Wetlands are a necessary and precious ecosystem, and they are in our care. Thank you, friends, for showing up for one today. You are so needed, appreciated, and loved.
Learn more about wetlands.
January 8 2022 Work Party
December 11 2021 Work Party
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
— Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Difficult Times
***
Something happens when we come together, something greater than the sum of us. When you arrive, I am on the ground, in my body, watching you. I watch you tumbling out of cars, exchanging shoes for boots, donning hats, zipping coats. You walk toward me with the tools for our work, loppers and clippers and shovels and open hearts. It fills me with such joy that my body cannot contain it, this coming together simultaneously a falling apart, the empty space in my cells exploding beyond my body, shooting away into the air around us.
We stand, six feet apart, and beam at one another. Sometimes even this distance is too much to bear and our bodies press together for a fleeting moment that feels like everything, the warmth of your body becoming mine, the illusion of our separateness shattered.
And then we are apart. I am hovering somewhere above, watching the whole of us. I see something magical, a synecdoche, the universe showing up as us, us as universe. We are electrons and protons falling around a nucleus, the moon attracted to the gravity of the Earth. There is no difference, it is all the same, and from this great height I can see a great coming together.
The night before I had been standing on concrete, watching people stream by, called out into the darkness to enjoy luminaries and each other in this season of receding light and stillness. How are you? you asked, one, two, three times. You look happy, you said, and I realize that I am. I am happy. There are challenges with parenting, with work, with the world, and yet. It is all there, jostling about inside and around me, finding a shifting, sometimes–often?–uncomfortable coming together before falling apart. Sitting in this space, I turn over the happiness I have found in my hands. It is full of cracks and tender spots and bumpy scars. It is mine, and it feels true.
Our work is coming to a close. The first drops of rain fall, the wind folds the tattered blue tarp we use to drag blackberry roots and canes. I look to the south, the sky approaching a velvet wash of steel grey. Do the last thing you need to do to feel done, I suggest, and then we walk to the parking lot together and I look into your eyes. I hope you come back, I say. We fall apart as the rain, cold on my skin, picks up.
You linger, arguing with me about the handling of the blackberry canes we cut from the earth, arguing that our nitrogen-rich soil will gobble them up greedily, arguing that they are not zombie canes that will regenerate if left to compost in place. You argue with me about the barrenness of our sheet mulched areas, calling them apocalyptic wastelands. You tell me that you talk to trees and that they are not happy with how humans have handled all the things. Why would they be? I reply. On that we agree, and then you argue that I don’t take enough selfies. You need to show that you are with the trees! You are a force, look at this badass fuckery you are responsible for, you say. You gesture broadly to the restoration area, to the park, maybe to the world. I stand taller.
And then we fall apart. There is room for it all.
November 26 2021 Work Party (two years)
Swamp Creek Habitat Restoration Project turned two today. What better way to celebrate than to continue as we began? Thank you to all who came out in the drizzle and rain today. It’s magic when you are there.
Happy birthday, us!
November 14 2021 Work Party
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
August 14 2021 Work Party
The world is on fire: right now the Western U.S, Canada, Italy, Turkey, Greece. Where else? It’s possible that Finland is still burning, that the fires of Siberia continue to smother the North Pole with wildfire smoke not seen there, in recorded history, until now. While wildfires burn, ice and frozen ground melts. We cannot be sure, as temperatures continue to climb, that the Arctic tundra will remain permanently frozen year round. And now the air currents over the Atlantic Ocean, including the Gulf Stream, may be shutting down. As these events unfold, it is increasingly difficult to see them as isolated or to deny that we are experiencing their cascading, destabilizing effects in our own backyards.
It can feel almost unbearable to witness at times. Heavy.
So I take a deep breath, exhale, and do it again, each breath a form of resistance to the despair pushing to take residence in my heart. Breathing in: I am here. Breathing out: I am still here. Breathing in: The despair will not crush me. Breathing out: I will not abandon myself.
I take this resistance with me to the park where I find that you, my community, have brought me hope and joy. I see it in your children, smiles so radiant and pure they must contain the same powerful light that shines on us from even the most distant reaches of the universe. I see it in the way you kneel together under the low hanging branches of the cottonwood tree, tugging the blackberry canes nestled there as gently as your heads bow together in the task. I feel it when we gather to see the garter snake you found in the mulch pile and transported to our restoration area by wheel barrow, when we find our snake relation in your gentle pour of wood chips and watch their forked tongue slip from tiny mouth as they seek refuge in the small woody debris once again. I see hope and joy in the diligence with which you work: filling wheel barrel after wheel barrel of mulch with such good cheer and digging blackberry and knotweed with such forbearance, despite the heat, despite the pandemic, despite climate collapse, despite the challenges that surely touch your lives outside this space. Despite everything, you have shown up for me, for our community, for our watershed.
You are hope and joy. I am in awe of and inspired by you. I needed to be with you to see that I am hope and joy, too.
Thank you. For your gifts. For you.