Places Remember What We Forget: The Sacred Nature of Ebenezer Creek

The trees and water of Ebenezer Creek have been a constant presence.  Listening to the silence, feeling the push of the water against your hand, there is a slow living, you realize, in the natural system, propagated by root and cypress knee, unseen planting, and invisible growth.  The trees are kin to us.  We share about a quarter of our genes with them.  Sometimes remembering is explaining.  The trees have borne witness to so many human joys, mundanities, and calamities.  A thousand years to us can be a single tree life at Ebenezer.  The Uchee lived in harmony with the forest and water for many centuries.  There were Woodland Buffalo.  Abundance without effort.  The Spanish came, the English and General Oglethorpe too.  Flocks of Carolina Parakeet used to fill the sky.  Next were the Salzburgers, settling where the Uchee had been, right on Red Bluff above the Creek.  And more recently, the Civil War brought blood to Ebenezer.  The living system of the trees and water, unchanged, has seen it all, written it all, like an arborglyph language, and stored it in the mystery of black water which is crystal clear.  Each of our wet plate collodion works incorporates the place into the art.  We develop our images with the water, make paper from the leaves, and work the sunken cypress.  The place and the process are intended to remind us that our small story is part of something larger.  Embrace being small, and let the forest fill you with gratitude.