Kinship

 Chapter 6 of  We are the Middle of Forever is by Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte, a Potawatomi Tribal member and it is about Kinship.  I recognize as I read this that Robin Wells Kimmerer also spoke about this and about reciprocal relationship with Earth and the creatures of Earth, but she does not so much use the word kinship.

Dr. Whyte says: But kinship refers to relationships of mutual responsibility, where we care for each other, and we create bonds with each other that make it so that, regardless of what the law says, and regardless of how severe a problem is, or regardless of what our rights are, we have an abiding sense that we need to care for others.  We need to be responsible for each other, and that's not just confined to the human to human context, but depending o the culture, to all living beings and nonliving entities and systems."  He goes onto to talk about the ways in which colonialism has erased or disrespected kinship.

When I think about a people that were living on the land for centuries and centuries feeling that the animals and the plants were their brothers and sisters, taking but only with respect - with honorable harvest guidelines and gratitude, and where conscious attention was paid to the needs of an eco system and oral stories passed down the knowledge of the properties of different plants, and the way to care for the ecosystem......I can only think what a rude shock it must have been to see settlers come and do things like chop down a whole forest or replant a whole field in a monocrop, or kill all of one animal, or pollute a water source, or extract and lay waste a landscape.....They must simply have regarded us as both crazy and "savage".  

The tragedy of genocide and destruction of college is an obvious tragedy.  But this destruction of and removal from their reciprocal relationship with the land is a deep and less obvious trauma both for tribes, but also for the land itself.   I think of Robin's report about a graduate student of hers that was studying where sweetgrass grew and did not grow and discovered that it was more abundant and healthy were tribes had harvested it - that their actions were in fact part of that ecosystems balance.  Just as it is now becoming clear that many tries did controlled burns and kept health the forests they were in relationship with.  For anyone of us that have tended a garden for years and then moved away only to discover that the next owner allowed it all to go to weeds...can understand the sort of sorrow this is.

Dr. Whyte also talk quite a bit about time - about linear time (that practiced by western culture) and deep time - a sense by Native people of a longer slower more circular or non-linear time.   He emphasizes the rushed nature of linear time especially in regards to crisis - and he talks about how the stories that pass down from generation to generation are a kind of guidance from outside time.    He states:  "For Indigenous people, we think of our deep time, where we're thinking about the stories that we still keep today.  We're thinking, 'wait a minute, we need to go back.  Is there guidance within those stories that can help us understand the challenges that we're facing today?"...You should never presuppose that anything that's happening today is the first time.  Maybe it is, but you should never presuppose that.  You should always go back into that deep time."   He goes on to say that Kinship is one of the ways to enter deep time.

He adds: "When we panic, we realize that because we don't know the conditions that made our normal possible, we're going to do whatever quick fix we can to return to normalcy, even if that just means a sense of normalcy. This idea of normality, or the assumption of what's normal, is a key problem with clock time."  And when I think of the dumb solutions to climate change or environmental problems I have heard - the ones that don't work but are just greenwashing or ill conceived - they indeed are as he says a quick fix attempt to return to normalcy.   He also goes on to point out that caregiving work is not valued in western culture and not seen as a pathway for change - because kinship is not valued.

As a white person considering this idea of Kinship it is very evident to me that not only was it never held out to me that I was in relationship with the life forms and entities around me - but those who held beliefs along those lines were made fun of.  It means huge blind spots about the interconnectedness of things around me, about the implications of my actions and even the importance of the human relationships I choose. 

Dr Whyte says:  "We need to think about what type of team we want to be part of.  We want to figure out who the collective of people are that are meaningful to us, that are responsive to change, and think about what it means to build that kinship network.  What's interesting about kinship is it is slow, because we have to be patient with the development of the relationship."  That gives me a lot to think about in terms of how I do my activism.

Becoming Naturalized

 In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer says:  "Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit.  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."

