Earth, the third planet from the sun, is our home. I am glad to exist here with you.
April 28 2024 Work Party
January 27 2024 Work Party
We whisper our worry about displacing neighbors who have found shelter behind blackberry brambles not many blocks from where anger shouted away the possibility of permanent homes for them. Rain. We do everything we can. We clip, dig, call, write, lay down cardboard, haul mulch, bare hearts, show up, plant trees, hold on to hope. It is what we can do and it is not enough this time. Everything comes tumbling down, grey clouds settle in. Rest. The world will be reordered and then we will start again.
January 6 2024 Work Party
So many hands. So many hearts. So much healing. I love you.
October 7 2023 Work Party
First meetings. Tree branches swoop to make swings. The forest swallows children, spits them out. A cardboard brigade. Small feet stomp mulch. The children become lost to the creek.
You arrive. We begin as we left off, the mulch pile moved, canes cut, root balls dug. Pill bugs and spiders scrabble over rick, dark earth, a dear long-toed salamander travels from glove to arm on ki‘s way to safe shelter. Canes moved by clipper, the last ripe blackberries of the season foraged, a heavy chain pulled from the brambles, a crushed frying pan declared non-native. Our time together inevitably comes to a close and most of you have ridden away, but you call from across the creek where you have nestled thirteen tiny Western red cedars here and there. You cross and we linger on on the slope among tangled roots, tangled relationships, tangled thoughts. None of the tension dissolves immediately, but there is relief in being witnessed. Together, we are healing more than just the earth.
September 23 2023 Work Party
Digging blackberry regrowth, felling English hawthorn. Gently tending to trailing blackberry and a baby sword fern, whispering with an adolescent Western red cedar. A thin layer of compost, a generously overlapped layer of cardboard, a thick layer of mulch. Some cardboard left bare, puddles gathered. Young people with heads together, talk babbling over talk, laughter, connection, so much love bouncing from you to me to root slayers to conifers to cottonwoods, everywhere, then rain. Light at first, then heavier, it soaks us, pelts upturned faces, drips from leaves, soaks into soil, seeps into roots, grows us, grows everything.
April 1, 2023 Work Party
A song for you.
February 4 2023 Work Party
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” –Desmond Tutu
Thank you for being the light, my dear ones, and a wellspring of hope.
June 18 2022 Work Party
I am grumpy. I am grumpy about the parking lot. I am grumpy that I am grumpy about the parking lot. I am grumpy about the leaked motor oil shining iridescently in puddles on the seasonally wet field. I am grumpy about the proposed development a stone’s throw to the north. I am grumpy that the plans have changed and I don’t know why or how. I am grumpy about the flooding. I am grumpy that not even my phone can distract me, that it points my attention to the hundreds of unsheltered humans who have died in the extreme heat. I am grumpy about the heat, that all those people died needlessly. Why did we let it come to that? I am grumpy that nature has been telling us and telling us and is shouting now and still we are not listening. Instead we are putting things off and filling up gas tanks and building more parking lots. I am grumpy.
I feel no good to anyone or anything.
You approach while my attention is on preparing for your arrival. When I turn to see you, the warmth of your presence washes over me, and I return to myself. One by two by one you all arrive, and we arrange ourselves with no beginning or end before collecting gloves and tools and traversing the field to our restoration area. For the length of our time together, while we dig the regrowth and around the edges and haul and spread mulch, I forget that I am grumpy. Being with you is respite. From myself, from the world outside of the space we have created.
For a time, I am not grumpy. I am in the moment with you.
April 4 2022 Work Party
The knotweed has awakened. Buoyed by spring birdsong, we dig it with renewed vigor. Every two weeks, forever, or maybe for ten years. Until we have made whole what has been broken. This is the collective work of right now. Thank you for showing up.
Until next time.
February 19 2022 Work Party
I didn’t know I would meet you. I didn’t know you would come if I asked. I didn’t know if you would be where I usually find you, tucked under the vine maple. I didn’t know the rain would hold. I didn’t know relief would arrive with three sturdy wheelbarrows in a tool trailer. I didn’t know you would tell me we are all connected, that we need each other. I didn’t know you would be my mirror. There was so much I didn’t know it filled an ocean, spread to the stars, bled 13.8 billion light years away. But by the time the last sodden cardboard was laid, the last wheelbarrow of mulch overturned, the last goodbye waved, I knew something more than I had known before. I knew you, for the first time, again, even more. I knew connection to the earth. I knew what it is to feel at home.