MINE
Dearest Abigail standing in the meadow next to the beehive known as “Erleichda.” Seven months after the fire that took her life, a carpet this green surrounds the bees once again.
A friend is readying her house to put on the market. It will officially hit the system today, but as we went to bed last night, she already had several offers, sight unseen. It will probably sell for $400K over asking price. I checked my old house in Spring Grove, IL, the one we sold before we moved here. It sold for $360K in 2018. People here have enough money to pay what my previous shelter cost OVER the $1.3 million dollar asking price. A part of my brain just broke, I swear.
I woke this morning wondering what I would do in her place? Every offer is going to come with a letter and maybe the promise of a week’s vacation at one of their second or third homes, or courtside tickets to the Warrior’s season opener. Some of those letters will be from families who lost their houses in the fire and have younger children. They’re integrated into this town and don’t want to leave. Others will be from tech families who need their “covid” home. A refuge from the city. A city they will return to when the schools are open again. A single mom I know wrote such a letter for a home in Felton, a mountain town above Santa Cruz that was starting to buzz before covid but is quickly becoming a hotspot for families that would like to pay less than a million dollars to raise their children in beauty. She begged the owners to sell to her for asking price so that she could put down roots with her young children. In the end, they chose to sell to her rather than take the higher offers. Would I be so kind?
Homeowners are cashing in while the getting is hot. Some will have college paid for their children, others retirement in a cheaper state, all from the mere sale of a home on a tiny plot of land, in a town everyone wants to live in. It’s a great plan, my mind is simply having a difficult time trying to understand where all the money is coming from. In the meantime, the shanty town grows along highway 1 and our local politicians are trying to make sleeping outside a misdemeanor, stymied by the same building code laws as I am when it comes to creating shelter for these people. As I poured my first cup of coffee this morning, these thoughts and more swirled through my head.
“Tend to me.”
It’s a voice I often hear these days.
I check my phone—Zillow and Redfin have informed me that a few of the houses I’m interested are under contract, but some new ones have popped up. Unfortunately, those homes are five hours away from my friends, my community, my land. I’d rather rebuild, but I’ve had three builders tell me now that building my garage will cost more than what I paid for my first home, never mind the other $1.3 million for the actual house, so damn, what am I supposed to do?
“Tend to me.”
I know who this is speaking in my heart—Big Trees—only most of her trees have died. She is to be a meadow and an orchard now, and she needs our help.
“But I need shelter,” I answer.
“You have shelter.”
True, I have a rental in Santa Cruz for another year.
“But I need shelter that is mine.”
Silence for a moment. I take another sip of coffee.
“What is mine?”
In her phenomenal book, Braiding Sweetgrass, poet and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that by learning the language of animacy— a language where there are few objects and instead words of being—we can create a means to change our relationship with the natural world. Not by putting humanness on nature, but by listening to nature as a being, strike that, a collective of beings. Rock people, river people, bee people, tree people, spider people, cloud people, snow people, Stormfather. When we see the non-human world as alive we can begin to see our place in the web of life. This is a place where there is no “mine.”
As someone who lost everything to a wildfire, including livestock and tree people I considered family, something I've discovered is how irked I get when well-meaning white landowners quote indigenous land practices as the only moral way forward without addressing the fundamental fact that land ownership is incompatible with their worldview. It’s a thing now for the newspapers in California to talk about prescribed burnings and the use of native plants to control wildfire as if skimming the top of indigenous wisdom is all we need, and I don’t want to become one of those who parrots the native’s customs while turning a blind eye to the brokenness within my own society of which I am very much a part. Of course, tending to a plot of land and listening to its needs will forever change one’s own view. Yet, it was also common practice for original participation societies to ask permission of the land or river or mountain before putting down their roots and if natural disaster struck, it was a clear sign she wanted you to move on. Contrast that to people outbidding one another to own this land while others hope to hold on to their devastated land and still others will leave their land in hopes of greener pastures, leaving acres left unattended.
In addition to the cost of owning land, so many have ideas of how to manage the land; CalFire, environmental health, erosion control, PG&E. The rules tangle into each other like balls of twisted yarn left in a handbasket for ten years. I know I can parse them if only I can find a place to begin tracing their nonsense back and forth. Everyone in California has an opinion on how to rebuild and return to our land.
“Tend to me.”
The truth is everything I see happening in the Bay Area real estate market highlights the error in our ways. Land ownership is the heart of capitalism’s failure. It takes what is ours and makes it mine. While I can’t offer any solution that will make the Western mind happy with a communal view of life on the planet, I can say that our need to own a plot of land and the house on it in the place we think we need to be has led to excessive reliance on automobiles, suburban sprawl, inequality, and now the inability for people all over the world to return to their land after an eco-disaster because the costs are too high, even with insurance payouts. We might not be able to turn this ship around if we continue to fence off the world, cutting off the flow of life into tiny little pieces of “mine,” and this thought adds to the blanket of grief I’ve worn since August. I’m enmeshed in this world of land ownership and thus the solutions terrify me even though my heart knows it may be the only way for the web of life to find balance and health.
“Be still.”
This is another phrase I hear a lot when I visit the land or meditate on what I should do next. My soul is the one speaking now, telling me to take a pause. Don’t play the game. Sit this one out. But how can I? Home OWNERSHIP is built into my very biology. It’s the American dream and I’ll be honest, being a renter in the Bay Area is incredibly unstable. I breathe deeply knowing this pause isn’t forever. It’s for now. Take it one lease at a time. See what happens. Listen to the land and tend to her. Is there really anything else to do?
I have the means at the moment to fall into the space of nothingness while society around me scrambles and scrapes to shelter themselves in this promised land. The land I fled on that hot August night needs me to focus on poop and worms for the soil, not permits and permission to cut into it yet again. The land needs me to weed the life that might not be helpful and plant the beings it needs at this delicate time. The debris from our past is gone and soon we’ll have water.
I’ve noticed that there are two areas on the property that are coming back to life with no help from us and both are areas where livestock once lived. The area near the chicken coop with garden beds that I’d filled with biodynamic compost for years and the back of the property where our goats would pasture right off the deck in the meadow with the bees. Those bees are still there and a green carpet of life is growing out from around their hive in a circle wherever Barttimus and Abigail would browse, like the skirt around a Christmas tree, filled with the gifts of earthworms and microscopic delights. I often drank my morning coffee while watching those sweet goats reach up to eat the scrubby leaves of the tiny oaks and other shrubs with such vigor, only to sit in the sun a few moments later, ruminating on their feast, pooping as often as they’d eat. Their poop has re-seeded that land. Right next to this wonder sits a barren site where the house once stood. Light brown, lifeless earth, strewn with glass and fragments of the things I once owned. Nothing is growing there. It is this patch that calls to us.
“Pick up the shards of the past. Get water. Get poop. Make compost. Plant ground cover. Renew my soil so that I might join in the life of the bees.”
Could our next steps really be about poop and plants and not permits and plans?
At this moment, I guess so.