"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness." 
John Muir (1838 - 1914)

Step into a forest wilderness. Wind your way to a secluded place, absent even the merest semblance of human experience. Close your eyes. Breathe in the air. Quiet yourself and just listen to the nature that surrounds you.

Now, try to imagine this world without you in it. A world without humankind. You may be alarmed by what you feel in this environment. You may even feel afraid, alien, unmoored to the world you have come to know as reality. But the fact is that this world: every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass, every ageless grain, is your inheritance. And your legacy.

This is not just some banal bit of whimsy. This holistic reality is intrinsic. Your entire being is made up of cells. And at that cellular level you bear little or no difference to a common mushroom. Far from being apart from the natural world, humanity is, every bit, a part of it: part plant and part animal.

The ice sheets didn’t recede at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago to reveal our thoroughly modern civilization, replete with single-family homes, two-car garages and crisscrossing superhighways. Four billion years of evolution has made this human moment, this hare’s breath of time, possible. Our distant ancestors burst forth in a eukaryotic explosion two and half billion years ago, spreading like wildfire, enveloping the planet. Scenes not unlike this are very probably unfolding on an unimaginable scale in carbon-rich regions across the known Universe.

What you are hearing in your quiet forest clearing is the echo of eternal awakening.

Somehow, as if by some miracle, we find ourselves perched here on this fragile layer, between the absurdity of space and the habitable worlds beyond the beyond, and the massive churning cauldron within constantly subsuming its surface, impelling it inward toward its core.

Gloriously, we are not only afforded the opportunity to coexist here, but we are also given the tools to record it and to reimagine it, as we play our part in its incredibly majestic tapestry, its sumptuous fecundity.

Of the countless species that have existed on Earth, humanity is the first and only one, either flora or fauna, with the gift of self-expression. We have the ability to express not only ourselves but the world we live in and shape it in a multitude of ways.

Utilizing this gift, we’ve created civilization and filled it to brimming with distractions. We have even created our own creators. We build monuments to our memory of them, to each other and the events we share. The spirit of these memories in some cases transcends the ordinary human lifespan – which, incredibly, we have managed to increase more than twofold - by centuries or even millennia. The entire human spirit is bound by and reflected in our common dilemma. That spirit haunts the Earth flirting with oblivion.

Can we find our way back to our common ancestry? Will we once again find peace in the thunderous quietude, the deafening stillness of our natural world, the very womb from which we are borne? Or will we merely descend into the stillness from whence we came? - Ron Voller

Special Thanks:
Troy Weldy, Doug Brown, Elena Mosley, Rob Strohmeier, Ron Voller, Michael Simpson, Marline Martin, Maeve McCool, Kelley Quan-McIntyre, Rhys McIntyre, Logan McIntyre, Hue Thi, Heidi Bock, Rebecca Walker, Noshin Tassim, Abida Begum, Nicholas Ogene, Trevor Slowinski, Peter Meyer and Ellen D’Arsy Simpson.


This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered in Columbia County by the Greene County Council on the Arts dba CREATE Council for Resources to Enrich the Arts, Technology & Education.