I awake on Saturday with anticipation. Kathryn Lafond and Jennifer Wilhoit, two seasoned practitioners of the annual Global Earth Exchange are going to meet me later to make beauty for a local wounded place. The day dawns bright and sunny. No, wait a moment, it’s cloudy and cool. No, here comes the sun, sweeping the yard with brilliance, making the peonies glow. Uh oh – here come the clouds, then the rain, a short squall followed by blue-ing skies and sun. I wonder if there is a rainbow somewhere. Our Pacific Northwest weather has been fickle lately, so we three women don’t even think about cancelling our meet up.

Our destination this time – a shade mitigation project to allow the neighboring grapes to grow more abundantly. Shade mitigation is a euphemism for clear cutting one hundred mature trees sequestering a good amount of carbon, contributing to water retention, providing habitat for countless lives, holding the hillside in place…and yet, and yet. The vineyard was planted when the trees were young. No problem then, but 35 years later they tower and provide shade in the late, hot summer afternoons – cooling the ecosystem – which is good – but hiding the sun from the vines – which is bad. A conundrum of our times. How do we honor the needs of all life at the same time we honor the needs of the local farmer, who in this case tends her small organic vineyard and vegetable fields with great care and attention to the old ways and less-mechanized methods.

As we walk up to the clear cut, we immediately recoil from the devastation, but wait, we also see nature sprouting green between the wood shards, disturbed soil, and lopped off stumps. We also soon see carefully planted by human hands, the hands of the food forest people who tend this acreage, new berry bearing shrubs along with several types of trees. What are they thinking? Clearly those humans with best intentions had forgotten to think 30 or 50 years ahead.

So we three see immediately many sides to this situation and are concentrating so hard on what lies before us that we have forgotten the wildly shifting skies above. A wet spatter hits my glasses. A friend yelps, “Oh, noooooo. It’s raining.” I say smugly, but wrongly it turns out, “It’ll pass before we know it.” Looking up, the clouds are grimly dark. The rain begins sluicing down. “Let’s move fast,” someone says. I happen to be standing next to a knee high, 3 feet wide, flat stump. “Look at this blank canvas,” I say. Another says, “And the rain is already changing its color. So beautiful. The stump is glowing orange.”
Rain becomes a deluge – truly a torrent. Kathryn with no raincoat is drenched rapidly to the skin, but she joyfully shrugs it off. “As a kid, I used to love being out in the rain with no protection. Loved getting sopped. I’ll be ok…as long as we work quickly.”
No time for “serious” prayer, spontaneous song, a poem, an observation or story. We get right to work making our Rad Joy Bird. Remember those peonies I mentioned – many of the heads were dropping their petals so I gathered them up – red, rose, pink, white – and brought them in containers. I also gathered inch wide, five petaled, white flower “faces” from the lawn. I had anticipated laying those out one by one in some fashion but that is not to be. Their container floods quickly and all those little flowers glue themselves together. We use them in clumps to outline our bird. Kathryn has brought cornmeal. We use that as the sun. We know without talking about it that our Rad Joy Bird is bringing new light to human consciousness. We’re asking forgiveness for our loss of connection with the land that provides for our lives.
Jennifer observes wisely and says something like, “Spirit is giving us this deluge to flush out our old ways, washing us clean to begin anew. All this fresh water makes the new green growth possible, too.” Kathryn and I nod YES!
Then it hailed, truly it hailed: little balls of white jumping on our sleeves, messing with our hair, adorning our bird. We continue working rapidly as our wet backs begin feeling the chill, our hands are soaked, my fingers having a harder and harder time picking up the fragile petals. We flow, few words are needed. We trust each other’s choices. I experience the effervescent joy of co-creating. Though the complexities and paradoxes of our era remain, I imagine all of our hearts are feeling lighter as we head back to our cars.