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.
The rain is steady and there is war. Bombs fall. Red banners announce the latest of the emergency we have spilled from within. The red stays tucked in my heart as I travel where birds nest, frogs sing, and water finds its way from mountain to sound. I dig root balls while you clip canes. The rain lightens, I hang my coat in the crook of a cottonwood tree. Ossoberry blooms, elderberry not far behind. Gartner snakes sleep, yellow striped millipedes unfurl everywhere. Decomposing wood on its way to new life. Bombs still rain half a world away, red banners surely still where I left them. For the moment, I am not paralyzed. I am the creator, with you, of the medicine we need–connection, care, love, compassion for all that is–and it fills my heart. There, with it, is hope.
“I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but “fear itself.” But I wouldn’t stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.”
Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee—the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”
And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.
I can remember—I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn’t itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world.
And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying—We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we are God’s children, we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.
Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we’ve got to keep attention on that. That’s always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn’t get around to that.
Now we’re going to march again, and we’ve got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be—and force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That’s the issue. And we’ve got to say to the nation: We know how it’s coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory. We aren’t going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don’t know what to do. I’ve seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr., April 3, 1968, Mason Temple, Memphis.
***
Fifty-three years later his words are as relevant as they were the day he spoke them.
The nation is sick. Literally, bodies crumpled and lost; figuratively, with far more than medicine can name.
Shadow forces send out their mercenaries to find the smallest of fissures between us, widening the cracks, exploiting our fragility, fear, and shame until our screaming at each other across a manufactured chasm is so deafening no one can hear. Our malaise shifts shape and form, fluid until the moment it solidifies into the crack of a gun shot and another of us is gone. Trouble is in the land.
The pain of it is in my joints, my head, my heart, the air, the earth, the sea. Everywhere.
We have arrived on a precipice, and we do not yet know which way we will go. Can we trust our elected leaders to work for the common good? Will our democratic norms and processes hold up to the baser authoritarian impulses living in and among us? Will I have enough to feed my child this month, next month, next year? At what cost to our other basic needs? Confusion all around. Why, in such deep darkness, have we let go of one another?
I reach out my hand. Will I find you?
It is so, so dark sometimes, and all I know to do to get through is to feel the pull of gravity against the back of my skull, my shoulder blades, my pelvis, my heels as I lie still and quiet. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. There is tile and concrete still between me and the earth, yet here on the floor is grounding enough for me to find the will to rise up and propel my body out of the house, into the world, to you. In this dark, I find you, 100 million billion points of lights, fireworks. In this dark, I find you, the singular point of expansion, the vastness of the universe, everything that ever was or will be. In this dark, we come together, stars forming the most beautiful earth-bound constellation on the ground, dancing with the constellations above.
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.
You came to the park for habitat restoration because of him, for him. Something is happening in this world. You are happening in this world, and thank you for that, for your care and compassion, for you. May his memory, and its call to action, be eternal.
May we keep happening together.
The ground is saturated again after a dry summer spell, strewn with fallen cottonwood branches and leaves. The Big Leaf Maples have cast down their own humongous fall foliage, sending sky messengers to ground to be devoured by yellow spotted millipedes. Sporocarps are everywhere, disguised by mulch, the bark on fallen branches, in the nooks and crannies of nurse logs and stumps. What was once alive is being returned to the earth to be born anew from rich soil co-created by death. And we are here, witness to and participant in this endless, beautiful cycle of decay and renewal, practicing being human together.
With gratitude for all things, until we meet again.
