Texts that cut, burning anger. Walking into a hug with you keeps my body here, where joy, defiance, anger, and delight shatter into something that feels a lot like gratitude. For every bit of everything, especially this connection with you.
Cool, tentative rain. A line of sentinel blackberry canes, dug. Root balls, gnarled and long. Goat neighbors munch tender shoots of reed canary grass. Entwined Western red cedars and ferns in their new homes. Beautiful child dancing through the planting, hiding from the wind, noticing everything.
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
You help make my present not only inhabitable, but also joyful. Thank you.
We whisper our worry about displacing neighbors who have found shelter behind blackberry brambles not many blocks from where anger shouted away the possibility of permanent homes for them. Rain. We do everything we can. We clip, dig, call, write, lay down cardboard, haul mulch, bare hearts, show up, plant trees, hold on to hope. It is what we can do and it is not enough this time. Everything comes tumbling down, grey clouds settle in. Rest. The world will be reordered and then we will start again.
Wool socks, silk long underwear, fleece pullover, down coat under lined ski parka. Snow pants and insulated skirt. Mittens, scarf, hat. All of this enough to hold body heat generated by movement. Root slayer as spear, frozen ground splits to reveal dark, soft soil. Conifers frozen in pots planted in the mulch pile, heat generated by thermophillic bacteria releases roots and soil, enough to get a few trees from pots to earth. Determination. Mini-cardboard drive. Initiative. When I am short on hope, I watch how you move through the world and it returns to me in abundance.
Mulch pile in the perfect wrong spot, ingenious tarp wrapping canes, joy traveling on air. Found objects leave stories untold; in the mystery, room for possibility, for magic. Root balls fat with the sun, rafts from here to the road, from here into the unknown. In this moment, with people unsheltered, with a climate collapsing, with bombs falling, with opposition to compassion, with apathy, here also is your joy, your persistence, your care. Here is the beautiful, painful messiness of it all laid bare. Here is life.
Today marks the four year anniversary of Swamp Creek Habitat Restoration Project.
We do this work on the ancestral land of the first peoples of this region — the Coast Salish, the Muckleshoot, the Duwamish, the Snoqualmie, the Sammamish, the Stillaguamish, the Suquamish — peoples who have stewarded this land since time immemorial and who are very much alive and present as good stewards of the land to this day. It is with gratitude to and because of them that we have the honor of tending to this land with the hope of restoring it to a healthy ecosystem where native insects, fish, birds, and mammals, including humans, can be sustained and thrive for generations to come.
We grew into ourselves this year as we welcomed more of you into the fold. We fell in love all over again with the root slayer and the weed wrench. We found cutleaf blackberry hiding in Western sworn ferns, pushed into new fields of arching Himalayan blackberry canes thicker than a thumb, and made wrenching out English hawthorn its own mini project. We worked alongside goats, found a nest of baby birds in the brambles, rescued trees from plastic wrap, all of this and more witnessed by deer, salamanders, herons, eagles, and hawks. We held our first official planting party in the spring at Wallace Swamp Creek Park, then two more in late fall — one at Wallace and one at the 175th St/Swamp Creek South site. We spent the better part of the year combing over active restoration areas again and again to ferret out persistent blackberry, thistle, and knotweed at the same time as we pushed into new tangles of weeds to create space for the earth to breathe and new native plants to thrive. We were in community, planted love, grew hope. We were accountable to the earth and to each other.
My gratitude to project co-founders Deputy Mayor Melanie O’Cain and Kenmore resident Linda Phillips for seeing the possibility in this project when it was just an idea; to the City of Kenmore for permission to work on City land; to City Staff Stephanie Brown, Maurita Colburn, Quinn Proffitt, and Jennifer Gordon for their behind-the-scenes support and to Gary and Darren for reliably ferrying the tool trailer to the right place; to City Manager Rob Karlinsey for loving Western hemlocks and all conifers so deeply; and to Sno-King Watershed Council, this project’s non-profit heart and home, with special gratitude to Eric Adman and Jeremy Jones for their mentorship and support. My gratitude also to my mother and my child — they’ve either been out digging in the dirt with me or home together so I could be clipping and digging myself.
If not for the individuals of all ages who have volunteered their time, we would not have built what we have over these past four years — a place of community and belonging, where we are embraced just as we are, where we learn and grow together, where we are healing ourselves as much as we are healing the land. We are all so needed in this work and everyone who has ever volunteered these past four years is permanently etched in my heart.
The earth needs you, I need you, we need each other. Here’s to another wonderful, connecting, healing year.
With love and gratitude,
Tracy Banaszynski
“So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.” — Pema Chödrön
The first trees of this planting season are in new homes, tucked on the east side of Swamp Creek before it bends to find the Sammamish River. Douglas fir, Western hemlock, Grand fir, and Sitka spruce removed from pots, roots unbound and draped over mounds of soil in deep holes, rocks sifted and piled nearby, compost mixed with the earth we found and pressed firmly down. Gentle tugs at the base of 30 trunks confirm they are all securely tucked. One tree in not quite the right home. We decide to move ki a foot over, safely out of the way of passing wheelbarrows full of Himalayan blackberry and English hawthorn debris. Mulch is laid over all the compost we spread, thickness sacrificed, the work left undone reaching us into the future, binding us to return to this place with intention. We leave with incantations of joy, wishing that all beings be well, wrapping ourselves and the new baby trees with love.
First meetings. Tree branches swoop to make swings. The forest swallows children, spits them out. A cardboard brigade. Small feet stomp mulch. The children become lost to the creek.
You arrive. We begin as we left off, the mulch pile moved, canes cut, root balls dug. Pill bugs and spiders scrabble over rick, dark earth, a dear long-toed salamander travels from glove to arm on ki‘s way to safe shelter. Canes moved by clipper, the last ripe blackberries of the season foraged, a heavy chain pulled from the brambles, a crushed frying pan declared non-native. Our time together inevitably comes to a close and most of you have ridden away, but you call from across the creek where you have nestled thirteen tiny Western red cedars here and there. You cross and we linger on on the slope among tangled roots, tangled relationships, tangled thoughts. None of the tension dissolves immediately, but there is relief in being witnessed. Together, we are healing more than just the earth.
