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.”
hatching a planting plan
I met a friend and neighbor, Jeremy Jones, at Wallace Swamp Creek Park today to dream about planting in our restoration area. We surveyed the surrounding vegetation, noting which trees and shrubs were native and which were not. We assessed the existing canopy and assigned one area to shade and another to sun. I had squished through the clover-covered field to our mulched area, mud coating my boots, a trail of size 7 pools of water left in my wake, and I remembered what time of year the ground is saturated and what time of year it is dry. I learned that a simple hole can be useful to assess soil type and condition and that even slight changes in elevation can make a difference in how much groundwater fills that hole. While I dug, Jeremy paced to measure how much space we have to plant. We talked browse protection–methods of keeping rabbits and deer from nibbling away young plantings–everything from plastic tubing to metal caging to sacrificial bovine blood.
We considered what ten species might suit the space, and a couple wandered through with dogs and grandchildren–one five years old with a backpack large enough for him to curl into, one seven years old and one inch away from being allowed on a carnival ride that would flip you upside down and make you lose the contents of your pockets if you didn’t follow the rules to empty them first or the contents of your stomach if you were a grown up who could no longer tolerate being flung about at great speeds. The story of an injury was recounted, a face mask ingeniously used as a makeshift bandage. Connections were made with people and water and land as past and present mingled.
Then the grandparents herded the kids to dinner, Jeremy took leave, and I scoured the mulch for evidence of blackberry growth and dug out some of the largest root balls I have ever seen.
When I could see no more new Himalayan blackberry growth to ferret out, I squished through the field to the parking lot and, as is my custom, turned to look at our restoration area. Crows on their nightly migration to Bothell cawed to one another in the sky above, a robin pulled a worm out of the muddy ground, and for one brilliant moment I could feel it–my connection to a greater whole. There was no separation between me and the mud and the birds and the trees and even the Himalayan blackberry canes we have worked so diligently to remove from this one small patch of earth. I felt in my bones what I believe–that we are all, everything and everyone, deeply connected.
November 12 2020 Work Party
One of us tends to a tree by unearthing the Himalayan blackberry root balls that have snuggled under its base. She follows the root balls to their smallest ends, untangling roots like filaments from the soil, excavating them with the care of an archeologist preserving what has been found. To watch her is to see love in action.
One of us sings with the unbridled beauty and joy of the birds she calls by name, all of them family to her. To gather with her and her dear human family with purpose during this time, to hear her voice across the field as we work is to be held in the warmth of true community.
One by one we arrived to do work that adds up to much more than we could have achieved alone.
This is everything, and I am grateful.
October 24 2020 Work Party
Sometimes I wish we could be there together, tending to place, healing wounds, connecting to the earth and to each other, forever. We are in my heart.
A sincere thank you to all who came to help me build the kind of world I want to live in. You are all so needed. And so appreciated.
Until next time. Love and grace, my friends.
October 10 2020 Work Party
We unearthed root balls bigger than child-sized heads, bigger than my fist, not quite as big as my foot. In these root balls we saw brains and hearts and arteries and capillaries. We honored these roots even as we removed them from the earth, embracing it all. We were defenders of place, habitat, native ecosystems, and humankind.
And then there was thunder, lightning, rain, and hail. If you stood still for just a moment, hail bouncing, rain pouring down, you might have deeply felt our inextricable connection to the earth and everyone and everything on it.
It was good.
September 20 2020 Work Party
September 5 2020 Work Party
We admired the tenacity of the Himalayan blackberry as a species and its multiple reproductive strategies. We marveled at the beauty of roots working so hard, curling and twisting and winding, to seek light despite six inches of cardboard and mulch to suppress them. We devised strategies to remove prickly canes without falling victim to sharp thorns, and we did the math that told us that we had found a cane that was the length of 5,000 sisters head to foot if she were to lie down next to it. We stood six feet from one another and realized that was close enough to feel the warm presence of a friend. And we gathered evidence that tiny groups of people working together toward the same goal can, indeed, create mighty change.
Thank you all, for everything.