This is a powerful call to action and a generous invitation.  There are undoubtedly Native people who feel we Settler Descendants can never be anything other than squatters and uninvited intruders upon the land.  Yet Robin invites us to stop running (as many of our ancestors did from famine, war, poverty and legal difficulties) and to put down roots - to come into relationship with the land.

It broke my heart the other day to hear almost full blood Native woman tell about being in grocery store and a guy in baseball cap spit out at her "Go back to Mexico'.   This squatter had the sense of entitlement to not notice that Mexicans are indigenous to this content - white people are not.  He had the racial blindness to not be able to distinguish one person of color from another.

Robin's words call us to deeply examine our relationship to the land.  The average American moves every 7 years - it is hard for us to form this sort of relationship to the land - especially with an ancestral heritage of having left "the motherland" - and of the disconnection from land and culture that the move across the ocean brought.

I grew up in the Midwest.   As most children, I was taught the names of the plants and birds and trees around me.  I still know those when I see them.   I moved to Washington State when I was 26...the plants, birds and trees here were quite different and I often felt like I was in some sort of Dr Suess book with oddly whimsical looking flora and fauna.  I struggled to learn the names and still know less than from my childhood haunts. The previous generation of my family is buried in the Midwest.  Once after having been gone for only 10-years I went back and heard the sound of the Cicada's singing, common to the summers of my childhood, and almost started crying.   I am told that when my father returned to his native Florida after 35 years gone and saw the palm trees he started to cry.

Science says that when we live somewhere for 7 years that the minerals of the land and water start being in our bones.  When I first arrived, a dentist looked in my mouth and said: "you are from the Midwest?"  I was shocked and said: "How did you know?"  From the mineral deposits on your teeth, he told me.  (Bonus points he said the deposits were protective.)   After 2 years my blood shape literally changed so I was not chilled to the bone by a damp cold that was 20 degrees higher than a Chicago winter but that no wool sweater could protect me from.

While I had to pass the 26-year mark to feel fully a Northwesterner....to I guess naturalize to this WA land, it has indeed happened.   The breath-taking beauty of this land - from the always green, to the huge old trees, to the magical flowers, to the mountains peeking out and Salish Sea itself, I have come to love this land.  My daughter who spent her whole childhood here was so homesick her first year at college she asked me to send her pinecones and moss!  She was torn for her 6 years in Massachusetts between the deep relationships she forged there and her sense of rootedness to the land.  Ultimately, she decided to come back here and try out being an adult here.

When she was wavering, I considered carefully - what if she would not come back?  She is my closest living relative and a part of my heart.   The only thing deeper than my sense of connection to land is to family (which is why so many Native people were destroyed by being forced off their land - the burial place of their ancestors.)   I decided if she did not return, I would have to move where she was - but it felt like a wrenching loss filled idea.  Happily, she has stayed.

I moved 4 years ago to Olympia, WA from Seattle where I had lived 32 years.  That move was not hard because I realized it was the Northwest - not Seattle I had naturalized to.  Seattle was too much concrete and steel to naturalize to it, and it has actually been easier to root here in Olympia where I can afford to own a house, and to watch the trees change with the seasons, to watch wildlife come through my yard and to learn when each flower will in succession come up.

But Robin does not just call us to love and respect the land - she also says: "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."   To me this is the call to fight climate change.   One could fight that in any part of the country.  Each part will be affected differently and already is.  Each has different strengths for living with and not against the land.  I have been fighting climate change for 15 years because I want my daughters to be able to grow old...and not in an inferno but in the beauty and lushness she was born into.  I am fighting hard for better protections for the city trees as well as fighting hard DNR for our old second growth trees. I have a responsibility to my daughter and to the land to fight for it.   I think it is only this bizarre Settler mentality that sees the land as "natural resource" as a thing to take from, that does not see when we pollute the water that we are polluting our drinking water, that when we pollute the air that we will breathe that in, and that when we pollute the land we will ingest that in our food.  We have to start living on the land like we are part of an ecosystem - not hoovering somewhere separate from the land that is our host.  What do you love enough in this land, your naturalized home, to fight for it?

