This show started somewhere between Goose Pond and December hiking in Turkey Run. When the best branding is “Naptown” and “No Mean City,” it can take a while to see the loveliness of the place you live. But Indiana is beautiful. In months strung with marshland murmurations and swallowtails, old growth forests and glacier-carved ravines, Becca and I started to see.

Then came a rainy winter afternoon. I don’t remember what the bad climate news was—maybe just the portent of a long January downpour—but the sense of threat was dripping from the eaves. Becca got her sketchbook out. The duet pairings were some of the first ideas on paper, because it’s hard to dream alone about a better world. Lidded jars became urns, in the face of degraded land and species loss. We debated how to make a murmuration. 

As a writer and sustainability educator, I wondered if I could narrate this show with anything but dread. Bad news unfolds around us: erratic weather and smoke-thick air, struggling harvests and trashed parks and a list of endangered species that just keeps growing. My students ask if cleanups or compost matter when the problems are so big. 

But this precarious dazzling world keeps summoning love out through the smog of fear. Redwing blackbirds serenade beneath a wildfire sky. Drifts of blackberries bloom along Lake Michigan’s shore, foam dancing on the gray-green waters. A feast of summer light falls golden through the leaves. It calls us back, until Becca is shaping clay into mug and mirror and urn and Katheryn is sketching the creatures we stand to lose. Katie paints gold luster murmurations and watercolors reciprocity. And I get to write about all of it, how this making is a way to hold lament and hope together in the land we love. 

It’s also a way to imagine a future we want to see. Can you picture the rivers—our White River—flowing clean again, teeming with fish instead of sewage? Air it doesn’t hurt to breathe? Butterflies the elegant rule and not the exception of a summer’s day? Farm fields a riot of flower and fruit alongside familiar crops, healing the soil as they grow food enough for all? 

This show builds toward that last vision. Our friends at Falcon Creek Farm are planting native fruit and nut trees on their land. Elderberry, Aronia, Hazelnut and Serviceberry trees will build and stabilize soil, welcome more creatures of wing and earth, draw CO2 from the air, and extend the farm’s bounty. 5% of each purchase will go toward this sapling fund: the show growing up to be an orchard long after these pieces are scattered to their separate homes. 

There are a thousand, thousand ways to stand up for all we love.