On The Sober Practice of Kneeling and Listening Simultaneously

This morning we decided to head out into the fields behind our house.

I have a ten-year relationship with the fields behind this little home. The fields directly behind our house are privately owned; the larger field by a family who has used their 40 acres for haying, and the smaller field by a corporation in Denver that allegedly does some sort of vertical farming in the city and rents this small 12 acres out to wandering small-operation farmers. This year a young trio of brothers moved in to grow hemp. Judging from the dead immature plants that sit out there right now, barely as tall as my knees, they were unsuccessful at growing this, the newest cash crop. I’m told growing hemp is hard. It is finicky and requires extensive soil amendment. The hemp left standing here, after the heavy snows and frozen temperatures, remind me of the terra cotta army of Qin Shi Huang.…waiting to be given a mission, stoic, and painfully obsolete.

Just beyond these two swaths of land to the East, the fields are owned by you and me; the taxpayers of Boulder County. But we cannot use them. I’ve been threatened by neighbors and harassed by the sheriff’s office on more than one occasion, simply for walking through them. They are designated Boulder County Open Space, leased out to a local farmer on an agricultural lease. He has given us carte blanche permission to walk through these fields he has leased from you and me, but the County says this permission is not his to give. His lease money goes somewhere but not back into the taxpayers’ pockets…a little like the ‘conservation easement’ situations we have cropping up all over Boulder County on wealthy private land. Despite asking all sorts of questions, and being a relatively smart person, the fiscal situation of these Open Space leases and those of so-called conservation easement purchases just doesn’t add up. But I think that’s a topic for another essay.  

A few years ago, after being told I would be arrested if I ventured – even just one more time – out into the fields to the East (the ones owned by you and me), I was so filled with rebellious anger I continued to take the dogs out there after sunset, keeping to the edges, and weaving in and out of the trees. But these fields are some of the last remaining coyote hunting and living territory in this part of Boulder, and dusk is their time. It felt wrong to be out there during their dinner hours. It was a tremendous heartbreak to me when I finally had to give up and stop walking in those fields to the East. ‘But still…’, I told myself, ‘I am beyond fortunate for these fields just behind my home…’ the privately-owned ones that are still okay to wander in. I am not complaining. Being able to walk out my back door and into the wonder of these fields, the Grandmother Cottonwood Tree, the giant Willow to the West of her…the six different families of apples, the endless plums, rosehips, alfalfa, mullein, the eagles, hawks, falcons and owls – so many different winged ones it rivals any ‘bird sanctuary’ I’ve ever been to. And the coyotes….Until the young brothers moved in and tore up the small field to build their hemp empire, the coyotes were frequent visitors to this end of the expanse of open terrain – just before the crazy danger of 63rd and Jay Road would corner them. This was their Winter home, under the two ancient apple trees who had rewilded themselves long before I moved into their neighborhood. Occasionally I would venture out under the low-hanging canopy of the coyote’s apple-tree Winter den to make an offering of a dead rabbit or a bird. It was like walking into Dracula’s lair…the bone and fur piles were tremendous and the hair on the back of my neck would prickle delightfully.

So my relationship with these fields has been passionate and deep and ambivalent. Like any great relationship worth tending. In my heart of hearts in relation to these fields, I’ve triangulated between ‘borrowed time’, ‘unrequited love’ and most recently, with a twinkly sort of impossible ‘what if….’. As many of you know, land gets under our skin. And the more-than-human ones who live on the land that works its way under our skin become family to a depth that many members of our human families never manage to reach.

This morning, unlike many of the recent mornings, and for reasons we certainly don’t ever figure out, Jeff, the elkhound, the littlest gray wolf and I chose to head out the back door for our morning ‘hello!’ to The World. We all charged out there with our usual excitement for whatever we might see, whomever we might greet. And this morning, because of a few interesting turns of event, I had an additional directive. Some of you have heard that we have cut the ribbon on a thing we’ve decided to call The Community Land Project. (You can read about that here.) Well…this CLP vision, like all visions I’ve ever had the opportunity to get to know, has evolved over the last two years to a beauty of a thing that is simultaneously exhilarating and overwhelming to think about. The original vision was wild land for humans and all other people to come together, remembering how to weave resilient community, creating spaces for all of us to grieve, learn, celebrate, listen…one possible response to the climate catastrophe that has given many of us the opportunity to ask ‘What needs doing?’ ‘What is mine to do?’ and ‘How do I want to spend my time?’ Well…just about three weeks ago, this land behind our house went on the market. It seems quite clear that this land would be an extraordinary thing for our community (meaning all the people who live within Boulder County and perhaps surrounding places – really whoever wants to be a part of it). It’s on the 205 bus route. It’s unassuming and of course, beautiful. It’s also $2.5 million. A drop in the bucket for lots of folks here in the County, which has its share of private wealth. But, being a die-hard grass-roots community-tender, that is not a sum I have in my own pockets. So, I’ve rolled up my sleeves and have embarked on a mission to see who is out there who might also be sniffing at the edges of this vision (or their own version of it) – those who have the financial resources.

