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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…
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February 24 2024 Work Party
Some of my favorite people in one of my favorite places.
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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.
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February 10 2024 Work Party
A song for you.
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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.
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December 2 2023 Work Party
A song for you.
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November 18 2023 Work Party
“So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.” — Pema Chödrön
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October 7 2023 Work Party
First meetings. Tree branches swoop to make swings. The forest swallows children, spits them out. A cardboard brigade. Small feet stomp mulch. The children become lost to the creek. You arrive. We begin as we left off, the mulch pile moved, canes cut, root balls dug. Pill bugs and spiders scrabble over rick, dark earth, a dear long-toed salamander travels from glove to arm on ki‘s way to safe shelter. Canes moved by clipper, the last ripe blackberries of the season foraged, a heavy chain pulled from the brambles, a crushed frying pan declared non-native. Our time together inevitably comes to a close and most of you have ridden away,…
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September 9 2023 Work Party
We push back Himalayan blackberry regrowth in preparation for layered mulching. Forsythia and boxwood are trimmed, salmonberry and elderberry discovered under weeping brambles of blackberry. The weed wrench takes a stellar turn at pulling up bamboo, ferns are liberated from canes that have been hiding in their fronds. Ivy is pulled, knotweed surveyed, trash in the creek contemplated. So much is in our care.
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July 22 2023 Work Party
You send your heartbeat 100 feet. Water sloshes from pails. You smile, your gaze steady, encouraging. I pull out tiny English hawthorn, ferret out fast-growing black locust hiding in the shade of towering cottonwoods, dig a horse chestnut on the verge of adolescence. We bear the heat and sun for the good of our first native plantings. There is refuge in the shade and in being with you.