Blue Oak
A meadow ends where all the perpendiculars of a leafy brown
river throw themselves up towards blue. The fruits are olive
and ocher. Sprays of dark leaves shiver and splash with
sun. Lightning scars show where the main, once shaped
by flames, was not lost but reduced to fine fists, oak tissue
under sheets of earth, sleeping through the storm and
teeth of quick-heat. Here it is: the world utterly lovely
despite the anguish, despite endless battles. Meanwhile,
you have slipped away to yours. My phone is still again. I
could call back. I could babble about this testimony to
resilience, bent limbs and great elbows of trunk leaning against
granite in gestures of pondering and reconciliation. I
could share the looping and fluttering of flycatchers, grasses
fresh with fog-drip and shade, pressed flat where a fox
recently turned doglike circles round and round before
settling in. I could hold up my phone. among the workings of
xylem and phloem so you could hear the rustling, the liquid flow
scooping minutes out of the heart’s rocky sloping, terrain
and flowing on as only a river can. Or I could stand still and listen.
–Maya Khosla
Little hands do important work. They find the smallest friends nestled in the soil and insist on safe haven for them. They stay present and persist and with determination dig roots longer than they are tall from dark, rich earth. They are filled with wisdom. I help, but work mostly to stay present to their journey. It’s an important one. And important for me to practice simply being alongside another–witnessing. Birds call to each other around us, clouds pass through a pale blue sky, robins engage in territorial dispute, a downy woodpecker stands sentinel. For some blissful moments that stretch to hours, it feels like we might just be all right.
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 branches over rushing water. A river undoing the scar of what we had done to it not so many months before, defying our impulse to control. The muted earth palette of reds, browns, and grays. The whisper of something. “You are held,” the bare tree branches against the cloudy sky tell me. “The sadness is okay,” says the water cascading over boulders and wood. “It is all okay. You are held.”
I met a friend and neighbor, Jeremy Jones, at Wallace Swamp Creek Park today to dream about planting in our restoration area. We surveyed the surrounding vegetation, noting which trees and shrubs were native and which were not. We assessed the existing canopy and assigned one area to shade and another to sun. I had squished through the clover-covered field to our mulched area, mud coating my boots, a trail of size 7 pools of water left in my wake, and I remembered what time of year the ground is saturated and what time of year it is dry. I learned that a simple hole can be useful to assess soil type and condition and that even slight changes in elevation can make a difference in how much groundwater fills that hole. While I dug, Jeremy paced to measure how much space we have to plant. We talked browse protection–methods of keeping rabbits and deer from nibbling away young plantings–everything from plastic tubing to metal caging to sacrificial bovine blood.
We considered what ten species might suit the space, and a couple wandered through with dogs and grandchildren–one five years old with a backpack large enough for him to curl into, one seven years old and one inch away from being allowed on a carnival ride that would flip you upside down and make you lose the contents of your pockets if you didn’t follow the rules to empty them first or the contents of your stomach if you were a grown up who could no longer tolerate being flung about at great speeds. The story of an injury was recounted, a face mask ingeniously used as a makeshift bandage. Connections were made with people and water and land as past and present mingled.
Then the grandparents herded the kids to dinner, Jeremy took leave, and I scoured the mulch for evidence of blackberry growth and dug out some of the largest root balls I have ever seen.
When I could see no more new Himalayan blackberry growth to ferret out, I squished through the field to the parking lot and, as is my custom, turned to look at our restoration area. Crows on their nightly migration to Bothell cawed to one another in the sky above, a robin pulled a worm out of the muddy ground, and for one brilliant moment I could feel it–my connection to a greater whole. There was no separation between me and the mud and the birds and the trees and even the Himalayan blackberry canes we have worked so diligently to remove from this one small patch of earth. I felt in my bones what I believe–that we are all, everything and everyone, deeply connected.
One of us tends to a tree by unearthing the Himalayan blackberry root balls that have snuggled under its base. She follows the root balls to their smallest ends, untangling roots like filaments from the soil, excavating them with the care of an archeologist preserving what has been found. To watch her is to see love in action.
One of us sings with the unbridled beauty and joy of the birds she calls by name, all of them family to her. To gather with her and her dear human family with purpose during this time, to hear her voice across the field as we work is to be held in the warmth of true community.
One by one we arrived to do work that adds up to much more than we could have achieved alone.
This is everything, and I am grateful.
