The Invisible World
Matt Daly’s lineage links back to Puritans from the early colonial period who helped set the course toward many of the destructive and shameful practices that Anglo-American culture has enacted on people and ecosystems around the world. The Invisible World strives to address this history, not to redress its wrongs, but at least to face them in the hope of making sense of how we might live beyond their influence.
Exploring the writings of his ancestor, Matt saw an articulation of wildness as the habitat for evil. The American continent was cast as a place to be purged of its darkness. This rhetoric sounded alarmingly familiar to the divisive and demonizing language of contemporary political speech.
And so, Matt created a daily practice of reading sections of his ancestor’s texts and writing responses to what he found there. In his responses, Matt kept gravitating to how his own sense of what is good and right, and how to live well with others, arises in and from the kinds of rural and wild places his ancestor saw as evil
The Invisible World celebrates the compromised intimacy of a life in love with wild places that and the inhabitants of these places in the hope of healing some small wound among the injuries wrought by a divisive ancestry of fer and mistrust of the living earth.
