building beds

in hell and high water

I’ve been going nuts on this hügelkultur garden bed. Digging up hard desert dirt, chainsawing dead cottonwood trees, chopping up willows and gathering twigs.

It’s like the fury and complacency of this these times, of birthing, of children, of war and AI and the churning belly of Mother Earth - it’s all pouring through my body in the form of creating a garden bed, in the wilderness of my true home up on the hill near my yurt, beneath the fragrant juniper trees and the dancing, growing species of birds.

I’ve injured myself. My arms are scratched and bleeding. My wrist aches, my back is tired. But I can’t stop, I can’t stop creating this bed, because the world is on some kind of self-induced, synthetic and not-so-synthetic fire, limping along to a mass media produced programming of human disempowerment and separation, destroying itself and all those who continue to dance to those weasels plucking lies upon lies on the strings of our naivety.

And then suddenly, it’s just me, the land and this squeaking wheelbarrow. Load after load, squeaking along, wheeling piles of mulch, logs and twigs, balancing, breathing with my nose, struggling with the weight of it all - suddenly everything makes sense and the world is NOT on fire; the world is green and very much alive and full of mystical smells and deep time simplicity and mystery and echoing songs throughout the valley.

My thoughts slow. My body works. I find rhythm and hear the subtle shifts of understanding that my deep soul has been trying to get me to grasp, but that the noise of the world and technology and the buzzing refrigerator have kept my little self deaf to hearing.

Hecho a mano. Made by hand, two hands, to be exact.

I’m not finished. I’ll head back up there today, make a cozy nest for my sick daughter, where she can look at the sky and bugs, while I wheel barrow back and forth listening to the birds who I swear are multiplying since I put up this bird feeder. Every little thing counts.

You can read a more about the magical phenomenon of the hügelkultur bed here and the benefits of this technique especially for high mountain, drought prone areas, like ours. Thought of my grandpa Wayne a lot as I’ve been working on this project. He grew the best sweet potatoes and dug up amazing quartz crystals all over his farm in Arkansas. He grew shiitake mushrooms from logs behind his wood shop and could talk for hours about his gardens. I feel his presence a lot as I work outside, moving earth and chopping wood.

I’ll be bringing seeds to an incredible elders gathering next week in Arizona. There will be over 80 indigenous elders, from North, Central and South America, and I’ve sourced some sweet native seeds as part of their gift baskets to take home: Zuñi Gold Beans, Hopi Purple String Bean and Hopi Red Dye Amaranth and a few native Tobacco and Poppy species. The seed business is a sacred thing. Thank you to the amazing Laura Parker of High Desert Seeds for her devotion and generosity, for the way her path will bring abundance and diversity to many corners of Turtle Island!

‘Tis the season.

All the love and resilience to you. Put down your phone and weave your own story with the sacred threads of earth and water, seed and story. Build a village of greening earth and flowering dreams. Sing as if the world depended on it, because, maybe it does.

✧

Thanks for reading this edition of Wild Leaf, an undulating landscape of meaning, poetry and what it seems to be a mother in these times. Please click the little ❤️ at the bottom of the page here so more readers can find this publication. Paid subscriptions support these works in a big way, thank you. You can also always: Buy Me A Coffee, it will help me purchase a new wheelbarrow.