A warm spring sun. Birdsong. Bare branches striking against a bright blue sky, their very tips yearning for the center of the solar system. Tightly furled ossoberry buds crown thin, delicate branches. Leaf skeletons nestle among sodden leaves, all decaying into something new. A small rat, dead on the side of the road. Tiny front paws curled, body still soft. A final resting place, shrouded in leaf litter, in the crack of a fallen tree. Himalayan blackberry thorns etch their secret language on bare skin, a protest, perhaps, in dots and dashes at being severed from the earth. A hawk, a juvenile we think, circles above us, wing tips touching sky, soaring and wobbling, wobbling and soaring, sending out piercing and beautiful cries. We stand silent, watching and listening, witnessing with gratitude this undeserved gift.
None of us knows how long we have. All of this, a gift.
“Love creates a communion with life. Love expands us, connects us, sweetens us, ennobles us. Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any moment we can step beyond our small self and embrace each other as beloved parts of a whole.”
–Jack Kornfield
***
Here we are, beloved, healing the earth and ourselves. Where does one end and the other begin?
“I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but “fear itself.” But I wouldn’t stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.”
Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee—the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”
And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.
I can remember—I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn’t itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world.
And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying—We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we are God’s children, we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.
Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we’ve got to keep attention on that. That’s always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn’t get around to that.
Now we’re going to march again, and we’ve got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be—and force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That’s the issue. And we’ve got to say to the nation: We know how it’s coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory. We aren’t going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don’t know what to do. I’ve seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr., April 3, 1968, Mason Temple, Memphis.
***
Fifty-three years later his words are as relevant as they were the day he spoke them.
The nation is sick. Literally, bodies crumpled and lost; figuratively, with far more than medicine can name.
Shadow forces send out their mercenaries to find the smallest of fissures between us, widening the cracks, exploiting our fragility, fear, and shame until our screaming at each other across a manufactured chasm is so deafening no one can hear. Our malaise shifts shape and form, fluid until the moment it solidifies into the crack of a gun shot and another of us is gone. Trouble is in the land.
The pain of it is in my joints, my head, my heart, the air, the earth, the sea. Everywhere.
We have arrived on a precipice, and we do not yet know which way we will go. Can we trust our elected leaders to work for the common good? Will our democratic norms and processes hold up to the baser authoritarian impulses living in and among us? Will I have enough to feed my child this month, next month, next year? At what cost to our other basic needs? Confusion all around. Why, in such deep darkness, have we let go of one another?
I reach out my hand. Will I find you?
It is so, so dark sometimes, and all I know to do to get through is to feel the pull of gravity against the back of my skull, my shoulder blades, my pelvis, my heels as I lie still and quiet. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. There is tile and concrete still between me and the earth, yet here on the floor is grounding enough for me to find the will to rise up and propel my body out of the house, into the world, to you. In this dark, I find you, 100 million billion points of lights, fireworks. In this dark, I find you, the singular point of expansion, the vastness of the universe, everything that ever was or will be. In this dark, we come together, stars forming the most beautiful earth-bound constellation on the ground, dancing with the constellations above.
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.
You came to the park for habitat restoration because of him, for him. Something is happening in this world. You are happening in this world, and thank you for that, for your care and compassion, for you. May his memory, and its call to action, be eternal.
Wetlands are a necessary and precious ecosystem, and they are in our care. Thank you, friends, for showing up for one today. You are so needed, appreciated, and loved.
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
— Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Difficult Times
***
Something happens when we come together, something greater than the sum of us. When you arrive, I am on the ground, in my body, watching you. I watch you tumbling out of cars, exchanging shoes for boots, donning hats, zipping coats. You walk toward me with the tools for our work, loppers and clippers and shovels and open hearts. It fills me with such joy that my body cannot contain it, this coming together simultaneously a falling apart, the empty space in my cells exploding beyond my body, shooting away into the air around us.
We stand, six feet apart, and beam at one another. Sometimes even this distance is too much to bear and our bodies press together for a fleeting moment that feels like everything, the warmth of your body becoming mine, the illusion of our separateness shattered.
