Letting Nature Ritually Wash Us
Plus mis-IDing plant mishaps, goat ventures, deserts studies and more.
I’ve been settling back in Paonia, Colorado where I’ve been making home base for the last year and a half. The Spring winds come almost daily and blow my outside things around to abandon, the wooden latticework of the yurt I’m renting creaks from the intense blasts, the warm airs from the Uncompahgre whip last year’s sunflowers stalks finally down from their winter of retting in snow and mud. I’m grateful to be here. I’ve been quiet on Substack, but not for lack of things I’m thinking about or wanting to write about or explore here, but you know how that goes — when inspiration is there and you can’t seem to sit down and write and don’t know where to begin, sometimes you have to begin somewhere and see where it goes, not have a lot of expectation to get it all out in one session. Also, I’ve been off my computer a lot, and off grid, and while I could still write here on this digital device, and thought about it a bunch, I mostly kept myself busy in other ways, handwriting, letting my thoughts formulate through feeling inwards and through.
I spent the last few months on an almost yearly pilgrimage I’ve gone on for almost 5 years now, a trip to the warmer parts of the southwest and camping around in my truck, sticking to mostly southern Arizona and southern New Mexico. At this point I have my spots, my old haunts, some I don’t get to every year, some I visit religiously every year, and some I discover anew. I feel re-made by living with less, sleeping in the back of my truck with my cozy wool stuffed futon bed and 4 wool army surplus blankets and a pile of sheepskins I tanned, or on the ground in my bell tent when I stay somewhere just long enough to warrant pitching it and even set up my portable woodstove in there if it its cold out. I feel alive when I’m cooking on the back of my tailgate in the mornings despite the weather and working on a craft project early with the cool air and morning sun hitting my face as I wake up, birdsong an immediate passive sensory input. Now, when I go back down there, I feel body memories of story, home, familiarity in simply the birdsong during a certain time of year the Horehound is greening up again or the Mustards are out blooming by the riparian waterways. My body knows the morels will be out soon, or the Willows will be leafing any minute now.
I traveled down to attend a land-based skillshare gathering, that while I enjoy for its purpose of seeing my old friends who all come from far and wide to meet there, I rarely get to take a class when I go. Partly I’m usually teaching, doing photography or work-trading so there’s just no time. And also, with how many people are in one place and how many things are going on all the time, it’s actually really important to carve out moments to be away from everyone whenever you can to re-center and get quiet. Nonetheless, I go, to congregate, to connect where I can even if fleeting and to see where those seeds planted from human interaction go. We all come there cause we like cordage, or clay pottery making, dealing with dead animal parts and pieces and making them anew, plants, hunting with simpler technology, think making fire without a lighter is neat, or like to make our own clothes, among many other reasons. These gatherings have plenty of problems in how their are conducted at times, but also are beautiful spaces for inspiration. I’ve talked extensively with different folks on my podcast about the pros and cons of land-skills gatherings, and I don’t have answers, or definitive opinions but I think that it is important to explore. Who gets to come, who knows the skills and why? Is there harmful cultural appropriation going on or harmless cultural appreciation? Should folks get paid? What does accessibility look like? How do we hold even past respected elders accountable for inappropriate behavior? How do we honor elders who have given so much? How do we advocate for the lands where the gathering is held, as mining ensues all around and threatens hundreds of miles of already poorly treated and managed landscapes?
I go down for this gathering and then it becomes an anchor for landscape and ecosystem exploration before and after the event. And also, inner exploration as I often take the time to get out somewhere away from the hubbub of the bigger world so I can hear myself again. I love learning new plants and over the years I’ve been slowing familiarizing myself with the Sonoran, Mojave and the Chihuahuan desert’s particular nuances. There hasn’t been a hurry. I’ve been soaking in what I can, how I can during the many Springs I’ve spent. If you drive from southern New Mexico to southern California, you get to see all three deserts and the Madrean region as well where mountaintops become sky island preserves for ecosystems found more abundantly to the south. Of course, these desert ‘type’ designations are arbitrary lines we draw in the sand based on the current camaraderie of plants that tend to grow together, brought in sync by geography, climate, soil and many other factors and ever changing like they always have. These designations are useful, just like any other naming system or categorization systems— for seeing patterns in a place and trying to make sense of them. But often what makes each of these deserts what they are, crosses over into blurred lines in many places where you’ll find a Joshua Tree growing with a Saguaro alongside Yucca and Creosote Bush, Ocotillo. Categorization is extremely useful and also at times limiting and over-generalizing. Something I teach in my ecology classes is to hold both the need for such naming games, and the openness and embrasure towards what ‘seeing’ land means without these imposed constructs as the only lens. See them for what they are with our senses, and take in our own stories, will also noting that these other constructs exist. A desert is a ‘place’ and places we as a culture determine, ultimately. Places are determined by our bodies remembering, sometimes collective bodies over time, and woven in land connection, not so much an objective truth. Looking at where culture and ecology cross in our observations, study and understanding is where the real work begins.
