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.
“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.
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.
Today marks the three 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 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 sustained and thrive for generations to come.
We grew our human family this past year as more and more of us emerged from the cocoon of our homes and pandemic pods. The connections have felt easy and meaningful. We learned to identify English hawthorn, common teasel, and black locust, and once we did, we saw them everywhere. We are removing them, or making plans to do so, as we go. We continued to maintain our original restoration area and made good progress on our second, moving as far north along 73rd Ave NE as we are comfortable until we determine the location of the park property line. While we wait, we are working into the park from 73rd and battling back another tangle of blackberry behind our original restoration area. We planted the first tree to come officially from the habitat restoration project — a volunteer Douglas fir from the yard of a friend who knew the tree would need more space as ki grew. We grew. So much.
My gratitude to project co-founders Deputy Mayor Melanie O’Cain and Kenmore resident Linda Phillips for the vision and faith it took to manifest this project; to the City of Kenmore for permission to work on City land; to City Manager Rob Karlinsey and City Staff Stephanie Brown, Quinn Proffitt, Jennifer Gordon, Justin El, and Rita Moreno for their behind-the-scenes support; and to Sno-King Watershed Council, this project’s non-profit heart and home, with special gratitude to Eric Adman and Jeremy Jones for their mentorship and support. My gratitude also to my mother and my kiddo — they’ve either been out digging in the dirt with me or home together so I could be clipping and digging myself.
If not for the individuals of all ages who have volunteered their time, we would not have built what we have over these past three years — a place of community and belonging, where we are embraced just as we are, where we learn and grow together, where we are healing ourselves as much as we are healing the land. We are all so needed in this work and everyone who has ever volunteered these past three years is permanently etched in my heart.
Without us, I could do little. With us, so much is possible. Here’s to another three years.
We honor, on Orca Recovery Day, Tahlequah (J35), daughter of Princess Angeline (J17), sister to Moby (J44) and Kiki (J53), mother to Notch (J47), Ti-Tahlequah (no J number assigned), and Phoenix (J57). We remember the death of Ti-Tahlequah less than half an hour after her birth in 2018. We tell the story of Tahlequah’s grieving, how she carried Ti-Tahlequah’s lifeless body on her rostrum for 17 days while traveling approximately 1,000 miles with her pod around the San Juan Islands and interior waters of British Columbia. We recount how Tahlequah dove deeply to retrieve Ti-Tahlequah’s body when the dead calf slid from her and sank, how members of her pod likely fed her and carried Ti-Tahlequah when she could not, how she finally let go.
We do not look away from Tahlequah’s personal grieving nor the fact that her sadness is the sadness of all orca mothers who have lost their babies–approximately 75 percent of Southern Resident Orca newborns over the past twenty years have not survived–nor that it is our sadness, too. Our beloved orca family members are in distress. They are endangered. We may be watching them go extinct.
One of the Problems The orcas’ main food source is Chinook salmon, whose survival is threatened or endangered depending on the run. Due to a variety of factors, including but not limited to habitat loss, climate change, and increased pollution, every stage of life for a Chinook has become more difficult for ki to survive. In order to keep our orcas, we must care for our salmon.
What You Can Do: Reduce Pollution Over 14 million tons of pollution ends up in Puget Sound every year, much of which is stormwater runoff after rain. Rain is not the problem though. The problem is the pollution the rain picks up from impervious surfaces like rooftops, parking lots, and roads and rushes directly into our waterways on its way to Puget Sound. Pollution is a complicated problem, but there are things you can do to reduce it. Depaving your yard, encouraging your community to depave wherever possible, planting trees, installing rain barrels, and building rain gardens are all green stormwater solutions within our reach that help salmon and orcas.
What You Can Do: Get Involved in Local Restoration Work Organizations across the region, from Conservation Districts to Salmon Recovery Lead Entities to Fisheries Enhancement Groups to other non-profit and governmental agencies are working everyday to restore salmon habitat with local communities. What we do on land affects the health of the water salmon need to be healthy and thrive. You can make a powerful difference by volunteering to heal the land. It takes all of us.
What You Can Do: Small Actions Make a Big Difference Washing your car on grass, picking up after your pets, and discontinuing the use of fertilizers and pesticides in your yard are small actions with profound effects when multiplied across the 4 million people that live in the Puget Sound region. We are the problem, but we are also the solution. Individual actions alone, however, as powerful as they are at scale, do not replace actions to transform systems. So lobby your elected officials and otherwise agitate for larger systemic change at the same time you engage in change in your daily life.
What You Can Do: Tell Everyone You Know that Orcas and Salmon Need Our Care We care for those we know and love. Recruit your friends and family in the work of salmon and orca recovery by sharing your love for these amazing creatures.
I wish I had the words for anything at all. Instead feelings pile up, crashing against the inside of my skin. I wonder if you see the quickening. I wonder if you know what I cannot name.
Supplication.
I want to be in a different world. A world that knows slow. A more beautiful world, a world where we are wrapped in the magic of stars. I want us to know discernment. I want us to be wise.
Intercession.
Names flow like water over stones. They float on downy wings, whispering protective incantations into the air we breathe. We come together and fall apart, the whole of us shifting, fluid. Gifts come wrapped in brown paper bags. The youngest among us works away a clearing. Now this patch of earth can breath. Now so can we.
Rain.
I need this world, this one we make together. Here we have no need for perfection. Here we are human. We return to each other, to this earth, again and again, to feel out together what it is all becoming.
“When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.”
–Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
