I walked in the wind on the first day of Spring. Behind our house, beyond our patch of pines is a 7000-year-old lava flow. Single trees root into the hope of soils in cracks. All winter, I’ve watched this American flag fray and tatter. I cannot help but think this is a sign. While I find our anthem The Star-Spangled Banner too violent and too hard to sing well, the final lines spoke to me today. “O say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
I hope we will all rise to save Democracy. No kings! Not today. Not ever. I feel resistance rising like trees taking root even in the harshest of conditions. Together, our winds of kindness, tolerance, fairness, justice, and love of Mother Earth can still save our country.
But we don’t have much time to stop autocracy. I feel urgency in the rushing of rivers to flood in snowmelt and a million stirrings beneath the soil of first wildflowers readying to bewilder the Earth in beauty.
This is the time to spring up. This is the time to free ourselves from the icy grip of despair. Buffeted by head-spinning bad news every day from President Trump-Musk —dismantling of the Department of Education, raiding the Institute of Peace, ignoring the court of law, sending edicts to log, mine, and desecrate our public lands and to sell them to the highest bidder, and continuing to fire federal employees, undoing all the good work to halt climate change, and to try to send us back to the era when rivers were on fire, DDT planes sprayed children, and so much more—well…it’s easy to do exactly what they want us to do. Throw up our hands. Put on a distracting Rom-Com. Eat comfort food. Pretend this horror isn’t happening.
DO go out in nature for your own renewal and to dig deep to find peace, centering, connection the the Earth, and then return ready to roll up your sleeves and be part of taking back our country from autocracy, greed, racism, and cruelty.
(I took this photo in June in the Ochoco Mountains—chosen for the reciprocity of bee and flower—the spreading of pollen flower to flower as the bee gains sustenance—so many teachings from nature for our way forward.)
Notice signs of Spring renewal right out your door—even a sprig of grass thrusting up between a crack in the sidewalk. Take courage from migrating songbirds overcoming myriads of obstacles on long journeys from the tropics to nesting homes in North America. Tiny hummingbirds cross the Gulf of Mexico (true name always please) to land exhausted in Texas, to gain energy from flower nectar and people’s good will at feeders, and then fly north to return to the same trees they nested in the year before—if we make sure the trees are standing.
DO seek the positive news of resistance that inspires and offers us channels to participate. Because we can’t sit on our hands. No one. Read
t and today’s post, “More Great News That’s Bad for Musk and Trump.” Even in the most conservative of places like Wyoming, people are angry. They didn’t vote for a billionnaire to dismantle government and Congress to cut funding for social security, medicaid, and medicare, while billionnaires pay nothing in taxes. Town halls are filled with people across party lines who are feeling the pain and speaking up.
(Click on image above to find out how you can participate where you live in the Hands Off demonstration).
Yesterday, I joined a webinar by Third Act, started by
to activate people over 60 to do everything we can to avert the climate crisis—that is the biggest elephant in the room. There’s no sugar-coating the terrible damages happening at a rapid pace. We have to be informed and then turn around and work in community at every level to protest—like the upcoming Hands Off April 5th day.Be on the offensive too. We can put forward a brighter vision and assure solar energy goes forward, state pensions are divested of fossil fuel investments, and so much more. In my first post after the January 20th inauguration of the felon, I wrote a post — I Care Deeply. About, inspired by
. What do you care deeply about? Let’s keep putting that forward. Let our lists be our mantra.“Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” — my great uncle David S. Richie’s mantra.
Lift up the good local things happening and build upon them. We need to know that our future can still be bright, even if diminished. We need to know that nature shows us the ways of renewal—if we work with and not against nature.
Salmon Return to a River Transformed— Renewal is Possible
I’ll end with one story of river restoration and renewal for our threatened salmon journeying from the ocean up the Columbia River to enter tributaries and reach ancestral birthplaces to spawn and die so their young may continue the circle. I care deeply about removing the four dams on the lower Snake River for struggling salmon to avoid extinction.
But this story is about the Middle Fork of the John Day River in Oregon—where I wrote a series of interpretive displays at a wayside overlooking a major restoration project of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs (see link to the project). The John Day River is the longest free-flowing tributary of the Columbia—from headwaters in northeast Oregon streaming 281 miles to enter just above the John Day dam. Salmon still must navigate three dams, but not the brutal eight dams for fish swimming to the Salmon River.
In just three years, the Tribes and their partners transformed a damaged stretch of river confined to a narrow channel and separated from the flood plain by a historic railroad grade. On my first field visit two summers ago in August, I witnessed six adult chinook salmon resting side by side in a new pool that hadn’t been there the year before.
Reconnecting the floodplain, re-creating channels and pools and planting thousands of native plants and trees took heavy machinery, but guidance came from a blend of science and indigenous knowledge. Right away, beavers moved in to start their natural restoration.
If you ever find yourself in northeast Oregon between Prairie City and Baker City—take the turn just past Austin Junction on the Middle Fork road, a few miles past Bates State Park. Be amazed. Take heart. We need these stories.
We, too, can find ways to reconnect, re-create, and renew. I’ll end with photos of the interpretive signs—-with thanks to a wonderful team. This project joins another one downriver. The goodness is spreading.
“For many years I have been encouraged by the thought: ‘You can count the seed in an apple, but you cannot count the apples in a seed.’”— David S. Richie, Quaker peacemaker
(Art by Ram Papish, Design by Maja Smith, writing and planning by Marina Richie, fabrication and installation by John Peters, and project leader Nicole Lexson).