen to their auntie. Where people are gathered, they strain the hardest to listen to the land. The quietest, most radical voice is the whisper no one wants to miss.

• • •

XI

Approaching adolescence, the child is taught their history. Time is spent on the almost-fabled stories of the blip generations, the long anomaly of the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries.¹² The devastating actions perpetrated against home and neighbor during the time of settler colonialism and white supremacy are shown to be a peculiar deviation from the norm when set alongside the 12,000-year timeline of human social organization. Against the 300,000 years of sapient existence, a mere blip. 

The children are exposed to the old societal beliefs of capitalist mythology and toxic masculinity, to many giggles and skeptical looks. They wince at the pristine violence that kept the creativity of the slums imprisoned. They wrestle with the assumed “acceptability” of that shiny jackboot cruelty against the DIY guillotines and collective uprising that eventually rose like floodwater to resist worldwide apartheid. Nature has its ways of restoring balance, and these ways are rarely non-violent. 

The children sit with this until it sinks in. They work through their grief, the loss wrought from the actions of those generations past. They stay a while on anger, but often end at pity for the lonely lives of the long dead. They do not accept it. That way of living. It is a cautionary tale.

This dread governs and guides the child into society’s tentative formations. Starlings in flight hold their fluid shape for protection against danger; they follow the lead of their seven nearest neighbors. The dance is precarious, they know—they don’t know, they don’t know.

  People have restored the forests, but they’re still quiet places. The lost songs echo. Languages of amphibians, silence. Symphonies of honeybees, whispers. The gods are slim-limbed descendants of truly ancient beings, still growing, like the people themselves, but with only a phantom limb understanding without those long roots to guide them.

The dance, the dance, their shuffling steps. They hold the pattern, imperfectly. A spider rarely strives for symmetry. So many holes were left by that reckless legacy.

• • •

XII

This is the trepidation which makes them watch their children so intently.¹³

• • •

XIII

They watch the child look up to admire the turbine balloons and spinning kites and whipping dragontails in the skies, and if they point to a neighbor’s wind generator design—the dual blades flashing like hummingbird wings—the auntie will stroke their hand with the jealous finger, and turn their palm up to cradle the kaleidoscope of butterflies in flight.

No one owns the wind, nor the land, nor the sea, nor the sky. Not the lives nor labor of any creature found there. Anything the child has is something that has been given, and the things they’ve been given are then theirs to give. The embroidered patches on tunics and trousers, the hand-knit ivy on a wolven sweater.¹⁴ A favorite toy, a shiny knife. They are shown it’s the act, not the item, that is the thing of value in giving. Mines and “Mine!” are perverted ideas of property, and tight-fisted hoarding will keep a family in poverty.

Giving is not charity; it’s not waiting for reciprocity. It’s the chatter and cheers in the raucous welcome of guests arriving  at a friend’s home or community tavern for an evening meal. The auntie waves to the children underfoot in the kitchen. Cheek-kisses the elder, arms laden with offerings for future meals. Auntie nestles the child in close beside them at the overcrowded table, composes a plate for the child from the array of dishes prepared from staples and seasonings previous guests provided. The child, too, spoons some food onto a plate for their auntie, learning early to consider what their loved one might enjoy. The ritual is a game and a challenge, flavored by their relationship and temperaments. If the auntie insists the child try an unfamiliar hash, the auntie better be prepared to sample the charred lizard skewers in return. It’s a scene of fellowship repeated even during the direst times in human history, at lunchtime in southern Italy or in Cairo streets at sundown during Ramadan. 

A man enters and makes room for himself at the table. The child notices that he gave nothing, not even a kind word. He brought nothing to the meal, the child remarks. He brought an empty belly!, the auntie is quick to remind them. 

When they’ve eaten their fill and stand with their dishes, auntie offers to wash the empty-belly-man’s bowl now that his belly is full. The child stands beside their auntie, elbow-deep in warm sudsy water, mimicking auntie’s technique to leave clean bowls for the next with the least amount of water waste. Why did you give him another gift? Since one’s labor is a favor that can only be given. It was a gift I gave to you, the auntie replies. To caution against confusing what’s fair with what’s just. Even if a man has a problem giving now, it may not always be. Does he deserve to go hungry—does he deserve not to be seen? The auntie shakes their hands dry and leads the child outside.

If bare-chested bucks start to push and shove, the adults within sight race to intervene. Speak with them and prod for the wound—it cannot be left to fester. Jealousy or humiliation can be an insidious spore, a corrupting cordyceps threatening to infect a mind and lead a person astray. It happens still, a resentment without root that could lead a group to monger or attempt to consolidate power—the hydrofoil yacht pirates, the tin bunker cults. Empires flickered and flared before the blip, but fire can prevent fire, if people have the foresight to clear the conditions that could feed the flames. Oppressive impulses are a perennial problem, similar to the sixteen-year cycle of cicadas, emerging from the underground to scream. How do generous communities protect against fascist swarms? They follow the laws of the living land. Like those sweltering spring-summers when cicadas emerge and the birds and rodents, snakes and lizards, fish, possums, raccoons, dogs and cats, all temporarily change their diets to feast. The neighborhoods that have no taste for bloodshed still rise up to decimate the dangerous power. There is too much to love to let it be lost. Again.

• • •

XIV

Because every child knows only the things they’ve been shown. 

