Emily Brisse

I’ve been trying to pinpoint it: the moment I knew I loved the natural world. I’d like to say it happened while overlooking a lush Montana riverbank plump with wildflowers, an image I claim as my first memory, but I was two and a half years old then, and too young to make declarations. Years later, when I was sixteen, I glimpsed the Continental Divide stretching across the Colorado horizon and felt something come loose in me, an awe that lacked edges. But that was not the first time that feeling came, even if before I hadn’t had the language to describe it. I could pick from memories on Lake Superior or in the Badlands or on the Mississippi, but the moment I keep coming back to is a simple one, cushioned in no impressive names, that took place in my Minnesota small town front yard. My family had just moved, and everything about our new life seemed strange and overwhelming. How does one make new friends at ten? How does one navigate the avenues of grief for a life that we’d left...

To be of the Earth is to know the restlessness of being a seed the darkness of being planted the struggle toward the light the pain of growth into the light the joy of bursting and bearing fruit the love of being food for someone the scattering of your seeds the decay of the seasons the mystery of death and the miracle of birth. -- By John Soos