Rain. Garter snakes. Adventure. Layers peeled. Fallen logs. Fungi. Leaves. Soil. Earth. Us.
October 30 2021 Work Party
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.
October 16 2021 Work Party
Sometimes it is enough simply to show up. Goodness often grows from grounded presence.
October 8 2021 Work Party
One person gave voice to a desire. Another person said YES. Several more people came along. Because of one strong, powerful, beautiful young woman, we gathered under a fall sky and found connection to the earth and to each other.
It just takes one.
September 25 2021 Work Party
Heavy
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
–Mary Oliver
September 11 2021 Work Party
Blue Oak
A meadow ends where all the perpendiculars of a leafy brown
river throw themselves up towards blue. The fruits are olive
and ocher. Sprays of dark leaves shiver and splash with
sun. Lightning scars show where the main, once shaped
by flames, was not lost but reduced to fine fists, oak tissue
under sheets of earth, sleeping through the storm and
teeth of quick-heat. Here it is: the world utterly lovely
despite the anguish, despite endless battles. Meanwhile,
you have slipped away to yours. My phone is still again. I
could call back. I could babble about this testimony to
resilience, bent limbs and great elbows of trunk leaning against
granite in gestures of pondering and reconciliation. I
could share the looping and fluttering of flycatchers, grasses
fresh with fog-drip and shade, pressed flat where a fox
recently turned doglike circles round and round before
settling in. I could hold up my phone. among the workings of
xylem and phloem so you could hear the rustling, the liquid flow
scooping minutes out of the heart’s rocky sloping, terrain
and flowing on as only a river can. Or I could stand still and listen.
–Maya Khosla
July 25 2021 Work Party
The scratches on my arms remind me that I touch the world and the world touches me. Here, with you, is where I am meant to be. Thank you.
July 17 2021 Interlude
I wanted clear the entire area of Himalayan blackberry regrowth. I wanted to hold my Asian neighbors close, to keep them safe from vitriol and hate. I wanted to dismantle the system that murders black people at the hands of the state. I wanted to shore things up. I wanted to repair the cracks. I wanted to make everything beautiful.
I wanted to protect the salmon, tell them it was safe to come back, that there would be no stormwater runoff or hardened banks or dammed rivers to kill them upon their return. I wanted to reconnect the rivers to their floodplains, wildlife corridors to each other. I wanted to wrap my arms around an old growth tree and stand there forever. I wanted to give the land back to the indigenous people who have been here always. I wanted to keep the forests from being disappeared. I wanted to care, to tend, to mend. I wanted everyone to have enough and then some.
I wanted to do so much.
I did what I could instead.
July 11 2021 Work Party
A small wheelbarrow doing big work. An overheard conversation and the pleasure of connection witnessed. A candidate rolling up her sleeves. A story unfolding within the larger unfolding of the universe.
Community. Reciprocity. Gratitude. Love.
Thank you.
May 23 2021 Work Party
The Blue-Green Stream
by Wang Wei
Translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell
Every time I have started for the Yellow Flower River,
I have gone down the Blue-Green Stream,
Following the hills, making ten thousand turnings,
We go along rapidly, but advance scarcely one hundred li.
We are in the midst of a noise of water,
Of the confused and mingled sounds of water broken by stones,
And in the deep darkness of pine trees.
Rocked, rocked,
Moving on and on,
We float past water-chestnuts
Into a still clearness reflecting reeds and rushes.
My heart is clean and white as silk; it has already achieved Peace;
It is smooth as the placid river.
I love to stay here, curled up on the rocks,
Dropping my fish-line forever.