Beneath our feet, the land remembers.
In the shifting tides and silent thickets of Long Island’s coastal marshes and dunes, ancient stories still speak – if you learn how to listen.
Land Spirits is an ongoing fieldwork project rooted in animist observation, ancestral botanical research, and a practice I call Sketchbook Seiðr – a contemporary form of place-based divination using drawing, walking, and reverence as tools of communication and communion.
Guided by reciprocity, I follow both native plants and migrant species – those carried here by wind, sea, and human hand. I trace the trails of healing history through seasonal plein air sketchbooks, translating field studies into paintings and mixed media works. I invite you to walk with me – to notice, to remember, to rekindle relationship with the spirits of place.
We whisper to the soil and listen for the reply carried through fungi, feather, and forgotten root.
This is a story about remembering – about drawing near to the land quietly, reverently. About finding the threads that connect us to soil, to root, to history. About sketching what has been overlooked.
This is Land Spirits.
Sketchbook Seiðr
In Norse tradition, seiðr was a practice of deep listening, shapeshifting, and seeing beyond the veil – carried by the völur, women who walked between worlds.
In Sketchbook Seiðr, the pencil becomes a wand, the page becomes a portal, and the act of drawing becomes a conversation with place. To draw is to enter relationship – to listen with your eyes and honor what is present.
Here, where the land meets the tide, the salt marshes and dunes speak.
Place, Memory, and the Living Archive
This is southern Long Island – ancestral land of the Rockaway, Merik, Massapequa, Canarsie, and Munsee Lenapepeoples.
This coast has always been a threshold – shifting, resilient, alive.
Once filled with native grasses, milkweed, goldenrod, and boneset, these wetlands now hold a mix of the old and the introduced. Non-native plants like mugwort and Phragmites arrived through colonization, trade, accident, and longing – spirits carried across the ocean in the pockets of settlers and sailors.
Every plant has a story.
Some speak of ancestral medicine. Some speak of displacement. The soil itself is a library layered with memory – mycelium, bones, and broken shell.
The non-native plants are not intruders in this work – they are evidence. Evidence of human hands, movement, survival, and trauma. And yet they bloom. They feed bees and birds. They form new relationships in this time, in this place.
The mugwort growing along a marsh path is no less sacred than the seaside goldenrod.
Both are shaped by wind, by history, by longing. Some came with ceremony. Others came by accident – tucked into linen hems, carried in horse feed, hidden in ballast soil.
Each carries a spirit.
Each forms new relationships with pollinators, fungi, and with you.
What the Land Spirits Teach
The land spirits remind us we are part of a changing ecology.
They are not static. They adapt, evolve, and remember. They show us how ancient roots and new seeds coexist. They teach us that complexity is not disorder – it is survival.
And they ask:
What will you carry forward?
What will you protect?
What stories will you choose to hear?
Our ancestors knew how each plant could nourish or heal, and they spread seeds with intention. This was reciprocity – relationship.
We can remember, too:
- Monarchs need milkweed.
- Bees need native pollen.
- Water needs protection.
- The marsh needs space to breathe.
So plant where you can. Protect what still lives. Tend to the earth in small ways – in sidewalk cracks, backyard corners, window boxes. Every act of care matters.
Whisper to the soil: What is it you need?
Send that message deep into the network of fungi and bones, into the old intelligence of the earth.
The land listens always.
A Prayer and a Practice
May you walk this land with listening in your bones.
May you remember that even a single square of earth is holy – a place where healing begins.
May your hands know the gesture of care: the planting of seeds, the stillness that hears, the whisper of the land.
Let the milkweed grow.
Let the bees find pollen in your garden, your alleyway, your windowsill.
Let the wild return where it can.
Let every sketch, every question, every gesture be a bridge back to relationship.
The land spirits are watching.
The ancestors are remembering.
And the future is listening.
Land Spirits is a prayer, a visual offering, and a way to see the living world as more than backdrop – as collaborator, witness, and kin.
This work is supported by Long Island Grants for the Arts through funds provided by the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by The Huntington Arts Council.
