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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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November 24 2023 Work Party (four years)
This is what it looks like to be four.
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Four years
Today marks the four year anniversary of Swamp Creek Habitat Restoration Project. We do this work on the ancestral land of the first peoples of this region — the Coast Salish, the Muckleshoot, the Duwamish, the Snoqualmie, the Sammamish, the Stillaguamish, the Suquamish — peoples who have stewarded this land since time immemorial and who are very much alive and present as good stewards of the land to this day. It is with gratitude to and because of them that we have the honor of tending to this land with the hope of restoring it to a healthy ecosystem where native insects, fish, birds, and mammals, including humans, can be…
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November 18 2023 Work Party
“So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.” — Pema Chödrön
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November 4 2023 Work Party
A work party cancelled due to lightning carries on, when it turns out the three hours are safe and dry, with those who just show up. It turns out that a cancelled work party turned active work party is completely delightful.
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October 28 2023 Work Party
The first trees of this planting season are in new homes, tucked on the east side of Swamp Creek before it bends to find the Sammamish River. Douglas fir, Western hemlock, Grand fir, and Sitka spruce removed from pots, roots unbound and draped over mounds of soil in deep holes, rocks sifted and piled nearby, compost mixed with the earth we found and pressed firmly down. Gentle tugs at the base of 30 trunks confirm they are all securely tucked. One tree in not quite the right home. We decide to move ki a foot over, safely out of the way of passing wheelbarrows full of Himalayan blackberry and English…
