Residency Journal — Week 2 at Flathead Lake
Asking permission, art and the land, a free, public workshop
This is my second journal entry from the Open AIR Artist Residency at the University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station.
Dear reader,
This week something shifted. I went for a walk high above the lake shore and felt a presence—faint, almost peripheral, like catching movement in the corner of the eye. Families camping, gathering. It wasn’t literal, more a sense of memory—of people who had been here long before me. I felt I needed to ask permission to stay.
Video: Before a cold morning swim.
Not permission in the parental sense—more like the way one asks to enter a home, to step into a space with respect. I walked to the end of the trail, to a large ponderosa pine, and asked quietly if it was all right to be here. It wasn’t about ownership or worthiness. It was about relationship. And what I felt in return wasn’t an answer, exactly, but an invitation to be a guest—because we all are—and to carry that responsibility lightly, but consciously.
Since then, I’ve tried to hold that feeling close: that being here isn’t transactional. I’m not here to extract inspiration or produce a measurable output, though that’s a hard instinct to unlearn. Academia trained me to produce—to turn ideas and experiences into deliverables. Capitalism thrives on that conversion. But my time here feels different. It asks for presence, not productivity. Still, I write more than I ever have.
When we go out with the scientists—this week to the beautiful Nyack watershed and for a full day on Flathead Lake collecting water samples—I see that same tension. They measure, collect, quantify—important, necessary work. But beneath that data, I sense the same connection I felt on my walk. They return to these waters and forests day after day, all year long, not only for the science but because they love the land. They belong to it in some quiet way. They just don’t always name it.
Maybe that’s where the artist’s work begins: in naming what’s already there. In remembering that communion is also a kind of knowledge. That the work of being here—of asking permission, of listening, of being porous and vulnerable—is itself part of what we produce.
I believe we all need this kind of attention to heal, even in small ways—for scientists, for artists, for anyone trying to find meaning in a world that rewards only outcomes. To enter a place not with entitlement but with humility feels like a kind of restoration.
I don’t think we need wilderness for that, though I find it easiest to access this in-between world in wild places, away from the bustle of daily life. Yet we can ask permission anywhere. The point isn’t the setting—it’s the shift: to step into a place, or a moment, or even a conversation, and understand that we’re guests there too.
This Friday, October 17, we’ll gather for our artist workshop at the Flathead Lake Biological Station—a shared listening to what we’ve seen and learned during our residency here. The program includes a world-premiere musical performance, experiential painting, a documentary short in progress, and some hands-on science. You’ll see how the land reflects in our art—and how our art, in turn, reflects the land.
I’ll lead a journaling session, which to me is a kind of communion: a slow excavation of what lies beneath our experiences. As a biographer, I find what we write about almost as revealing as how we write it. Here I’ve learned that objects themselves can become the most telling journals—small artifacts in the ongoing archaeology of stories.
Come join us for the Open AIR Art and Science Conference at Flathead Lake. It’s free and open to the public (all ages).
Here’s the program: openairmt.org/events/flbs-arts-conference
Bis bald,
Eva
