A song for you.
April 1, 2023 Work Party
March 11 2023 Work Party
You arrive, the Elders arrive, two Christophers from Texas find their way to us through separate winding paths. We build protective cages, secure them with wooden stakes, pull ivy and wrestle Himalayan blackberry from the earth. Betty and Thelma race side-by-side through the muddy field to rest at the center of a prickly pile of English hawthorn branches. You hold a far-ranging course for two in science and nature and culture, maybe untangling a theory of everything beneath the osoberry blooms. I hear just enough to be intrigued, not enough to really know. We prop up a listing conifer. You snuggle Betty and Thelma, they gaze with beseeching eyes, give you sloppy kisses. Layers shed, skin scratched. Beautiful, watchful forest dog a witness to our comings and goings. How does this happen? How are we so lucky to be spinning through this universe together?
February 18 2023 Work Party
We worked to the soothing sounds of Swamp Creek, creating survival rings and pushing back against Himalayan blackberry. A raccoon observed from a wary distance, birds graced us with song. We learned about this place and each other. We grew. Together.
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.
January 28 2023 Work Party
Thistle and yellow arch angel and reed canary grass and Himalayan blackberry. Beautiful plants from other ecosystems who have found their way to ours and managed to disturb the balance of here. We clip, dig, and pull against loss of biodiversity and habitat, dirt on gaiters and layers and foreheads, snags on sweaters, connection vibrating the space between us. Himalayan blackberry roots resist our removal efforts, breaking under the soil, absconding with the energy required to push up new shoots at some later time. Tiny spiders, deep rusty orange with two stripes ringing their abdomens, scrabble across mounds of soil that must seem like mountains, a woolly bear curls defensively in my hand, everyone ferried to the safety of a gently weeping Western Red Cedar. On a field trip past the corner of the neighbor’s chain link fence, we slip by the adolescent conifer trees that stand between us and the beyond onto a bed of laid-down reed canary grass, and tears viscerally rise up as I gaze upon Himalayan blackberry brambles as far as the eye can see. This time hope comes in the form of your openness to coming back to face the brambles with me for as long as it takes. Together is the only way I know to do this.
January 16 2023 Work Party MLK Jr Day of Service
“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking before the Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1968
It was an honor to serve alongside you. Thank you with every part of my being.
January 7 2023 Work Party
Cut English hawthorn hauled. Cozy rooms carved out of a tangle of Himalayan blackberry. Wondering who might dwell under a small mound of decaying wood. We met here in this new year, full of possibility, under the blessed, wondrous rain, to give each other the gift of being alive together.
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 cold, and it was good.
November 13 2022 Work Party
We honor, on Orca Recovery Day, Tahlequah (J35), daughter of Princess Angeline (J17), sister to Moby (J44) and Kiki (J53), mother to Notch (J47), Ti-Tahlequah (no J number assigned), and Phoenix (J57). We remember the death of Ti-Tahlequah less than half an hour after her birth in 2018. We tell the story of Tahlequah’s grieving, how she carried Ti-Tahlequah’s lifeless body on her rostrum for 17 days while traveling approximately 1,000 miles with her pod around the San Juan Islands and interior waters of British Columbia. We recount how Tahlequah dove deeply to retrieve Ti-Tahlequah’s body when the dead calf slid from her and sank, how members of her pod likely fed her and carried Ti-Tahlequah when she could not, how she finally let go.
We do not look away from Tahlequah’s personal grieving nor the fact that her sadness is the sadness of all orca mothers who have lost their babies–approximately 75 percent of Southern Resident Orca newborns over the past twenty years have not survived–nor that it is our sadness, too. Our beloved orca family members are in distress. They are endangered. We may be watching them go extinct.
One of the Problems
The orcas’ main food source is Chinook salmon, whose survival is threatened or endangered depending on the run. Due to a variety of factors, including but not limited to habitat loss, climate change, and increased pollution, every stage of life for a Chinook has become more difficult for ki to survive. In order to keep our orcas, we must care for our salmon.
What You Can Do: Reduce Pollution
Over 14 million tons of pollution ends up in Puget Sound every year, much of which is stormwater runoff after rain. Rain is not the problem though. The problem is the pollution the rain picks up from impervious surfaces like rooftops, parking lots, and roads and rushes directly into our waterways on its way to Puget Sound. Pollution is a complicated problem, but there are things you can do to reduce it. Depaving your yard, encouraging your community to depave wherever possible, planting trees, installing rain barrels, and building rain gardens are all green stormwater solutions within our reach that help salmon and orcas.
What You Can Do: Get Involved in Local Restoration Work
Organizations across the region, from Conservation Districts to Salmon Recovery Lead Entities to Fisheries Enhancement Groups to other non-profit and governmental agencies are working everyday to restore salmon habitat with local communities. What we do on land affects the health of the water salmon need to be healthy and thrive. You can make a powerful difference by volunteering to heal the land. It takes all of us.
What You Can Do: Small Actions Make a Big Difference
Washing your car on grass, picking up after your pets, and discontinuing the use of fertilizers and pesticides in your yard are small actions with profound effects when multiplied across the 4 million people that live in the Puget Sound region. We are the problem, but we are also the solution. Individual actions alone, however, as powerful as they are at scale, do not replace actions to transform systems. So lobby your elected officials and otherwise agitate for larger systemic change at the same time you engage in change in your daily life.
What You Can Do: Tell Everyone You Know that Orcas and Salmon Need Our Care
We care for those we know and love. Recruit your friends and family in the work of salmon and orca recovery by sharing your love for these amazing creatures.
And stay connected. We need each other.
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.