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.
we needed to be outside
Outside the warmth of the sun reaches my core, birdsong delights my ears, clouds—my heart sentries—drift in the sky. My child’s mouth hurts from the joy of the season’s first salmonberries. We needed to be outside to be feel what it is to be home.
May 8 2021 Work Party
Sometimes the digging and pulling and cutting
is not the medicine
but the space for feeling the pain
of living in a world barreling
toward the brink of what could be
mass extinction
or maybe something else
maybe something
generative and alive
that requires a complete surrender
to grieving
in order to be born.
Either way
the earth knows
how to hold our tears.
April 10 2021 Work Party
Nothing Wants to Suffer
by Danusha Laméris
after Linda Hogan
Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind
as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff
being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want
to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it.
The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see
their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust.
The coyote in its den. The puma stalking its prey.
These, too, want ease and a tender animal in the mouth
to take their hunger. An offering, one hopes,
made quickly, and without much suffering.
The chair mourns an angry sitter. The lamp, a scalded moth.
A table, the weight of years of argument.
We know this, though we forget.
Not the shark nor the tiger, fanged as they are.
Nor the worm, content in its windowless world
of soil and stone. Not the stone, resting in its riverbed.
The riverbed, gazing up at the stars.
Least of all, the stars, ensconced in their canopy,
looking down at all of us— their offspring—
scattered so far beyond reach.
March 27 2021 Work Party
Little hands do important work. They find the smallest friends nestled in the soil and insist on safe haven for them. They stay present and persist and with determination dig roots longer than they are tall from dark, rich earth. They are filled with wisdom. I help, but work mostly to stay present to their journey. It’s an important one. And important for me to practice simply being alongside another–witnessing. Birds call to each other around us, clouds pass through a pale blue sky, robins engage in territorial dispute, a downy woodpecker stands sentinel. For some blissful moments that stretch to hours, it feels like we might just be all right.
March 21 2021
I intended only to move canes previously cut, but it is so hard to stop tending sometimes. I was mindful of possible bird nesting above and below. All things matter. Including you.
nesting season
Our community work parties came to an abrupt pandemic pause at the end of February 2020 and did not resume until fall, so this year brings a new consideration: How to move forward with habitat restoration without disrupting nesting season?
Work in our original area is slowing as we maintain what we have done, and we have just barely started on a new area overgrown with Himalayan blackberry. Birdsong–from chickadees, robins, juncos, and so many birds I have yet to learn–already fills the air, telling me I’m really too late to clear more canes, but I am desperate not to lose these coming months of work in the park.
We must mow down all the blackberry canes now! I think. I must do it in this first bit of March so that we can dig root balls through the rest of spring and summer! It has to be right now and fast and there is no time to spare because, if I am honest with myself, I am already too late and shouldn’t be doing this at all!
A power tool would be just the thing, I think, and so I rent one with visions of mowing all the canes running the length of the park north of the parking lot entrance. It is a gas powered tool, which I vaguely know to be horrible, but I go ahead anyway in my desperation and rush.
The tool is not hard to master, but it is heavy and loud and malodorous. I accidentally cut an ossoberry plant, hidden in the thicket of Himalayan blackberry, that I mean to keep. The Himalayan canes, thicker than my thumb and barbed for battle, protect themselves by bowing far from where where they sprout from the ground, making it difficult for me to see and reach them there. I end up trying to whack them in the air with the round, spinning blade. It is not how the tool was intended to be used and is, unsurprisingly, inefficient. Within minutes of struggling with the canes and tool, I feel nauseous from the fumes. Still, I press on for a while.
And then I surrender.
I lay down the power tool, pick up the hand clippers, and move much closer to the canes. I am able to work more precisely to protect the native plants we want to keep. I seem no slower–and perhaps even more effective–with the hand clippers than with the power tool, and they make for quieter work. Contemplative. I can hear the birdsong again and the sounds of families enjoying far off places in the park. I feel the air enveloping me and something deep within me vibrating in connection with the plants and animals nearby. I am satisfied to be working like this. It feels like the right kind of hard. It feels just right.
As we leave the park, I feel the lessons of my experience with the power tool surface: Perhaps this work of tending to the earth is not meant to be fast in the way we have come to expect things to be in our modern capitalist society.
Perhaps the lessons of the power tool can be generalized beyond the park.
Perhaps slow and steady, in tune to the natural cycles of the seasons and life, is how this was meant to be all along. How have we gotten so far in practice from this idea? And how can we get back? Perhaps the lesson is that it is okay, smart even, to give up attachment to what isn’t working and find another way.
Perhaps the lesson is that there need be no rush, that trusting in ourselves and in the wisdom of accumulated knowledge can lead us, in good time, where we need to be.
February 27 2021 Work Party
We’ve started removal of a second large patch of Himalayan blackberry at Wallace Swamp Creek Park! What satisfying progress can be made by small, dedicated groups of people. What a balm such kinship is during this pandemic time.
We found gifts in every bit of earth reclaimed–Oregon grape growing all this time under the thick blackberry bramble, brilliantly orange witches butter on the side of a decaying stump, luscious green moss blanketing a fallen tree.
And then a walk to the creek revealed another gift: a pair of hooded mergansers, surfing the riffle and then coming to rest in a pool created by sediment deposits, just being themselves, seemingly unaware of their beauty and the delight they brought to those who witnessed.
What a gift it all is.
resting with the earth
I’ve been feeling sad these past days, so I went to Wallace Swamp Creek Park to ground myself in noticing: The roots of the Himalayan blackberry, so much in appearance like the arteries, veins, and capillaries of our own bodies, stubbornly holding life deep in the soil, waiting for the warmth of the sun to call it to the sky. The heat in my body generated by the work of digging and cutting and pulling. The rain cooling my skin. A round of robins skittering across muddy earth, red breasts carrying forth resilience and hope. Reed canary grass laid down in wetland water. Snowberries, oblong and opulent, dripping from delicate branches over rushing water. A river undoing the scar of what we had done to it not so many months before, defying our impulse to control. The muted earth palette of reds, browns, and grays. The whisper of something. “You are held,” the bare tree branches against the cloudy sky tell me. “The sadness is okay,” says the water cascading over boulders and wood. “It is all okay. You are held.”