Engaging with Honorable Harvest

 In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the native approach to honorable harvest.  She describes it this way:

The Honorable harvest rules:

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

Introduce yourself.  Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.

Ask permission before taking.  Abide by the answer.

Never take the first, never take the last.

Take only what you need. 

Take only that which is given.

Never take more than half.  Leave some for others.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

Use it respectfully.  Never waste what you have taken.

Share.

Give thanks for what you have been given.

Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.

Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

Throughout the book she describes this way of relating to the natural world.  She describes growing food this way, she described gathering food or bark for baskets in this way, and she describes a doctoral thesis of one of her students who established that the gathering of sweetgrass by native tribes had been protective against the plant dying out.  (In short humans were part of the reproductive cycle of the plant).  There is a lot to take in, as a white person about this idea of honorable harvest.  It certainly frames a new for me the horror with which our Native siblings must have viewed the taking and plundering and ceasing, and mining of the natural world by colonists.  It also brings new light for me on how we got so badly out of sync with the natural world and the long path back for us to getting into sync.

She also says on p. 154:  What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours?  To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the threads of life in everything and pay it respect?  Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.

I almost weep to see how much the disconnect from the earth is that I don't see trees in Kleenex, or algae in tooth paste, etc.  (I have seen the oak in floors and furniture and paper).   I was taught that these were objects and to have no concern for where they came from.  This is far away from the ethic of introducing oneself and asking if you take, not taking the first or the last - this is not even knowing what is taken.  This is how we have an earth degraded and melting under climate change - because we have turned a blind eye to how we relate to the earth.

"Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.  Use it respectfully.  Never waste what you have taken."  I think of the common site of people in restaurants pulling 5 napkins at a time out of the dispenser.  They are on autopilot.   I don't think they believe they need that many, nor any real thought at all about it - it is a habit of grabbing.  They do not have any awareness when they later throw most them away unused that they have wasted the tree lives embodied in those napkins.   Yes on one level this is a small matter and will not significantly impact or end climate change.   And yet it is a metaphor for how we live in general on this planet: unconscious, grabbing, using, wasting, and unaware of the results.  On an even larger level we have taken whole mountains, whole waterways, whole Tar Sands and we have thrown them away, left them uninhabitable - taking both the first and the last and giving no thanks.

Robin has inspired me to try to figure out how to live into a new (and old) way.  What are your thoughts?

 

Reconnecting to the Earth

 I have been slowly, ever so slowly, making my way through Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.   I am reading it slowly because it is so rich and deep, I must bask in and integrate each bit before going onto the next, and linger against its end.  Robin's book took the slow path to the New York Magazine's bestsellers list.   This is a route taken when you are not an already famous author, and when no one is actively promoting your book, when you are published by a non-profit publishing house rather than a big name one, but when one reader after another tells others to read it or gifts others with the book.  I am honored, like the millions of other readers that Robin gifted us, a primarily white American audience with her wisdom and was bothered enough about us to call us back to the earth.  There are Native people who feel done with us descendants of settlers, disgusted and angry with the destruction that has been wrought on "Turtle Island" - and feel that what we reap now is what we have earned.

Yet Robin, shares her own off reservation journey back to the land of her ancestors and understands intuitively that all our fates are joined now by climate change, and so she calls us back to living in relationship with the earth.   Joanna Macy has for years called her deeply experiential workshop approach "The Work that Reconnects" and when asked will say she is calling us back to reconnection with each other and with the earth.  While I in some abstract way understood why both were good ideas I would not have ever seen myself as disconnected from the earth.  But as I have read more of Robin's book and lived in this pandemic, I am coming to understand for the first time how disconnected I have been my whole life.  It really does fall into the "don't know what you don't know, till you know it" category.

