garter snake – Swamp Creek Habitat Restoration Project

September 8, 2024January 18, 2025

September 7 2024 Work Party

Do snakes grieve for the selves they shed? If you could hold anything at all in a bottle, what would it be?

October 1, 2023

Digging blackberry regrowth, felling English hawthorn. Gently tending to trailing blackberry and a baby sword fern, whispering with an adolescent Western red cedar. A thin layer of compost, a generously overlapped layer of cardboard, a thick layer of mulch. Some cardboard left bare, puddles gathered. Young people with heads together, talk babbling over talk, laughter, connection, so much love bouncing from you to me to root slayers to conifers to cottonwoods, everywhere, then rain. Light at first, then heavier, it soaks us, pelts upturned faces, drips from leaves, soaks into soil, seeps into roots, grows us, grows everything.

July 30, 2023

July 29 2023 Work Party

New elders, teens known and new to each other, all new to me. You trickle in, each of you right on time, growing us from six to twenty at our peak. We disentangle layers of black plastic sheeting from roots, wrestle blackberry canes from a conifer and elderberry, activate the pungent sent of Herb Robert as we pull it from the ground. Goats arrive, stunning slot-pupilled eyes pulling us from shade to sun. Our happiness increases by 50%. In the end, reed canary grass stands tall, thistles sharp, there is a sea of blackberry before us, but there is only discernment, no discouragement. This is the work before us. We gather to connect before falling away to rest so that we may return again, over and over, for as long as it takes.

April 24, 2022