So this morning, I was heading out into the fields to make offerings, to listen, to declare (once again) my devout love for these grasses, birds, soil, trees, bugs, snakes, and even the stoic hemp soldiers and all the garbage the farmers left behind once they realized their fortune was not forthcoming (as PattyAnn Rogers says, “it’s all nature”). I brought flowers, seeds, nuts and dried fruit and out we four went. The elkhound and the littlest gray wolf both have their unique relationships with these fields and it is pure joy to see them overcome by it as they project like determined acrobats being shot out of cannons flying over the low-growing Briar Roses and the Thistle into the dense shrubbery of the American Plums. As we were coming back East in the furthest section of the field that is for sale, the elkhound began whining and hedging. And there he was. A big buck, lying as near to the Grandmother Tree as he could get before he died. A beautiful ten-pointed he-creature, powerful and crumpled, with the tell-tale trickle of blood coming from his nose and his mouth; a sign of the internal bleeding that was no-doubt a result of a (fatal) collision with an automobile just to the South on Jay Road. We have seen many things in these fields including an Autumnal mama black bear and her cub. But over the decade we’ve been rolling through these grasses, we have only seen three deer. We stopped and fell to our knees. It’s not often we suburban domesticated folk have a chance to be so near a wild body of such size and power. Over the course of the rest of the morning, Jeff and I tried to find the words that would describe what immediately happened to us and ‘sobering’ was all we could come up with. It was both exciting and ‘grief-strickening’, enraging and devastating. But some folks would say something like, “It’s just a deer. They’re everywhere. As a matter of fact, I just shoo-ed one out of my backyard yesterday.” No big deal.

No big deal. Except that for whatever reason, I was born a person who has always tracked the deeper thread of a deeper story. Of course this can get out of hand, like when we say something like, “and at that moment right as I was wondering if I should stay with my (abusive) boyfriend, a hawk flew over my car and I knew it was a message from the Universe that I was meant to give it another try!” Perhaps I’m in this category as well, of folks who look outside of themselves for meaning without listening to the intelligence that dwells within us. But this morning the urge to stop and listen was cacophonous. We do not go out into the fields very much these days – mostly because of all the garbage left out there, and because (for me) it is often uncomfortable to feel the magnitude of possibilities while also feeling the magnitude of miracles that would have to happen to reunite humans with land in the down-to-Earth way that is the Community Land Project. Yet today, it felt clear and unequivocal that we were to go out. So much so that I took fistfuls of flowers from our ancestral celebrations over the weekend and packed my pockets with seeds, nuts and dried fruit. I wanted us to walk through the fields like they had been scooped up into this Community Land Project, like we were courting them. And there he was. Powerful. Peaceful. In his final resting place.

Later, after we had walked back home, as we were eating breakfast, I was thinking about the beautiful buck. I was again trying to find the words. The words, “he came here to die” rang out in my head. And as I wove his fate with the possibility of our human fate in these uncertain, unimaginable times, I felt like I had heard something important. So much is dying right now, as I write this and as you read it. Unfathomable numbers of species, individuals and ancient cultural ways are exiting the living Earth plane. To have the opportunity to drop to our knees in the presence of all that is dying, to sober ourselves up and listen, to allow ourselves to feel the impact, and to feel like we too might perish from its weight…all these things are just some of the essential steps in remembering what it means to be human at this time. And remembering what it means to be human at this time is the first step in knowing what is ours to do next. The Community Land Project is fundamentally about this. It is about reweaving ourselves with the Earth, remembering an old way of being together so we can listen for the new way of being human. Fundamentally, the Community Land Project is about dying and living. It is my heartfelt vision that we find our way back into community with each other and all things so, at the very least, we might die well. But perhaps, just maybe, in the process of this, we will also remember how to live well.