We gathered at the peak of the mulch pile and learned who we were, rehearsing names until they lodged, like warm, polished stones, into hands and pockets and mouths and hearts. We talked of poop, bullfrogs, and poop again. We decided it wise not to run with clippers, pulled ivy with all our might, created survival rings around trees, plotted to return with saplings to grow the forest under our care. We worried over everything – the harm we do even as we care so very much and have the best of intentions to restore–the plants inadvertently clipped, the salamander tail severed, the bugs suddenly without home, the soil disturbed. We grappled with it, the complexity of being alive in this moment, of living in a world where killer whales are orcas and also are not whales at all, but in the family of dolphins, and whose preferred food, Chinook salmon, is threatened by human ideas of progress untethered from our deeper needs and connection to every other living being. We came back around to poop, deciding that some poop in some places is a boon to the earth and that some poop in other places is not quite as good, maybe even bad. Some of us had snacks, supervising from a safe square of blanketed earth, awaiting the moment we would be called to rally the rest of us to carry the tarp. We did, we hauled two loads of ivy and Himalayan blackberry bramble to the gate where it would be ferried even farther away from the patch of earth we tended. We ran with abandon back to our work, doing our one last thing before gathering for a story of a creek lost and found, wondering in awe over how the insects, frogs, and fish found their ways back after long exile, hoping that we might find our way back as well, to a state of being that slips in and out of consciousness as one we might be missing, that we need, that the earth and every living being needs us to find and stay present with right now and always and forever. As long as it takes for us to find our way to our deepest, truest selves, we will do this work, together.