Our community work parties came to an abrupt pandemic pause at the end of February 2020 and did not resume until fall, so this year brings a new consideration: How to move forward with habitat restoration without disrupting nesting season?
Work in our original area is slowing as we maintain what we have done, and we have just barely started on a new area overgrown with Himalayan blackberry. Birdsong–from chickadees, robins, juncos, and so many birds I have yet to learn–already fills the air, telling me I’m really too late to clear more canes, but I am desperate not to lose these coming months of work in the park.
We must mow down all the blackberry canes now! I think. I must do it in this first bit of March so that we can dig root balls through the rest of spring and summer! It has to be right now and fast and there is no time to spare because, if I am honest with myself, I am already too late and shouldn’t be doing this at all!
A power tool would be just the thing, I think, and so I rent one with visions of mowing all the canes running the length of the park north of the parking lot entrance. It is a gas powered tool, which I vaguely know to be horrible, but I go ahead anyway in my desperation and rush.
The tool is not hard to master, but it is heavy and loud and malodorous. I accidentally cut an ossoberry plant, hidden in the thicket of Himalayan blackberry, that I mean to keep. The Himalayan canes, thicker than my thumb and barbed for battle, protect themselves by bowing far from where where they sprout from the ground, making it difficult for me to see and reach them there. I end up trying to whack them in the air with the round, spinning blade. It is not how the tool was intended to be used and is, unsurprisingly, inefficient. Within minutes of struggling with the canes and tool, I feel nauseous from the fumes. Still, I press on for a while.
And then I surrender.
I lay down the power tool, pick up the hand clippers, and move much closer to the canes. I am able to work more precisely to protect the native plants we want to keep. I seem no slower–and perhaps even more effective–with the hand clippers than with the power tool, and they make for quieter work. Contemplative. I can hear the birdsong again and the sounds of families enjoying far off places in the park. I feel the air enveloping me and something deep within me vibrating in connection with the plants and animals nearby. I am satisfied to be working like this. It feels like the right kind of hard. It feels just right.
As we leave the park, I feel the lessons of my experience with the power tool surface: Perhaps this work of tending to the earth is not meant to be fast in the way we have come to expect things to be in our modern capitalist society.
Perhaps the lessons of the power tool can be generalized beyond the park.
Perhaps slow and steady, in tune to the natural cycles of the seasons and life, is how this was meant to be all along. How have we gotten so far in practice from this idea? And how can we get back? Perhaps the lesson is that it is okay, smart even, to give up attachment to what isn’t working and find another way.
Perhaps the lesson is that there need be no rush, that trusting in ourselves and in the wisdom of accumulated knowledge can lead us, in good time, where we need to be.