A song for you.
May 18 2024 Work Party
April 13 2024 Work Party
Thank you.
March 23 2024 Work Party
Light rain. Root balls, knotweed, holly, mulch. Little lime green frog. Bushtits nest in an adolescent fir tree, chickadees make copious announcements. We dig and haul and break for strawberry knotweed pie. Fireworks of green everywhere around us.
September 9 2023 Work Party
We push back Himalayan blackberry regrowth in preparation for layered mulching. Forsythia and boxwood are trimmed, salmonberry and elderberry discovered under weeping brambles of blackberry. The weed wrench takes a stellar turn at pulling up bamboo, ferns are liberated from canes that have been hiding in their fronds. Ivy is pulled, knotweed surveyed, trash in the creek contemplated. So much is in our care.
July 22 2023 Work Party
You send your heartbeat 100 feet. Water sloshes from pails. You smile, your gaze steady, encouraging. I pull out tiny English hawthorn, ferret out fast-growing black locust hiding in the shade of towering cottonwoods, dig a horse chestnut on the verge of adolescence. We bear the heat and sun for the good of our first native plantings. There is refuge in the shade and in being with you.
June 17 2023 Work Party
A song for you.
May 20 2023 Work Party
New friends, familiar friends. The Molina Crew. We know each other by our names, by the water nearest our homes, by our popsicle flavor preferences. We find shade. Popsicles drip. Mango is deemed best. Pogo shovel jumps, you move downed trees and bond over tech burnout. We collectively fall in love with the weed wrench, you discover it pulls up blackberry as well as anything else. The sun embraces us, the work is everything all at once, we are right where we are meant to be.
You were all so very kind and generous. And I thank you for it.
October 22 2022 Work Party
Suffering.
I wish I had the words for anything at all. Instead feelings pile up, crashing against the inside of my skin. I wonder if you see the quickening. I wonder if you know what I cannot name.
Supplication.
I want to be in a different world. A world that knows slow. A more beautiful world, a world where we are wrapped in the magic of stars. I want us to know discernment. I want us to be wise.
Intercession.
Names flow like water over stones. They float on downy wings, whispering protective incantations into the air we breathe. We come together and fall apart, the whole of us shifting, fluid. Gifts come wrapped in brown paper bags. The youngest among us works away a clearing. Now this patch of earth can breath. Now so can we.
Rain.
I need this world, this one we make together. Here we have no need for perfection. Here we are human. We return to each other, to this earth, again and again, to feel out together what it is all becoming.
Rest.
September 25 2022 Work Party
We dug all the knotweed and pushed back the Himalayan blackberry regrowth. We identified a black locust tree, and once we knew, we saw them everywhere. We limbed up an English hawthorn and pulled up some reed canary grass. We connected, we learned, we grew, we stretched ourselves in all the best ways.
August 20 2022 Work Party
A song for you.