A song for you.
***
The lesson I need to learn over and over is that I am not alone. This is the lesson you teach me every time we are together.
I am so grateful for you. And for goats!
March 18 Work Party
March 11 2023 Work Party
You arrive, the Elders arrive, two Christophers from Texas find their way to us through separate winding paths. We build protective cages, secure them with wooden stakes, pull ivy and wrestle Himalayan blackberry from the earth. Betty and Thelma race side-by-side through the muddy field to rest at the center of a prickly pile of English hawthorn branches. You hold a far-ranging course for two in science and nature and culture, maybe untangling a theory of everything beneath the osoberry blooms. I hear just enough to be intrigued, not enough to really know. We prop up a listing conifer. You snuggle Betty and Thelma, they gaze with beseeching eyes, give you sloppy kisses. Layers shed, skin scratched. Beautiful, watchful forest dog a witness to our comings and goings. How does this happen? How are we so lucky to be spinning through this universe together?
March 4 2023 Planting Work Party
“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.” –Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachman
The feedback feels personal and harsh, landing hard after more than a year of working diligently to be present to partner needs and desires. The path with this child feels dark and thorny. And this world. We cannot seem to change in the face of overwhelming evidence that things are not well.
Delusion gets in the way of clear seeing, of knowing the questions to ask, of discernment. We grasp for the one perfect something we believe will erase all our suffering. We cause ourselves so much suffering.
“This moment or this place is as perfect as it can be.” –Father Richard Rohr
Happiness can only be given in this moment and this place, with the hard feedback, with the conflict with this child, with all that is wrong with how we have organized our lives together. Winding among these things, inextricably entwined, is all the joy, love, empathy, belonging, courage, and everything good we could ever hope to find.
“This is a tale about the brilliant betweenness that defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.” –Bayo Akomolafe
Here in this brilliant betweenness we create together, we can see with fresh eyes. The scales drop, we are allowed to be, nothing is wrong. Here we accept the invitation to rethink everything, to meet ourselves as if for the first time, to not only imagine but also to create the more beautiful world of our yearning. We do this in fits and starts, separated by days and weeks, both pressing out and inviting in the world from which we’ve come.
Today we have come together doing our clumsy best to use the tools of that world to sculpt something new. We plant trees, making sure their roots are not tangled, protecting them with mulch and metal cages. We practice hope. It is magic.
Then all too quickly the mulch pile is tidied, the tool trailer packed away, and we’ve fallen apart to rest and to take the magic we created in the brilliant betweenness to other people and places.
A Red-breasted Sapsucker rat-a-tat-tats on a metal park sign.
This can be yours, I say. I am all okay with all this being yours.
There is peace in letting go.
There is joy in traveling together.
Until next time.
March 3 2023 Preparing for Planting
85 native plants wait for human hands to place them tenderly in the ground.
February 18 2023 Work Party
We worked to the soothing sounds of Swamp Creek, creating survival rings and pushing back against Himalayan blackberry. A raccoon observed from a wary distance, birds graced us with song. We learned about this place and each other. We grew. Together.
February 4 2023 Work Party
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” –Desmond Tutu
Thank you for being the light, my dear ones, and a wellspring of hope.
January 28 2023 Work Party
Thistle and yellow arch angel and reed canary grass and Himalayan blackberry. Beautiful plants from other ecosystems who have found their way to ours and managed to disturb the balance of here. We clip, dig, and pull against loss of biodiversity and habitat, dirt on gaiters and layers and foreheads, snags on sweaters, connection vibrating the space between us. Himalayan blackberry roots resist our removal efforts, breaking under the soil, absconding with the energy required to push up new shoots at some later time. Tiny spiders, deep rusty orange with two stripes ringing their abdomens, scrabble across mounds of soil that must seem like mountains, a woolly bear curls defensively in my hand, everyone ferried to the safety of a gently weeping Western Red Cedar. On a field trip past the corner of the neighbor’s chain link fence, we slip by the adolescent conifer trees that stand between us and the beyond onto a bed of laid-down reed canary grass, and tears viscerally rise up as I gaze upon Himalayan blackberry brambles as far as the eye can see. This time hope comes in the form of your openness to coming back to face the brambles with me for as long as it takes. Together is the only way I know to do this.
January 16 2023 Work Party MLK Jr Day of Service
“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking before the Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1968
It was an honor to serve alongside you. Thank you with every part of my being.
January 7 2023 Work Party
Cut English hawthorn hauled. Cozy rooms carved out of a tangle of Himalayan blackberry. Wondering who might dwell under a small mound of decaying wood. We met here in this new year, full of possibility, under the blessed, wondrous rain, to give each other the gift of being alive together.
December 17 2022 Work Party
A Benediction
“May the roots of suffering diminish. May warfare, violence, neglect, indifference, and addiction also decrease.
May the wisdom and compassion of all beings increase, now and in the future.
May we clearly see all the barriers we erect between ourselves and others to be as insubstantial as our dreams.
May we appreciate the great perfection of all phenomena.
May we continue to open our hearts and minds, in order to work ceaselessly for the benefit of all beings.
May we go to the places that scare us.
May we lead the life of a warrior.”
–Pema Chödrön, from The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
And a song for you.
Happy winter, my friends, and a restful end of 2022 to you and yours.