Each story a seed, and in its telling, it’s sown. A crystal of salt, a tear for what’s lost. The ripple from a raindrop, a kiss from a moth. A flash of feathered wings, the growth patterns of rings. A waft of smoke can best express the behavior of social beings. The playfulness of elders and each child’s dignity. The self-similar iteration towards zero, or out into infinity.

The child has a heart, which guides how they treat those closest; this shapes the values of the family, which influences the attitude of the neighborhood; this determines how the community dances with another, which matters to the region. Sahara sands nourish the Amazon. Swirls of phytoplankton seed the tides of clouds. The planet orbits its star along with twelve wandering companions, all sitting in the left palm of their home galaxy.

• • •

Archivist’s note: Before she left, Auntie Cade and I sat up long nights discussing what to do with the Field Guide in her absence. Aunties traditionally gift their Field Guide to the next generation of caretakers, but she wasn’t transitioning from her auntie role—she was leaving the neighborhood to support one of her children and felt the Field Guide would be best kept in the Community Archives until her return.

The undertaking to preserve the Field Guide with words—a living thing cradled in protective amber—that was my own project. A safeguard in case we as a culture lose the ability to map its meaning and decipher its stitches. This is a concern for all archivists, perhaps; we know how time erases what may be the most meaningful parts of the long story. It happened with the khipu, the lost Quechuan language of knots. It happened with the ruins of the cities ours are built upon. The lost city of East St. Louis only a century gone—the relics of Cahokia seven centuries deep beneath those marvels.

My husband leaves my tea to cool beside me as I hunch over my workspace with the Field Guide splayed out like a tapestry. He likely believes me to be a silly man. I fear he’s right. Perhaps the Field Guide cannot be contemplated as a decorative object, and it’s foolish to attempt a faithful interpretation of its lessons out of context from its intended use, its function as a blanket. How complete or accurate is my transcription if I omit my memories of our son Ben swaddled inside? He’s grown now, but I can still see his dark little arm fighting its way out of the fabric cocoon as his Auntie Cade coos and consoles.

I miss my friend. I am anxious for her return. For the Field Guide to again be used to give warmth to a child recently bathed in the river. Not folded in the Archives. Not as inspiration for this pale facsimile comprised of words.

• • •

Compilation of Archivist’s notes

¹ This embroidered pipevine swallowtail is life-size, intricate as a scientific illustration yet otherworldly. The threads appear to be infused with fungo, though the luminous colors may not-so-simply be the results witchcrafters teased from natural dyeing methods. Surprising nuances. Dogwood-bark blue, yellow-orange alder bark. Golden lichen for the pollen swirls, perhaps.
The vibrant colors of the butterfly wing are repeated in the renderings of blimps and airships in the nearby section.
The spiral pattern of the pollen stitching continues into the section on storm-care.  (back)

² A single delicately stitched snowflake opens the section of exquisite geometrical pattern repetitions comprising the map of neighborhoods and societal structure. (back)

³ This shimmering thread is woven throughout the sections with the murkiest coloring. The effect is quite stunning. It can be followed throughout the piece, culminating in iftar, the breaking of fast for Ramadan. (back)

⁴ A subtly shifting band of color winds from the center to the “tail” of the galaxy. (back)

⁵ The variegated greens with morning-sun quilting echo the calling of the cows. (back)

⁶ The stitches indicating the single cricket’s call mimic the section on voices in society. (back)

⁷ The quilted fabric gathering technique starts here and extends to the section encompassing “seven nearest neighbors.” Clever. (back)

⁸ These renderings of tree leaves branch off into the section on the spiritual and arboreal. (back)

⁹ The use of synthetic and archaic materials and their placement link this to the section on recent history. Terrible to the touch. (back)

¹⁰ The irreverent stitches here humorously resemble Cade’s rendering of “the zealots.” (back)

¹¹ This section consists of a fabric texture so subtle, only the shimmer of light on the semi-silk threads reveals the honeycomb weave pattern. The six-sided shapes, each the size of a child’s thumbprint, interlock to form the fabric’s structure. I can’t even conceive of the loom that would allow for such weft and warp. And to capture the intrinsic elegance of the witchcrafters’ technique, I rendered this bewildering textile into three words: “Bees teach governance.” The brute force of the written word. The inadequacy of spoken language. (back)

¹² This section is a patchwork of petrochemical synthetic textiles—archaic materials. There’s a quilted backing of traditionally sourced natural fibers stitched to the reverse where the Field Guide ordinarily touches a child’s skin. The dimensions of this recollection of recent human history are proportional to its place on the long timeline of life on the planet—that is to say, in the galaxy of the Field Guide, it’s a small dark spot. (back)

¹³ The entirety of the following section XIII uses visible mending techniques to construct new cloth across the worn holes in section XI. None of the original fabric remains beneath. The needlework itself weaves the textile out of nothing, supported by the frayed edges of the surrounding section(s). These intricate patchwork reinforcements create a tactile testament to the durability of the social tools and craft methods we have at hand for this continuous repair work on our enduringly fragile fabric … This sentence is my attempt to convey that tension. Work suspended across the expanse. (back)

¹⁴ There’s an informative diagram nestled into the design detailing the process of harvesting tufts of wolf fur caught in wild brambles, then carded and spun like sheep’s wool to be woven into wolven fabrics. Also includes a sampler of various climbing vine varieties, making distinctions between naturalized non-native species and invasive plants: Virginia creeper, poison ivy, kudzu, and more. (back)

• • •