I mean to live on the earth where you do not know the names of the plants, the trees, the animals or the birds that live there, to not know what time sunrise, sunset or high tide is, and to not know the planting season or what can successfully be grown there....is pretty disconnected from the earth.   Two years ago I listened to someone gush about how nice it was that the daffodils were coming "early" in Feb - with no apparent awareness that this is a sign of deep illness - that the earth is out of cycle because of the warming and is actually the sound of the earth crying out.  I just felt saddened by her comment. I have further come to understand through my climate work that we can only keep making incredibly stupid and destructive decisions that pollute our own water, air and food, if we are so disconnected that we don't understand the impact of our actions.  During one chapter of Robin's book I realized how crazy us settler descendants must look to First Nations' people.  I mean here come these settlers who don't know the land, don't know how to survive on it and bumblingly go forward, and then while incredibly disconnected from the earth destroying it.  Imagine watching a chicken in your back yard pee and poop in the only water supply.  You would just shake your head.

So Robin's message that we descendants need to become naturalized to the land feels very important to me.  I see it as central to solving the climate crisis.  I am looking at my own life and what will have to change for me to come into a real and healed relationship with the earth.

In a somewhat tongue in cheek, but an also metaphorical description based off an actual Halloween House of Horrows she accidentally visited, Robin describes 7 steps of descendants journey back to the earth.   She names them in the following way.

1.  Earth as Capitol - Land seen only as a means to make money.

2. Land as Property - Property means one has "rights" to all the resources of the land.  These "relations" dwelling there are not seen to have their own rights.

3. Land as Machine - in which she raises the pointed question are humans or the earth the driver of what happens on the land?

4.  Land as Teacher and Healer - She had eloquently described through the whole book how Native people are in communication with the plants and animals and the land, and how they are taught and healed by that communication.   Could we be too?  She describes the amazing way succession works in the natural world to begin to heal an environmental wound (much as I described in my post about Hope and the healing of Mt. St. Helens.)

5. Land as Responsibility - Here a key shift of being back in relationship must happen first so we can be responsible stewards of the land.  She has previously described how the gathering relationship with plants can actually nurture the ecosystem.  She talks about the shift from a scientific lens that sees the land as thing, to one of actually loving the land.  She talks about our current responsibility to clean up the land we have laid waste too.  

6. Land as Sacred, Land as Community -  She says:  "What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from understanding multiple means of land?  Land as sustainer, Land as identity.  Land as grocery store and pharmacy.  Land as connection to our ancestors.  Land as moral obligation.  Land as sacred.  Land as self."   These many understandings are ones I see that Native people hold, but they are not ones I was raised to see or know.  This is part of the journey.

7. Land as Home.  All of the above, allows us to come home to the land.

It is instructive for me to survey this list.  I see that I was not taught 1 and 2 by my parents.  I was slow to understand that part of the capitalist game.  My parents both traumatized by the economic fall of their families in the Great Depression, did teach me land as security, which I do understand as some twist of one and two.  I was taught 3 in the public schools, where I learned much later during my daughter's public education about succession from 4.  And then as shared in other posts I started to have the land teach me as I bumbled along.  So I just now am taking on the question of 5 - how to be responsible to the land.  I have a long journey ahead to get to home.  How about you?

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.

Descendants of Settlers

I was organizing an interfaith service at a utility company that has consistently refused to adjust its business plan for a future without fossil fuels. I was organizing with a Native American woman.  Casually she throws in the phrase, referring to me: "those of you who are descendants of settlers".  Internally I felt the reaction "who me?"   But as I reflected upon this it crashed in on me as the most obvious thing I had never realized.

I have gone to anti-racism trainings since I was 27.  I have spent so so many hours looking at my relationship to African Americans - feeling shame and guilt about my families heritage there.  I have been encouraged to reconnect with my original European roots so as not to be one of the endless culture-less white people who simply assimilate everyone else's culture for want of having any cultural identity.   But what I suddenly realized in absolute shock was that while I had known more than most white American's the shameful history of genocide against Native people,  I had somehow learned that history as what "some white people a long time ago did."  I had participated in endless rallies in Seattle that acknowledged that we were standing on stolen Duwamish land.  But I was the first person in my family to come to Seattle or the NW so for me this was actions, some other people's white ancestors took.  I was shocked to realize that I had never checked in with what role my ancestors had played in Native genocide in the US.