The more I take the time to see, to observe, to immerse, the more I notice this to be true, that culture has more to do with what we think we know about things than anything else. Science comes from humans culture trying to make sense and measure the ‘nature’ outside of us and still is filtered through our own human needs, what we ‘want’ to see out there.
I’ve done a number of ‘intentional walks’ down in this region too over the years, and this year a group of 10 of us managed to all meet on the same day at the same trailhead and did a week long walk with goats the last week of February deep in the steep canyoned waterways of the Gila wilderness where we still got snowed on and the river crossings were so frigid that I nearly cried some days from the icy snow runoff waters on my skin, which stayed wet all day long from the waist below- especially after I fell in one of the days to my neck and couldn’t get warm despite putting on dry clothes. The walks, like any of the other walks I’ve ever done, help me to see what’s going on at that time, to take in what the collective of life in that place— what we as humans like to categorize as ‘ecology’ —is doing at that moment, which could be different from every other year, or similar, and its pure magic. I like to do this to myself too to tend to my own inner ecology and be transformed by every walk, in my discomforts, in my being washed by the roller coaster of pain and pleasure and beauty and so-called wildness and welcome how it changes me. The sore feet feeling is familiar, the dehydration and fatigue, the shoulder pain from my backpack, timeless brainwaves ignited from walking all day, I welcome and know so well. I know what I’ve been capable of in the past so I see the pain differently now.
I’ll write more about this specific walk in a future post as I’ve been processing how to speak to it alongside how it connects to other things for me, including the animal processing class I helped with at said skills gathering, but I thought I’d mention it here, and how it still seeps in to my dreams, those remote and vastly difficult terrained canyons and river crossings.
I hung out with multiple sets of goats this winter. Something is in the air. I’ve wanted goats for a long time, and I don’t know if it will happen anytime soon with my current housing complexity situation (or maybe I go nomad again) but I keep getting put around goats. My friend Sunny has a set of goats she is gearing to take on a Stone Age immersion trip up in Washington with Lynx Vilden. We visited her before the gathering at her home north of Phoenix, where she was scrambling to get her gear together for the walk she is doing. I hung out with the five pack goats that we took out on the rugged cold and wet Gila walk, none of them milkers but a quirky group used to rugged walks with questionable high river crossings. I hung with my friend Callie Russell’s 11 goats while we camped together for almost 2 weeks at one of the special spots many of us love and she would bring me milk most mornings while we sat in the hot springs there, sometimes squirting fresh creme straight from teet to coffee cup. We did record a podcast convo about how small scale shepherding lifeways can bring us into closer familiarity with our ecological relationships, also caught on air her goat almost knocking me off a cliff, or actually succeeding- coming soon. I also got to say hello to my friend’s goats in McElmo Canyon outside of Cortez in the four corners region on my way back north, yet another set of goats. Some people hate goats and their mischievousness, but I think they are super funny, interesting, endlessly entertaining and life-giving. If you have them for their nutritious milk as well as their companionship, you can taste the land in your drinking, what a cool way to experience the landscape alchemized. As we were camped by the river together, Callie’s goats started to increase their milk production by a third, just by being able to browse all day long practically, and had so many options of what to eat. Oak leaves, Juniper, Silk Tassel, Three Leaf Sumac, Willow, Cottonwood leaves. I won’t forget the smell of crushed Juniper greenery in the air as they chew their cud after going through a grove of them nibbling, akin to an essential oil dispenser in a massage room.
I am getting prepared now for teaching ecology courses and other classes beyond those courses through the Groundwork nonprofit (Groundwork and my longterm project Ground Shots are not related by the way other than I teach for the western Colorado-based nonprofit sometimes!) again this season. I look forward to teaching at locations that I spent time last year (click here to see some new pictures from last years sessions), and in that same tradition of being washed by place with its unique wisdom over many visits and pilgrimages, I am feel changed by these places and imagine will be again this year. I remember in my body where the Hawthorn grows, or the big patch of wild Onions or the giant Biscuitroots in the adobes, and I hope to revisit them with a new series of students who will want to learn land relationship by being immersed in body memory as well.
I address with students a lot of the barriers that keep us from connecting to land and one another in that during our time together, alongside geeky botany studies, discussing readings, and really fun natural journaling and mapping projects, but I also want to impart to students a kind of ritualistic reverence for taking the time to be washed by what slowing down in landscapes shows us about land, and being changed by this time in our inner landscapes as well. What dirt makes its way into our psyche, cleaning with it’s alivness or turning little doors in our brains this way or that with the roots that grow from it, filling cracks and making ripe soiled foundation for keeping us centered in our daily lives we attend to, keeping us centered in what matters most. Perhaps this time out together can be a reminder in a moment later where big decisions or even small ones are made, and we are drawn to decide things that favors the health of the whole, of all of nature, and with the knowing that we are a part of nature, too.
