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June 21 2025 Work Party
A Green Thought by Katharine Towers Say instead it was an evening in head-highbracken with its smell of dark and medicine.Thinking green of the infecting fern where you may crouch and not be known,lodging your feet for good amid the stalks.A bower is a dwelling place or once it was a cage for pent-up singing birds. Look down to see the warp and weft of root.All the world is in these clutches. Look up to clock the fern’s drab underneathblotched with spores you mustn’t breathe.Breathe in deep. There’s nowhere else to live.
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June 7 2025 Work Party
Boisterous clipping and digging of canes, pulling up a carpet of ivy, young people have brought their older humans along. We add our blackberry and ivy to the raft, ferry more to the field for pick up, get stung by nettles five times. A black-tailed deer grazes across the way. Hard rain starts to fall, scattering some of us, the rest of us carry on. The underground infrastructure of a very old Himalayan blackberry is exhumed, some concrete detritus moved. We leave with so much distance travelled in just three hours.
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May 10 2025 Work Party
We continued clearing a new patch of Himalayan blackberry, started on a patch of knotweed, the stalks of these like giants. Rescued a fern, excavated more trash, were stung by nettles. Fringe cup and large-leaved avens watched from along the trail.
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April 12 2025 Work Party
It is always good to be with you.
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March 15 2025 Work Party
The best problem to have is not enough root slayers.
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January 20 2025 Work Party
Love in action.
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December 29 2024 Walk
Restful solitude, nourishing until the days wear into claustrophobic sameness. Glass door. Rain. Tea. Chair. Keyboard. Caretaking. Glass door. Rain. Thoughts pile up, crowd worn tracks, dress themselves up for disturbing nighttime scenes. I sleep for a day, stumble into an anatomy of melancholy, wonder if the tech billionaires have found a way into my busy brain. Still rain. Still genocide, still oligarchy, still authoritarianism rising, still greed and profit and planetary destruction, still not enough affordable housing, still a sixth mass extinction, still all the suffering I cannot control. I don’t want to move, but I do. I go outside, walk through the seasonal stream, across the swampy field.…
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December 14 2024 Work Party
The last work party of 2024: We excavated trash, dug Himalayan blackberry roots, pulled ivy, rooted up herb Robert and foxglove. We tucked in baby conifers with blankets of mulch stitched in rings, the Western red cedars in particular need of this tender care under climate change. We felt the wind rush around us, watched a murmuration twist and turn above us. We found a tiny Garry oak pushing out of the ground from an acorn planted on the winter solstice one year ago, put a kite in the air for a fleeting moment, brought a whole vibe. We made space, for the trees and for each other. We arrived…
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November 29 2024 Work Party
This is what it looks like to be five.
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November 9 2024 Work Party
U.S. Navy Reserve members from all over join us. The large branch of a horse chestnut tree comes down, taking two folding handsaws with it. Baby conifers uncovered, trash exhumed. So many gifts, so much grace.
