Many of us today cannot fully comprehend the ramifications of the loss that has occurred between people and place in recent millennia. That is, to fully comprehend this loss in a somatic way, feeling it in our bodies. Each broken animistic culture has had their day of reckoning with settler culture. This has often been the forced removal of a people from their ancestral homelands, and ultimately, their divinity. For most of us, this original trauma is distant, making it hard to comprehend. For some of us it is happening right now.

Imagine you exist within a culture that is intact across hundreds of generations, thousands of years. Your people move through a landscape along ancestral pathways. These serve as patterns of your people and their memories. Your movement along these pathways is inspired by pulses and changes within the culture and landscape. These pathways are rich with stories that literally create who you are and how you relate to the world. You live intrinsically woven to your people, the spirits of the land, the ancestors. You are born into a cosmology that connects your people and the landscape to the divine, and this cosmology is held by everyone, passed down through oral story and art. Parts of this story are the landscape itself, and certain places are honored as particularly sacred. There is a lone sacred mountain, built from the bones of the giant beings that died building this world for you. Without the mountain, your people would not be here, and so the site is reserved for sacred initiations, seasonal rituals, and other important events. Through the stories, the initiations, the landscape, you feel an unwavering sense of belonging. And if ever you waver, there are established Elders.

Now, imagine what it would be like to lose all of this. This imagining - feeling the wonder of connection and the cruelty of its loss - is a part of re-enlivening this deep sense of place and carrying it forward.

We want to note here that while general elements in the above cultural story are shared among various ancient cultures, the specific elements (sacred mountain, giant beings) were created by us to illustrate a story. This paragraph is not intended to speak about or for any specific culture.

There is much left to learn and understand about the original indigenous presence of this place. And more to grieve in the way that these people were removed from their ancestral homelands through physical and cultural violence. We aim to learn of that sorrow, while being grateful for this land. And we acknowledge the immense trauma that our privileged access to land rests on. In doing so it is our hope to work with others to break lineages of cultural trauma.

Re-spiriting Place

The spirits of a place can be driven out. This can be felt when viewing the aftermath of a clear-cut. Spirits require relationship, and part of our work here is to welcome and call in those spirits of place that desire to be here. As such, we listen to what spirit beings are looking to guide us in our work. A significant moment in this process for us as a couple was meeting Heron spirit. Heron spirit showed up as a great blue heron in so many meaningful instances as the two of us grew into relation with one another and the land. Its power has always shown up for us with a strong sense of guidance, along with a sense of being watched over. And so this land we dwell on was named to honor the spirit of Heron who dwells here and is a guide to us: Ardea.

Listening to a place can also entail spending time moving through the landscape and feeling what places carry with them certain forces, powers, or energies. Over time we have given names to certain areas, including trees and other landscape features. This naming gives them greater agency to work with us in whatever way is appropriate. When we name these places and features, and work with them ritually, we designate space in our personal neurology to create meaningful relationships that tend to the needs of all involved. And so we are creating and enlivening these relationships across time: the Beauty Spot, Musclewood Grove, Twin Tulip Trees, the Medicine Spot, the Grief Yard, Grandmother Oak, the Lightning Tree.

We are immersing ourselves in this remembering, alongside the 4th consecutive generation to dwell here. May there be many more generations - by blood or by spirit - to know this place deeply.

A brief tour of Ardea as flora and fauna

Ardea expresses herself in a lot of ways, being a bit of an ecological mosaic. Most of this 60 acres is forested: mature, dry-mesic, mixed hardwood forest. Dominant canopy trees are largely beings of oak: eastern white, northern red, and chestnut oak. Interspersed are beech, hickory, tulip tree, red maple, pine, and others. The lower canopy is composed of dogwood, sourwood, and sassafras, to name a few. Adjoining this mature forest are areas of young forest dominated by black cherry and other early succession trees.

Along the edges of forest, and the many nooks that are hidden away, grows the great thicket, the hedgerow where worlds meet. This meeting is often seen here as that which exists between the forest and the pasture: a place where the world of shadow meets that of light, where beings of the forest meet beings of the meadow. Here mother deer beds down to give birth, later stashing her babes in thorns, ready to graze in the pasture. An indigo bunting alights in the brambles of sawtooth blackberry, a nest of eggs nearby. An old opossum wanders into the thicket, badly injured, but not killed, by a coyote. It has come to rest. Beings are born here and beings come here to die.

Meandering at the base of the hills within this forest are a few small streams. Among the beings that live here are primrose-leaf violet and bloodroot, crawdads and salamanders, glorious mosses. There is a pond where we find plant beings of yellow water lily, river alder, and black willow. Of the animal beings we may meet kingfisher, great blue heron, green heron, yellow-bellied slider, red-eared slider - even otter has come to play. The songs of many frog species are loudest here.

The forest is often home to the calls of the pileated woodpecker. In summer we hear the distinct voice of the rain crow. In the mornings we see the sun-warmed bodies of black vultures, soaring from north to south, taking their morning route as they leave their nightly roosting site. The coyotes stalk the edges of the pasture as the hay is being mowed, in search of fleeing mice. The crows flock to the pasture afterward, dining on those who have been killed. After the sun has set one can walk into an open field, stare into the stars above, and listen for the calls of owls, barred and great horned. You might be delighted by fireflies, or startled by the shriek of a red fox.

As we have dwelled on this land together, committing to it as best we know how, we have witnessed an increase in the life force here. One way this can be seen is through a noticeable increase in animal beings. Wild turkeys come to mind. Once nonexistent here, they are now a regular site. And some unexpected visitors we have had in the past few years are otters, quail, bobcats, and bald eagles.

A Recent Human Past

There is also a recent lineage of human animals that remain in the lived experience of those of us currently dwelling at Ardea. Stacey can remember the faces and voices of those that take us back to the early 1900s when Beamus Smith purchased the farm and then eventually sold it to her grandparents - Reid and Waynell Costner. A century is an incredibly short time span in the consciousness of the land and her original humans. However, this longevity is now an anomaly by modern standards of land transfer and we intend to celebrate and continue the preservation of these 60 acres.

Reid and Waynell raised 3 children on the land while farming large acreage in field peas and also working in the local mill. The mature forests that remain are due to Reid’s decision to leave any tree with a foot or less in diameter when he sold fallen timber after hurricane damage. Without this fine detail, the current ecosystem of Ardea would be much different. Reid & Waynell’s son – Edwin Costner – dwelled on the land his entire life and inherited the farm in 2009.

It was at this time that Stacey moved back home to settle alongside Edwin, seeking guidance and mentorship in land-based living. She fell in love with Alex in 2012, at which time he moved to the farm. In 2018 the 4th generation of Costners to live here - Meissa Cedar - was born in the old farmhouse at Ardea. In 2021, Edwin Costner died here on the land, marking the end of an era for those of us who are left. The land tells the story of his presence through the pasture fence lines that held his beloved goats, and the fishing pond that now feeds Heron - our guide.