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October 30 2021 Work Party
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…
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September 11 2021 Work Party
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…
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March 27 2021 Work Party
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…
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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…
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hatching a planting plan
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…
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November 12 2020 Work Party
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…