With that said, one last story to leave you with to welcome you back to reading my publication of pondering, though this one is a hard one to stomach (not gross just infuriating). I took a walk last week, after getting back from my travels, with two friends to Dominguez Canyon, a red-soiled canyon 40 minutes from here, where Spring usually starts before it does here in Paonia, and we took all day to explore this special place. It is a place I took my Riparian ecology students last year (this class is happening again!) and want to take my Canyon country ecology students this year as well. We started the walk along some train tracks, and then eventually crossed the main river to catch a path through Single-leaf Ash, Fremont Cottonwoods and Saltbush groves towards the roadless areas. We started to see waist high piles of plants along the worn down red dirt path, and I wondered why the piles were there. We saw one guy walking with a hard hat and work gear on, who nodded as we passed him. We came to a clearing where we would have the option to turn right and go up a side canyon which was what we had planned, or keep on the main river, and we see a group of young folks with more piles of woody plants, chainsaws and vessels of gasoline, backpack herbicide sprayers like I remember seeing my dad always using during landscaping jobs in Virginia growing up. We asked what they were doing, and they said they were a part of the Western Colorado Conservation Corps and were cutting out Salt Cedar which is an ‘invasive’ plant. Ironically though, most of what they were cutting out was actually Willow. Willow is a riparian plant that is key to the health of river sides in the Southwest, and they were actually cutting out and mixing up herbicides to spray on the Willow they were claiming to be saving. There were a few branches of the Salt Cedar in the piles but mostly the Salt Cedar along the river remained intact while they cut down the Willow growing along with it. So, they were actually encouraging the spread of this much hated, deemed harmful, ‘aggressive’ and ‘no-good,’ misunderstood plant, along a river that already isn’t treated well, one of the reasons the Salt Cedar does so well there. (Note, people also called Willow aggressive and invasive sometimes when it grows where we don’t want it especially in flood irrigated orchards). The three of us, Matt Springer who I worked for last year on his organic medicinal herb farm plant and biochemistry nerd extraordinaire, and Jason Moore who is a botany and plant geek (we’re leading a donation based plant walk in Paonia, CO on April 20 if you’re nearby, 10 AM meet at Espresso Paonia), didn’t really know what to say.
All three of us question the cultural paradigms that dictate ideas about what plants belong and don’t and why to begin with, but in this moment I think we were kind of speechless. I did say to the girl I was talking to that what was here was Willow and not Salt Cedar but she proceeded to correct me with the upmost confidence that it was Salt Cedar because of its opposite buds. The branches of the plants in the pile bent and flexed without breaking, had a pale pink color and every other characteristic of Willow. Salt Cedar breaks, has more burgandy bark and bumpier texture on the branches plus foliage that looks like the ‘cedars’ it is named after though it has no relation to the trees in the Cypress family commonly called Cedar nor the actual original Cedar that grows in the Middle East which is in the Pine Family. (Strangely enough when looking up the invasive plant lists published on official governments sites in Oklahoma when I have taught about Juniper ethnobotany, all ‘Cedars’ are listed as invasive plants including Salt Cedar without going into any nuance at all). They had clearly mis-identified the Salt Cedar they were cutting with chainsaws and poison on the blades, and pouring directly on the plants cut. We walked on where we saw more piles and decided to not say anything, knowing these 20 year olds wouldn’t listen to us likely. We took pictures to send to their bosses to kindly let them know that this was happening and perhaps better training was needed.
I sit with myself and wonder about the deep disconnect between really knowing ecology, and plants and understanding the appropriate way to react and tend and be in relationship. Were these folks really feeling like they were making an impact or just listening to their higher ups who didn’t train them well? I wish they could attend one of my ecology classes and then decide for themselves later how they should respond to the rapidly changing ecosystems of riparian areas in the Southwest, which have salinating waters due to dams and flood irrigating on an old ocean floor, channelized river banks that don’t allow them to pulse out properly because of human’s trying to control them and therefore the willows and cottonwoods can’t thrive, big ag happening right on the shorelines where poisons and GMO’s take the place of complex plant kinships, and plants moving in that weren’t there 50-100 to 200 years ago and responding to the conditions that humans have helped to cause for them to thrive where the Willows cannot. It’s an easy bandaid to just pull up the Salt Cedar and blame them, even though in this case they weren’t even pulling them up at all, but pulling up Willows while mid-IDing the plants altogether. I thought to myself, what a waste of time, money, energy. I felt sad for the Willows. I wished it made sense for me to replant some of them since Willows have rooting hormones that make it easy to do so in the right soil conditions, but with all the poisons everywhere near the shore, and the time of year, I didn’t bother with the overwhelming task.
I’ll still be taking my students to this location for my riparian ecology and canyon country ecology classes despite the conservation corps’ activities, but certainly we will be talking about this more in depth out in the field, what this whole encounter represents. I’ll be sad that Greg of Hiraeth blog and Kollibri of ‘Speaking for The Trees’ won’t be here this year in person to have the in-depth discussions with me and students about plants. Here’s two posts by them related to this topic and the broader theme of land connection:
If you’re interested in my Spring and Summer ecology courses, now is a great time to sign up in time for May and June sessions and come out to join me to explore in person.
I’ve got a lot more stories to tell about the last few months of my wanderings, but here’s a snippet for now, and what I’ve been thinking about. Goats, Pilgrimage, Invasive plants and more.
I am so excited to find this story of your winter adventures. I have only had time to skim through it so far, but I will return. Love the goat stories! Thanks for the update. Peace and Love