“When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.”
–Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Trailer, wheelbarrows, and root slayers. Canes pulled from ground and sky. Digging, cutting, sifting. Thorns drag across skin. Trees released. A clearing.
A low current of anxiety hums through at least half the days, sometimes even the days I go to one of our restoration sites to prepare for you. And then I see you. My heart grows a bit every time–when you arrive, two kids and dog in tow; when you walk across the parking lot toward me; when I find you sitting in the dirt, digging out the finest filaments of knotweed root; when you offer to sharpen our tools from the back of your truck; when you embrace the root slayer I offer; when you grow the circle we stand in; when you come for the first time; when you continue to show up. For a time, the anxiety is distant, quiet. My heart is somewhere outside my body, all around me. I am in my heart center. You have reminded me of the way.
“The principal point of this book is not that the salmon is a magnificent animal that holds its own compared to anything on the Serengeti–beautiful in its many phases; thrilling in its athleticism; moving in its strength, determination, and courage; poetic in its heroic and tragic life story–and it would be sad if it were to disappear. All that is true, but a more important point is that if the salmon does not survive, there is little hope for the survival of the planet.” –Mark Kurlansky, Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of their Common Fate
If the forecast this year is correct, 10,165 Cedar River sockeye will pass through the Hiram M. Chittenden Ballard Locks on their way to Lake Washington. If the forecast is correct, 2022 will displace 2020, when 22,950 returned, as the lowest Cedar River sockeye run on record. If the forecast this year is correct, we are in free fall. Salmon are in crisis. So are we.
The knotweed grows more slowly and seems easier to dig now that the soil is drier. My child tells me excitedly that he is no longer shy now that he is double digits and turns his attention toward happily hacking a holly tree. We have a weed wrench, but the holly trunk is too large, so some of us dig and dig, reconnaissance that shows where the roots are small enough to slay. Others of us look at the Himalayan blackberry grow back and wonder who will prevail and are surprised again that in the end it is us. We dig it all. And then we stand in the rectangular hole where the holly once grew, with smiles bright as stars, and we bask in the glow of having done this thing, not an impossible thing, but a new thing for us that showed that with flexibility, curiosity, and perseverance we can do hard, important things.
I drive the surface streets of Seattle on the way to greet my loves. Traffic is heavy, and I will be late but I play with not worrying about it. There is so much to worry about–our collapsing climate, unnecessary parking lots, democracy slipping away, salmon on the brink of extinction–that there is no room for adding lateness to the list. I look at the buildings on either side of me when I am stopped by traffic lights, and I notice how close together they are, how varied in style, how unlike they are to the buildings in my own neighborhood. My own beautiful, comfortable neighborhood, sprawling, spread out, requiring copious use of this car I am in, contributing to the problems about which I worry. I wonder how we will grow in a different way. Will we? If we don’t, what will we lose?
My mind wanders into the past. I think about the year I became a volunteer naturalist with the Seattle Aquarium. That year, I lay on the banks of the Cedar River while we talked about where we might see salmon spawning if we were lucky to see them at all. The listlessness of then pushes its way into now, bringing a swell of love, sadness, and tears. These are my loves, I would not change that if I could, and so I live with the pain of witnessing them struggle for species survival, with the sadness that comes from knowing we might lose them still.
Back in the present, I look out the car window, watching people walking their dogs, walking with reusable bags, waiting at the bus stop. Then The Church is on the radio singing Under the Milky Way, and I am pulled to the past again, this time to the 1980s, before I knew about salmon at all. I am in the home ec room where I am learning to bring the liquid measuring cup to eye level to discern whether I have poured in the desired amount, I am crying in the choir alcove, a note filled with adolescent spite and pettiness on my lap, I am hanging upside down on the monkey bars over hard, cracked asphalt. All the yearning of that age–wanting so badly to belong, to not feel awkward, unsure, and misfit–settles over me, jostling about in my crowded mind. If we felt we truly belonged, would it be easier for us to make space for others, too, including salmon?
Finally I am walking on the promenade along Salmon Bay, coming closer and closer to my final destination, the Hiram M. Chittenden Ballard Locks. I am late, but no matter. There are salmon in the fish ladder, and everyone is glad to see me. I spend the next two and a half hours basking in the joy and giddiness of being in the presence of my loves, beautiful salmon, mostly sockeye right now, returning from a long and arduous journey in the ocean to spawn in their natal rivers and streams. I see a handful of chinook smolt in the fish ladder, too, where they are undergoing complex physiological changes to adapt from fresh water to saltwater living, something we cannot see even as it is happening right before our eyes.