And then we are apart. I am hovering somewhere above, watching the whole of us. I see something magical, a synecdoche, the universe showing up as us, us as universe. We are electrons and protons falling around a nucleus, the moon attracted to the gravity of the Earth. There is no difference, it is all the same, and from this great height I can see a great coming together.
The night before I had been standing on concrete, watching people stream by, called out into the darkness to enjoy luminaries and each other in this season of receding light and stillness. How are you? you asked, one, two, three times. You look happy, you said, and I realize that I am. I am happy. There are challenges with parenting, with work, with the world, and yet. It is all there, jostling about inside and around me, finding a shifting, sometimes–often?–uncomfortable coming together before falling apart. Sitting in this space, I turn over the happiness I have found in my hands. It is full of cracks and tender spots and bumpy scars. It is mine, and it feels true.
Our work is coming to a close. The first drops of rain fall, the wind folds the tattered blue tarp we use to drag blackberry roots and canes. I look to the south, the sky approaching a velvet wash of steel grey. Do the last thing you need to do to feel done, I suggest, and then we walk to the parking lot together and I look into your eyes. I hope you come back, I say. We fall apart as the rain, cold on my skin, picks up.
You linger, arguing with me about the handling of the blackberry canes we cut from the earth, arguing that our nitrogen-rich soil will gobble them up greedily, arguing that they are not zombie canes that will regenerate if left to compost in place. You argue with me about the barrenness of our sheet mulched areas, calling them apocalyptic wastelands. You tell me that you talk to trees and that they are not happy with how humans have handled all the things. Why would they be? I reply. On that we agree, and then you argue that I don’t take enough selfies. You need to show that you are with the trees! You are a force, look at this badass fuckery you are responsible for, you say. You gesture broadly to the restoration area, to the park, maybe to the world. I stand taller.
Today marks the two 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 Stillaguamish, the Duwamish, the Suquamish, the Sammamish–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, native ecosystem where native insects, fish, birds, and mammals, including humans, can be sustained and thrive for generations to come.
This project is about many things, perhaps as many unique things as there have been volunteers tending our restoration areas at Wallace Swamp Creek Park over the past two years. One of my reasons for working in the park is salmon, a keystone species and bellwether of watershed health. Pacific Northwest salmon are threatened, and we need them–for culture, for sustenance, for the way they hold our ecosystems together–as much as they need our help recovering them. Every bit of watershed health we restore helps salmon recovery efforts.
Much has happened in the past year. Sno-King Watershed Council officially brought the project under their wing, giving us access to liability insurance (we’re growing up!) and their 501c3 non-profit status. We’ve started in on a second restoration area, tackling another enormous tangle of Himalayan blackberry (and knotweed, holly, and scotch broom!), and we continue to visit our first restoration area to monitor and maintain our work. The pandemic has given us the unexpected gift of keeping the groundlessness of our situation front and center, reminding us to hold at once tightly to our overarching vision and loosely to our progress toward those big goals.
I remain grateful to every person who has touched this project in any way–from my co-founders, Linda Phillips and Kenmore City Councilmember Melanie O’Cain; to the City of Kenmore, especially city staff Stephanie Brown, Quinn Proffitt, and Jennifer Gordon; to Kenmore City Council; to those who have dropped off cardboard; to those who have cheered us on with a wave or a friendly hello as they’ve driven or wandered by. I am grateful most especially for the community who has gathered month after month, through seasons, though all kinds of weather, through this wretched pandemic, for showing up and showing me the resilience, joy, and connection that exists in our community and in me. Without each other, where would we be?
Thank you for being in this work with me. I’m excited to keep going with you.
Swamp Creek Habitat Restoration Project turned two today. What better way to celebrate than to continue as we began? Thank you to all who came out in the drizzle and rain today. It’s magic when you are there.
The ground is saturated again after a dry summer spell, strewn with fallen cottonwood branches and leaves. The Big Leaf Maples have cast down their own humongous fall foliage, sending sky messengers to ground to be devoured by yellow spotted millipedes. Sporocarps are everywhere, disguised by mulch, the bark on fallen branches, in the nooks and crannies of nurse logs and stumps. What was once alive is being returned to the earth to be born anew from rich soil co-created by death. And we are here, witness to and participant in this endless, beautiful cycle of decay and renewal, practicing being human together.
With gratitude for all things, until we meet again.
