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April 23 2023 Work Party Earth Day
“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.” –former Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson In 1970, Gaylord Anton Nelson, a United States Senator from Wisconsin, organized the first Earth Day as a national demonstration to raise awareness about environmental issues. At the time, there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act, no legal or regulatory mechanisms to protect the environment. People across the country rallied on April 22, 1970, spurring the United States to create the Environmental Protection Agency by the end of that year, and that day, April 22, is now an annual celebration that honors the…
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November 25 2022 Work Party (three years)
A song for us. We belong together — for these past three years, for many more. For always. *** We had a special guest at our third anniversary work party — constant, steady, wonderful, life sustaining rain. We felt the drumming of ki on hoods and hats, watched water meet wetland, observed ki seeking Swamp Creek in sinuous, braided strands over grass and rock and mud. All the while, clippers and shovels met blackberry canes and earth, carving out space for hidden ferns holding on and exiled plants we will one day invite back. Robins skittered across wet earth, snails nestled in the reed canary grass. It was wet and…
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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,…
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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.
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June 5 2022 Work Party
Presence. Love.
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April 23 2022 Work Party
What beauty is in our care! Thank you for showing up for the earth and for us.
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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…