People are visiting the Locks from all over. They are from Seattle, from Iowa, from Saskatchewan, from places unknown, and 62 of them spend some of their time in conversation with me. I talk animatedly about my loves, and they ask questions and tell me about themselves in what feels like a fair and connecting exchange. They are heading to Alger, Washington as part of a quest to visit every town in the country bearing their surname. The other Algers are in Michigan and Ohio. They have come from rural Canada, where people are intimately connected to the land for their livelihoods as farmers and loggers, on a coach bus to cheer for the Toronto Blue Jays against the Mariners that night. They are a landlocked people, yet they understand deeply the importance of caring for these ocean-going fish. They have come with a lifetime of experiences, with hopes and dreams, with adventures yet ahead, and our stories intersect on the concrete walkways around the fish ladder. Salmon have connected us all.
I am kneeling at the hardware store, counting trowels as I place them in the basket next to me on the floor, leaving none hanging on the wall. A couple approaches and stops just short of me, watching. I wonder if they too have come for this tool, so I offer one from my basket. No, they tell me. They are simply noticing that I have taken all the available trowels and wondering, too. I tell them that I am working with a group of children and that I want to make sure everyone has a tool, and this seems to hearten them.
If the forecast this year is correct, 10,165 Cedar River sockeye will pass through the Hiram M. Chittenden Ballard Locks on their way to Lake Washington, the lowest in recorded history. These are my loves.
Rain, rain, rain and cool for weeks and weeks and now heat. We dance with the edges of the shade, find refuge in a cool pocket of air held by trees. We identify snowberry, marvel at the fitness of Himalayan blackberry, dig out root balls the size of beaver kits. Hard topics broached, we listen and share with openness and grace. We create the medicine we need in these times: Connection with the earth, with plants, with each other. We fall away with gratitude and warm hearts, knowing we will come together again.
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.
Giddy with excitement, we sawed an old Scotchbroom, exhumed its roots, and packed it lovingly out of the park. In its place, a smattering of brilliantly saturated yellow petals lay at rest on the mulch. The moment before we started, I watched those yellow blooms, delicately folding in on themselves, dance with a bumblebee in the breeze, and I felt a pang of regret for what we were about to do. To take the life from this particular plant in this particular place was good for the whole, on balance. But to disturb the soil, to take the flowers from the pollinator–these things still don’t settle easily in my heart. The injured salamander tail, the severed worms, waking up the knotweed, the unease of the neighbors–the only certain way to avoid these hard things would be to lay down our shovels in retreat, to disengage from the work.
This I cannot do.
I cannot surrender to paralysis and inaction as ecosystems continue to be damaged and destroyed, as biodiversity loss accelerates, as our climate collapses. So instead I wrestle with the complexity–our actions, even the ones we deem good, are not always pure and unadulterated. There is harm tangled up in the good of our restoration actions, the very actions intended to heal. All of this–the work, us–is messy and imperfect.
It feels scary to say out loud. Is acceptance of the gray just a way to justify bad things? What if sitting in that space muddies my discernment? What if the only way to guard against evil is to draw a bright, clear line? That feels safer. And yet wrong. I know the next right thing is to stay in the messy, mucky grey. It is hard.
The seduction of certainty is strong, even when–especially when–it, too, must be set aside. It is part of what has led us to the brink, part of what keeps us from turning away from the edge, part of what keeps us from saving ourselves.
Scary as it can feel, we must chart a different course through heavy mist and fog.
I take a deep, stabilizing breath as I take the next step into the grey, with you. Exhaling, I feel the expansiveness of embracing the mystery. I hope you do, too.
What constitutes success in habitat restoration? Number of volunteers engaged? Collective hours logged? Cubic yards of invasive plants removed? Number of native plants put in the ground? Yes and. How to measure the compassion for the earth cultivated with each work party, the value of hearts turned toward the work of making whole again what we have broken, the deepening of connection to place that comes from revisiting the same small plot of earth again and again, month after month, season after season, noticing when the first leaves fall, the first buds form, birdsong erupts, frogs take up their chorus, the first sleepy detritivores uncurl. How do you measure the movement from here to a new story, from here to a new consciousness, from here to a better tomorrow? How do you know which way to turn on the path after all the easy trails have been mapped and what appears before you is both glaringly obvious and all the grey you’ve ever known? How do you hear the silent call? How do you melt into the arms of the stars, holding on at once tightly and loosely to it all?
How do you keep going in this culture of ours with the most meaningful of work when success is not easy to define?
