emergencemagazine.... · 13 hours ago

Teaching a Child Time by Walking Into It

What does a season mean to a child who has only circled the sun a handful of times and can barely remember last week? Filmmaker adam amir lives in Vancouver with his young son and has been building something quietly remarkable: a set of seasonal practices -- pilgrimages, really -- designed to make time tangible for a child too young to hold it abstractly. Each year they climb to the snow line, wade into marshlands to meet migrating cranes, sit with the cherry blossoms, and wade through high-mountain berry meadows, tasting the wild land directly. As amir writes, "we pray through pilgrimage" -- to snowfields, to salmon streams, to sidewalks pink with sakura. He draws on the seasonal vocabularies of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations, whose languages hold a dozen or more names for seasons, including herring time, salmonberry time, and the return of the sockeye -- a kind of knowing the land that amir, as an immigrant, is learning alongside his son rather than inheriting. What lingers most is his honest confession: where elders have very old stories to tell, he has only a feeling, a wordless sense of the spirits of the land he cannot quite name. And so he returns, again and again, to the same places at the same times, hoping his children will sense something too.