Love in action.
January 20 2025 Work Party
December 14 2024 Work Party
The last work party of 2024: We excavated trash, dug Himalayan blackberry roots, pulled ivy, rooted up herb Robert and foxglove. We tucked in baby conifers with blankets of mulch stitched in rings, the Western red cedars in particular need of this tender care under climate change. We felt the wind rush around us, watched a murmuration twist and turn above us. We found a tiny Garry oak pushing out of the ground from an acorn planted on the winter solstice one year ago, put a kite in the air for a fleeting moment, brought a whole vibe. We made space, for the trees and for each other. We arrived as we were and left transformed, still ourselves, but some slightly different version produced by the alchemy of the our own hearts, the elements, and each other.
November 29 2024 Work Party
This is what it looks like to be five.
April 13 2024 Work Party
Thank you.
March 23 2024 Work Party
Light rain. Root balls, knotweed, holly, mulch. Little lime green frog. Bushtits nest in an adolescent fir tree, chickadees make copious announcements. We dig and haul and break for strawberry knotweed pie. Fireworks of green everywhere around us.
March 16 2024 Work Party
A copse of trees hides a stand of holly. The youngest among us recruits help, instructs on tools, leads the way. It is warm, too warm for this time of year, we peel off layers, elderberry and red flowering currant bloom weeks earlier than usual. What do the nesting birds make of the unseasonable warmth? An elder wrenches tangled holly roots from between those of a grown cottonwood, we unearth gnarled blackberry root balls nearby, pull up the carpet of ivy. An old Coke can, shards from a broken pane of glass, tennis balls shorn of fuzz. Everywhere we have touched this landscape. A silent bald eagle and a crying red-tailed hawk circle above.
February 24 2024 Work Party
Some of my favorite people in one of my favorite places.
February 17 2024 Work Party
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
You help make my present not only inhabitable, but also joyful. Thank you.
February 10 2024 Work Party
A song for you.
January 27 2024 Work Party
We whisper our worry about displacing neighbors who have found shelter behind blackberry brambles not many blocks from where anger shouted away the possibility of permanent homes for them. Rain. We do everything we can. We clip, dig, call, write, lay down cardboard, haul mulch, bare hearts, show up, plant trees, hold on to hope. It is what we can do and it is not enough this time. Everything comes tumbling down, grey clouds settle in. Rest. The world will be reordered and then we will start again.