Arts Blog by Sabra Comins

September 2026 – Pocket Reminders

I don’t want to add weight to my pack, but once I hold the stone it feels magnetized to my body and slips into my pocket.

I am backpacking with my son and we have just reached our first campsite. The cool green stone is a perfect marker of this time as we settle into the flanks of Mount St. Helens after a day of scrambling over lava flows. It is our second attempt to be there – the first thwarted by smoke – and possibly our last trip of this kind as he heads further into adulthood.

Rubbing the stone between my fingers, I contemplate my need to collect treasures. Is it for proof of my time in a product-driven society? The rock is circular, smooth enough to feel soft. Am I collecting to better hold onto a memory?

Author Jason Dove Mark says we are on a glide path of forgetting. In his new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet, he addresses ecological amnesia, shifting baseline syndrome, normalization of extreme weather, and connections with memory and imagination. He offers four impactful steps to take: Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on.

During a local reading, when asked what we could do preemptively for the expected loss of ash trees in the Willamette Valley (due to the impending arrival of the emerald ash borer), Mark suggested building memories with the ash trees now. One could take pictures of young kids with a large ash tree, visit and document an ash regularly, or make eco-prints with ash leaves. Building ecological memories of mature ash trees lays the groundwork for realizing a baseline and restoration that might not have been imaginable otherwise. As Mark said, the purpose of memory is imagination.

The second day on the trail, I pick up a rough white and yellow pumice rock and imagine how it might have burst out from deep within the volcano. It is so porous I could crush it with my hands. I quickly pocket it anticipating the pigment it might become. Then, I laugh out loud visualizing the jars of marigold blossoms and coastal redwood cones awaiting a similar fate at home.

Artist Natalie Niblack wants us to remember too. Her bird portraits highlight the perils and triumphs of species previously in decline, and alert us to a worse possibility for other species if the average temperature increases by three degrees. Niblack’s two-part exhibition titled 66 Birds/3 Degrees | Return to Life was inspired by a National Audubon Society publication, Survival By Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink. As much as the show is a reminder of the past and present, it is also meant to inspire. I wonder how these birds and their stories will influence our understanding and instigate action. Can we still encounter local species that are “on the brink”?

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On the restricted northern side of St. Helens, I ruminate on my desire to collect while we pass mountain goats. Is it a residual fear from when being without our things – food, shelter, tools, community – was life-threatening? Our packs are extra heavy because we are carrying enough water for this day and the next. Tufts of wool appear along the trail. Pressing a bundle in my palm, I feel its weightlessness and happily tuck it into my pocket.

Artist Rose Covert’s sculptural basketry emulates how it feels to be in nature. She builds a deep connection with her materials by first cultivating and processing the plants that she then intertwines with old weaving traditions and contemporary thought. I am curious to see what earth-based memories surface for me as I witness her collection of thoughtful works in Elemental Bodies. By the time we circumnavigate Mount St. Helens, my pockets contain rocks, goat wool, dried lupine, and paintbrush blossoms. Satiated with experience, I no longer fear forgetting this trip. I realize I gather these treasures to more easily recall the expansive feeling of being among mountains. These tactile reminders will buoy me forward, urging me to keep stepping into wild places and build my ecological memory so that I may pass it on.

Sabra

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