The moment I turned my gaze upon it, it was painfully obvious.  My father's family were some of the original "settlers" of colonial Virginia.  Clearly the land was inhabited by native people before they came.   I had focused so long in their role as slave holders and apologists for slavery that I had missed this other evil.   I had always thought of my mother's side of the family as not into the evil since they arrived to Michigan escaping the Swedish Potato famine decades after the civil war was over.  However, they received their land under the "Homestead Act" and there has been a family member living on it now for around 120 years.   Yet, again as I turned my gaze on this I realized: "and that land was inhabited by Native people before it was "awarded" to my ancestors".

I realized that I had been blind to all of this because of how American history is taught to children in school.   We are taught that the original 13 colonies were settled by people seeking religious expression and new opportunities.   We  have a fake Thanksgiving story that completely white washes that was going on there.  Then we have stories of people "expanding west" , exploring the "frontier" or the "wilderness".   These ways of describing the "settling" of the US fails to mention that this land was not empty or uninhabited or "available".    Oh sure there are some stories of army skirmishes with Native tribes, and the stories of Custard's last stand, etc.   But even these stories sort of militarize the story in a way that takes out the role of settlers in creating the pressure to take the land.  I was shocked to realize that I had been taught this story in a way that made me blind to the role my individual family had played in the taking of land from Native people.  We are all descendants of squatters on someone else's land.   Maybe it would have been more clear if I had grown up in Michigan or Virginia...but I doubt it.  I have looked it up.  The Manahouc Tribe inhabited the land before the Fitz-Hugh's came to Northern Virginia.  A tribe of only about 1,000, by 1728 they have disappeared from recorded history.

Do you know?  Do you know where your family "settled" America?  Do you know what role they played in the taking of land and the genociding of Native people?   I have been asking white people for many years to identify whose tribal land they are on to begin to try to raise consciousness but this is new to ask people to actually notice what your ancestors did.  I have sat in rooms where people have tried to tell me that if they immigrated after colonial times or after the US was "settled" that they are not involved in this history.  I would agree it is less obvious, but if your family came to lands long ago "taken" by previously settlers, it does not mean that you don't "benefit" from the historic taking of Native lands.   All land which is available "for sale" in the US is for sale because it was taken by colonizers which you now benefit from.  We are buying land from descendants of squatters.

Beginning to face this, to look at this squarely in the face has been a seismic shift for me.  It suddenly makes a new understanding for me about the old paradigm versus new paradigm shift that I laid out in my original post.  I am asking us to look at how a paradigm of separation from the land got in place and how we can come back into relationship with the land.   Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about it as becoming indigenous to the land.  It is more clear to me now than it ever has been that White Americans who came to the US whether fleeing religious persecution, or wars, or famine or simply seeking a new start, left behind family and a way of life, they cut off from their heritage and in so doing they came into a land they were unfamiliar with.  They lived in a paradigm that saw them as "taming the land, managing the land, conquering the land (and "the savages"), and farming the land.  But they did not see the land as having a history, they did not understand the flora and fauna and the ecosytem they came to.   They were uprooted and they transplanted badly.  They made decisions like to infill wetlands, that were bad for the land and out of touch with its truth.   We have lived that way for 300 years - disconnected from the land we live on.  The average American moves every 5 years.  So how then do you have a connection to the land?

So where you live right this minute - it may be an accident of job transfer, marriage or perhaps decisions your parents made.   But what if you learned both your "settler history" and the history of the land you live on.  What if you learned the true nature of the eco-system you live in.  What if you began to heal the relationship you have to land and to make restitution to the Native people (how ever you think of that) for the lands we live on?

Look it up: https://native-land.ca/   whose land are you on? Whose land did your ancestors take?

Conversion to Tree Hugger

I always appreciated that there were tree huggers and thought it unfortunate that this was used as a pejorative insult.  But I wasn't a tree hugger.   Sure I always appreciated that trees were beautiful, but that was pretty much it for me.

