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three years
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…
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November 13 2022 Work Party
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…
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October 22 2022 Work Party
Suffering. 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,…
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October 8 2022 Work Party
A song for you. And something I am working on right now: “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…
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September 25 2022 Work Party
We dug all the knotweed and pushed back the Himalayan blackberry regrowth. We identified a black locust tree, and once we knew, we saw them everywhere. We limbed up an English hawthorn and pulled up some reed canary grass. We connected, we learned, we grew, we stretched ourselves in all the best ways.
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August 20 2022 Work Party
A song for you.
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August 13 2022 Work Party
Trailer, wheelbarrows, and root slayers. Canes pulled from ground and sky. Digging, cutting, sifting. Thorns drag across skin. Trees released. A clearing.
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August 6 2022 Work Party
The work goes on even when I am not there, all of you picking up the threads to weave them together into a beautiful whole, all on your own. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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July 16 Work Party
A low current of anxiety hums through at least half the days, sometimes even the days I go to one of our restoration sites to prepare for you. And then I see you. My heart grows a bit every time–when you arrive, two kids and dog in tow; when you walk across the parking lot toward me; when I find you sitting in the dirt, digging out the finest filaments of knotweed root; when you offer to sharpen our tools from the back of your truck; when you embrace the root slayer I offer; when you grow the circle we stand in; when you come for the first time; when…
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July 2 2022 Work Party
“The principal point of this book is not that the salmon is a magnificent animal that holds its own compared to anything on the Serengeti–beautiful in its many phases; thrilling in its athleticism; moving in its strength, determination, and courage; poetic in its heroic and tragic life story–and it would be sad if it were to disappear. All that is true, but a more important point is that if the salmon does not survive, there is little hope for the survival of the planet.”–Mark Kurlansky, Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of their Common Fate If the forecast this year is correct, 10,165 Cedar River sockeye will pass…
