Beautiful reframe of shared risk as the actual work, not the feelings that come easy. The redwood analogy grounded this perfectly, second-growth forests carrying forward something they never chose but still grow toward. What stuck with me is how belonging gets conflated with ownership when real belonging comes from mattering to a wider web. I've found that communities avoiding interwoven relationships to stay 'clean' end up more fragile, not less.
thanks for this gorgeously fraught and inspiring piece. i wonder if the second/third growth forests had/have some way to compost the grief. at least some of it. after all, they are directly rooted to Earth. i want to learn the ways of the composters.
aw thanks mina... its a really good question. i don't know so much about forests as compared to some, but in my time learning from forester kin, i am learning that in a lot of clear cut landscapes, the ecology that grows back grows in succession, for example in the sierras the pines that have a shorter lifespan will sprout up readily, and in some ways shade out a lot of the slower growing trees that the indigenous groups had preserved as important food source (the oaks) or really straight timbers (sugar pines).
my take on it is that second/third growth forests are calling out for relationality, especially in the ways the trees grow up very tightly packed and are prone to crown fires that can decimate a whole landscape, versus what may be considered good fires that clear out the debris, and nourish the older trees.
they say that when colonizers first came to these lands, they described at least the sierra nevada like a garden, where there were big meadows and you could see far out across the mountain because the indigenous people were tending to the land through their hunting and foraging needs. the colonizers thought the land had just been this way, and it is sad to see that that mindset has carried over into modern day efforts to preserve land through not doing anything in our forests.
so i don't know if that offers anything about composting grief, but i hear them asking for relationality through the ways they're growing and creating an extreme fire prone environment.
mhmmm thank you for this beautiful articulation. I feel it in my heart-belly, the nerves around risk and the butterflies of potential!
Beautiful reframe of shared risk as the actual work, not the feelings that come easy. The redwood analogy grounded this perfectly, second-growth forests carrying forward something they never chose but still grow toward. What stuck with me is how belonging gets conflated with ownership when real belonging comes from mattering to a wider web. I've found that communities avoiding interwoven relationships to stay 'clean' end up more fragile, not less.
thank you thank you for this! appreciate the care in reading and reflecting
thanks for this gorgeously fraught and inspiring piece. i wonder if the second/third growth forests had/have some way to compost the grief. at least some of it. after all, they are directly rooted to Earth. i want to learn the ways of the composters.
aw thanks mina... its a really good question. i don't know so much about forests as compared to some, but in my time learning from forester kin, i am learning that in a lot of clear cut landscapes, the ecology that grows back grows in succession, for example in the sierras the pines that have a shorter lifespan will sprout up readily, and in some ways shade out a lot of the slower growing trees that the indigenous groups had preserved as important food source (the oaks) or really straight timbers (sugar pines).
my take on it is that second/third growth forests are calling out for relationality, especially in the ways the trees grow up very tightly packed and are prone to crown fires that can decimate a whole landscape, versus what may be considered good fires that clear out the debris, and nourish the older trees.
they say that when colonizers first came to these lands, they described at least the sierra nevada like a garden, where there were big meadows and you could see far out across the mountain because the indigenous people were tending to the land through their hunting and foraging needs. the colonizers thought the land had just been this way, and it is sad to see that that mindset has carried over into modern day efforts to preserve land through not doing anything in our forests.
so i don't know if that offers anything about composting grief, but i hear them asking for relationality through the ways they're growing and creating an extreme fire prone environment.