But then while doing my climate work I started working on protecting trees because they are carbon sinks.   This is old paradigm thinking.  It is still seeing them as things which serve humans.   But you know the simple fact that they remove greenhouse gases from the air was not enough to convince Seattle City Council members or three Mayors that we needed a new ordinance to protect them. 

However in the course of trying to convince them I learned the following things about trees:

• They remove pollution from the air - thereby reducing asthma rates where they live
• They are literally removing Co2 and creating oxygen for us
• They provide enough shade to prevent "heat islands" and greatly reduce air conditioning
• They are more effective at storm management than our technological "solutions"
• Studies show just being able to see a tree reduces depression in humans
• They are habitat for birds and bugs that we won't have otherwise
• They share nutrients and communicate with each other under the earth through thin root like threads.  They look out for each other (more than I can say for many humans).
• The older the tree the more carbon they are sequestering per year.

I started to realize that the trees were providing critical "eco-services" to us and we were taking them completely for granted.  The more I was trying to promote their protection in a city undergoing a huge building boom (and in which trees were disappearing at an alarming rate), the more I could hear the language - how others were thinking about them.  They were thinking of them as "things" and they saw them as: to be cut and used (ie as wood), as in the way (that blocks my view or I want to build there), as money to be made (board feet) or as not even as living.

How did we become so cut off from the eco system that keeps us alive that we don't understand that we are in relationship with trees?

One of my friends was talking about putting her hands on a tree and talking to it.  I was agnostic about that idea.   Then I had a really bad tree lobbying day.  I pulled up to my office where a row of 20" diameter trees head the parking lot.  I walked up to the tree and put my hands on it and said: "Mark (name changed) is ruining this for our whole group".   The tree said back to me without pause:  "Mark loves trees too."   It was a good reminder that my screwed up allie did have a common goal with me.  At the next meeting I asked us all to share before we started what our favorite tree was.  Mark broke into a broad smile and talked fondly about his feelings for Maples.   It did reconnect me to Mark. 

It has continued.  During a very upsetting meeting at my church where someone was behaving in a very toxic way I headed out in the yard and to the nearest tree.  I put my hands on the tree and said: "This is awful!"  The tree responded: "Send the toxins down into the earth like we do".     Now when I say the tree responded you may think either I am crazy or that I am anthropomorphically attributing to the tree what I want to hear (like an imaginary tree).   But all I can tell you is those are the words I heard and they were NOT at all what I expected.  If I had made up my own answers they would have been quite different (and not nearly so helpful). I was surprised how quickly the trees spoke, how they needed no time to gather there thoughts.

One of the campaigns created by a colleague to protect the trees was called Save the 6,000 (Lidar had showed that Seattle had just 6,000 exceptional trees - those over 24" in diameter left from its second growth).  For this campaign people were invited to find trees of this size in their neighborhood and take pictures of them and post them on the website for the campaign, so that we could identify where they were in order to protect them (but also to help bind people to these trees in their neighborhood).  https://www.thelast6000.org/how-you-can-help.html

I had gone with great enthusiasm to take pictures of some of my favorite trees - ones that I had lived with and stared at for a number of years.  I excitedly went to submit them on the website and then discovered that they were asking me what kind of tree it was?   What kind of tree?  Wow for a tree advocate I felt so incredibly stupid.  I did not grow up here.  I could tell you a lot of deciduous tree types in Illinois ....but here well it was good that the term Evergreen sort of covered everything.  Except that was not going to work on this website.   So I spent a lot of time looking at websites trying to figure it out.  I realized I should have paid attention to the cones which are incredibly helpful clues and also more about how the needles are on the branches.

But this interesting thing happened.  It was like you went to the same bus station every day and saw the same person till the bus got there.  Suddenly one day you start to talk and you exchange names.  They go from being a stranger to being a "real person" in your life.  Over more time maybe even a friend.   Well suddenly when I was walking past trees noticing their size and beginning to wonder their species - their name mind you, well the trees stopped being strangers in my life.  I'd already learned how amazing they were - Now I wanted to know them all by name.   That was probably the cross over point to being a bonafide tree hugger.


