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March 16 2024 Work Party
A copse of trees hides a stand of holly. The youngest among us recruits help, instructs on tools, leads the way. It is warm, too warm for this time of year, we peel off layers, elderberry and red flowering currant bloom weeks earlier than usual. What do the nesting birds make of the unseasonable warmth? An elder wrenches tangled holly roots from between those of a grown cottonwood, we unearth gnarled blackberry root balls nearby, pull up the carpet of ivy. An old Coke can, shards from a broken pane of glass, tennis balls shorn of fuzz. Everywhere we have touched this landscape. A silent bald eagle and a crying…
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March 9 2024 Work Party
Cool, tentative rain. A line of sentinel blackberry canes, dug. Root balls, gnarled and long. Goat neighbors munch tender shoots of reed canary grass. Entwined Western red cedars and ferns in their new homes. Beautiful child dancing through the planting, hiding from the wind, noticing everything.
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February 24 2024 Work Party
Some of my favorite people in one of my favorite places.
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February 17 2024 Work Party
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark You help make my present not only inhabitable, but also joyful. Thank you.
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February 10 2024 Work Party
A song for you.
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January 27 2024 Work Party
We whisper our worry about displacing neighbors who have found shelter behind blackberry brambles not many blocks from where anger shouted away the possibility of permanent homes for them. Rain. We do everything we can. We clip, dig, call, write, lay down cardboard, haul mulch, bare hearts, show up, plant trees, hold on to hope. It is what we can do and it is not enough this time. Everything comes tumbling down, grey clouds settle in. Rest. The world will be reordered and then we will start again.
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January 13 2024 Work Party
Wool socks, silk long underwear, fleece pullover, down coat under lined ski parka. Snow pants and insulated skirt. Mittens, scarf, hat. All of this enough to hold body heat generated by movement. Root slayer as spear, frozen ground splits to reveal dark, soft soil. Conifers frozen in pots planted in the mulch pile, heat generated by thermophillic bacteria releases roots and soil, enough to get a few trees from pots to earth. Determination. Mini-cardboard drive. Initiative. When I am short on hope, I watch how you move through the world and it returns to me in abundance.
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January 6 2024 Work Party
So many hands. So many hearts. So much healing. I love you.
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December 16 2023 Work Party
Mulch pile in the perfect wrong spot, ingenious tarp wrapping canes, joy traveling on air. Found objects leave stories untold; in the mystery, room for possibility, for magic. Root balls fat with the sun, rafts from here to the road, from here into the unknown. In this moment, with people unsheltered, with a climate collapsing, with bombs falling, with opposition to compassion, with apathy, here also is your joy, your persistence, your care. Here is the beautiful, painful messiness of it all laid bare. Here is life.
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December 2 2023 Work Party
A song for you.
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