Shadows and Tracings: thinking through poetry

Shadows and Tracings

snow reveals tracks

tracks reveal possibilities

possibilities reveal stories

shadowy stories of humans and nonhumans that have crossed time and space

wonderings and wanderings

moments fleeting

what tracks go unnoticed when snow no longer reveals shadowy presence

remembering and forgetting

stories untold

erasing, rooting

following, leading,

walking, crawling, slithering, running, leaping

away from and towards

paths converging and pulling apart

snow reveals tracks

who/what walk(ed) these places?

waiting watching listening

what might the presence and absence of tracks reveal

being

neither (a)lone nor lone(ly)

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) reminds us that speculative inquiry “pushes the boundary of acceptable” (p. 73), while Val Plumwood (2002) writes “openness and attentiveness give us sensitivity to the world…allow[ing] us to be receptive to unanticipated possibilities” (p. 195). In reflecting on the tracks encounter, the educator and I resist (mis)representing the stories of ‘what else’. Rather, the tracks become provocative shadowy stories of animals living in liminal and precarious spaces. While tracks and tracings remind us of the movements of the critters that traverse the forest spaces, we are left to speculate what it might mean to care for more-than-human others who go unseen.