Tag: mulch

Posted on

January 11 2025 Work Party

“Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allowing ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion; to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance. We cultivate bravery through making aspirations. We make the wish that all beings, including ourselves and those we dislike, be free of suffering and the root of suffering.”
–Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty

And a song for you.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

December 16 2023 Work Party

Mulch pile in the perfect wrong spot, ingenious tarp wrapping canes, joy traveling on air. Found objects leave stories untold; in the mystery, room for possibility, for magic. Root balls fat with the sun, rafts from here to the road, from here into the unknown. In this moment, with people unsheltered, with a climate collapsing, with bombs falling, with opposition to compassion, with apathy, here also is your joy, your persistence, your care. Here is the beautiful, painful messiness of it all laid bare. Here is life.

Posted on

October 28 2023 Work Party

The first trees of this planting season are in new homes, tucked on the east side of Swamp Creek before it bends to find the Sammamish River. Douglas fir, Western hemlock, Grand fir, and Sitka spruce removed from pots, roots unbound and draped over mounds of soil in deep holes, rocks sifted and piled nearby, compost mixed with the earth we found and pressed firmly down. Gentle tugs at the base of 30 trunks confirm they are all securely tucked. One tree in not quite the right home. We decide to move ki a foot over, safely out of the way of passing wheelbarrows full of Himalayan blackberry and English hawthorn debris. Mulch is laid over all the compost we spread, thickness sacrificed, the work left undone reaching us into the future, binding us to return to this place with intention. We leave with incantations of joy, wishing that all beings be well, wrapping ourselves and the new baby trees with love.

Posted on

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.

Proudly powered by WordPress