Slowing down to the earth

Last year I was living in my new house for the first time and like a series of surprise reveals the yard which hsd been increasingly barren in the fall as I moved in, and moved into its winter fallow started shooting up plants i did not even know where there.  I discovered with delight that careful choices had been made before me so that each month for 6 months new things appeared.

Despite having lived in the NW for 33 years I have yet to become Native. Like most descendents of settlers I had as a small child asked "what's that?" enough to learn the names of the birds and flowers and trees I grew up with.  But 33 years ago I left the Mid-West and came to the Pacific NW whose flora and fauna is wildly different and often had me feeling I was in a Dr.Suess fantastical landscape with monkey puzzle trees, gigantic Sequoia, and Rhodendrums the size of sheds.  Over time they became familiar but for the most part without names.  As I mentioned last month I have begun to learn the names of the trees and with that to come into relationship with them.

Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass talks about the difference between being indigenousness and becoming naturalized.   To be indigenous means to be born to a land that your ancestors and your descendents have relationship to.  To be naturalized means to come to a land and learn a relationship to it where you will care for it for your future generations. Few Americans have naturalized.  We have stayed instead squatters, disconnected and unconcerned.  So even all this while later I am becoming naturalized to the NW.   Enough so that the idea of leaving it breaks my heart.

"To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground.  Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it.  Because they do".  P215 Braiding Sweetgrass

Recently I asked a small group of people who are trying to live back into their relationship to the earth to tell about one bird, one flower, one tree, and one plant from their yard and whether that which they spoke of was native (or by definition invasive)  .  The 9 of us filled a whole hour joyfully describing the birds and trees and flowers that we were noticing and enjoying.   Several people spoke about how because of the pandemic they were staying home more and they were spending more time in their garden or looking out upon their yard.

I have already written earlier about how I feel the virus is like cells within the body of the earth moving to try to heal the earth which is sick with its own fever right now.  Other poets have written about the idea that the earth is calling us to slow down, or that it is reminding us of our connection to each other....but now I note, also our relationship to it.   It has slowed us down to a pace where we can notice again that we are living in relationship with the Earth.