I have known people who have gotten arrested sitting in large trees so they would not get cut down.  In some ways I respected that they could care that much about one living being.  But in some other way it has seemed to me like focusing on one drop of water in an ocean.   Like there are so many social evils in the world, so many good causes, why not get arrested protesting a whole issue, a whole cause - something bigger.

I don't see it that way any more.   Now to be arrested with my arms wrapped around a tree protecting it feels like making a much bigger statement about needing to stand up for our eco-systems, protect the life forms that provide for us, to actually literally rejoin the Living Earth within which I am simply one breathing life form in an interdependent web of life.

As Robin Well Kimmerer says: "You cannot take something without giving back.  The tree takes care of us, so we have to take care of it."

Welcome to Together on a Living Earth

I have blogged for more than a decade, mainly on spiritual topics.  But I have also been a climate activist now for 13 years.  Recently I have felt strongly called to start a new blog about changing the paradigm of how we live with Earth.   (I had to resist the urge to call it the earth which makes it an object and does not capitalize it as we don't but do for other planets?  Why is the one we are a part of less important?  These are all efforts to leave the old paradigm.)

So this will be a blog about living in relationship with Earth: politically, emotionally/socially, and also spiritually.  But most importantly it will be about moving out of an old dominator, industrialized, capitalist, colonizer paradigm of "dominion over" the earth, into a new paradigm on being part of a living Earth system of which we are both dependent and integrated.  It is about coming back into intimate and intentional relationship with, or as Robin Wall Kimmerer says, into reciprocality.

I want to share with you some of my own journey and acknowledge the folks that have heavily influenced it.  I am a life long Quaker and also activist.  Quakers have testimony's on non-violence, simplicity, equality, integrity, community and earth care.   So all of these are values that have informed my journey.  I have been an activist for social justice issues and so as such have not come to climate change work as an environmentalist as many of my peers have.  It was not out of the love of nature, but rather the love of people that I came to fight for our planet's survival.  But interestingly what has happened is it has brought me into a deeper and deeper love of nature, and for a born and raised city girl, back into relationship with the land.  For hard core environmentalists some of what I will have to say will sound obvious or like nothing new.  I suspect for other non-environmentalists it will make useful connections and new ways of thinking about the situation.

I met Joanna Macey when I was 22 and for those of you who don't know her she is a Buddhist, whole systems thinker, eco-feminist who has for decades invited us to see our grief for the world, move into it so we can open our hearts to our activism.  Joanna's idea that we must start with gratitude, move into our grief for the world, see the world through new and ancient eyes, and move into action - you will see woven into my work.   I also read Strategy for a Living Revolution (Out now as Towards a Living Revolution) by George Lakey, a Quaker non-violent activist when I was 20 and it has transformed forever how I think about social change.   When I was 21 I was also trained by Elise Boulding, the founder of Peace Studies in America, to facilitate the Imaging a World Without War workshops - which I have for the last decade done as Imaging a Sustainable Planet workshops.  This approach invites us to catch our image of a planet and society in health and to by going backwards from the image (rather than trying to push from our stuck present into the future) to see how such a future is created.  This also empowered me from my youth to have vision for a better world.   Finally now as I turn 60 I have been gift to both hear Robin Wall Kimmerer speak and to read her transformative book Braiding Sweetgrass.   I have also been gifted to do climate work with a number of local Native American Climate Activists who have taught me much about seeing the Earth through non dominating eyes.

In looking for the right title to name this blog I wanted to talk about being in a whole system relationship with Earth - one that recognizes all we receive from nature and the planet itself, and thus our obligation to protect Earth. A title that would reflect the reciprocal relationship we are in together, the kinship we are in with all living things, without appropriating any of Robin's thinking.   This name came to me and seemed perfect.  Later I started hearing music in my head and googled and sort of laughed to see that "We're living on a living planet, circling a living Star" is actually a line from the song Living Planet from one of my favorite groups; Emma's Revolution.  So my hats off to them as well.