Building Hope
Opportunities to Write This Month
We will have another informal writing session this Thursday morning, the 13th at 8:30am. This is a casual writing group meeting intended to give time and space to write together. Please bring your current work in progress or feel free to use a provided prompt. We will end the quiet writing time with an opportunity to share and network. Meeting is inside the Co-Create Innovation Hub on Arkansas Avenue.
Next week, on November 20th, we will meet for our regular workshop which is free and open to the public. We will continue our discussion on using lived experiences and concrete details to bring an embodied reality to our storytelling, essay weaving, and poem making. All levels, all genres, this generative workshop invites you to explore a piece of writing together, opening the floor to craft discussions and using writing exercises to create new work.
For Next Month
For my local writers, please respond to this email and let me know if you are interested in finding a date for a workshop evening in December! It’s a very busy time of year and I know people can struggle to find the time amidst other obligations. If I get enough interest, I will get a conference room booked for the 18th, if it is available.
Building Hope
Not to point out the obvious here, but things are tough right now for a lot of people and if you’re one of those people, I’d like to let you know that you are not alone. As we head into a darker time of year and the holiday seasons, I think it can be easy to feel alone in our struggles. I think that Thanksgiving and the winter holidays are a time of real cheer and merriment for many, but I think they also serve as ways to guilt us into acting as if we are joyful and hopeful.
I am both joyful and deeply troubled. I carry my hope and my fears in two hands, not as contradictions but as living truths.
I have been thinking a lot about a story I listened to with my daughter several weeks ago. A story about beavers.
Beavers have an interesting impact on the environment around them. While beavers have a long history of being considered a nuisance (or a fashionable hat accessory), new research shows that beavers actually help repair wetlands, boost biodiversity, and improve water quality.
By creating their dams, beavers make the places around them a lot healthier. The dams themselves work as a kind of water filtration, purifying the water, even from agricultural chemicals. Air is cooler and moister near the pools they create, encouraging plant growth and visits from other animals. Between the dam’s filtration and the increased biodiversity, the soil health around beaver dams begins to improve as well, enriched by and enriching the systems around them.
Beavers often build more than one dam in an area, creating a network of surface water and vegetation. These networks, called “beaver wetland complexes” provide long-term water storage solutions and work to repair and recharge groundwater supplies. Amidst these complexes, there’s more greenery and more animals coming to the space, effectively making beavers expert watershed engineers, providing solutions to issues of conservation human engineers have been struggling with for decades.
Dr. Emily Fairfax has spent years studying beavers and she shared a story about a particular beaver family she’d been following in the mountains of Northern California at Little Last Chance Creek. The beaver family she was following included a mom and a dad and “definitely three to four babies”.
Fairfax spent months observing the family, watching the many ways the beavers effected the area around them; building their dams, taking part in and changing the ecosystems around them.
In the summer of 2021, the forest in which Dr. Fairfax was studying the beaver family caught fire. It became a massive wildfire, causing evacuations for thousands of residents and burning hundreds of homes. It was October before humans were able to contain the flames.
Dr. Fairfax was not optimistic about the beaver’s chances for survival, but she made the long trip up the mountain anyways. What she recalled in the miles of travel, past burned houses and charred land, was the silence of the woods, a sense of eeriness and isolation.
But, as they neared the location of the beaver family’s dam… things changed. There was a breeze that blew threw green leaves. There were leaves. There was bird song. The wetlands the beavers had made hadn’t burned. Even the creek seemed to be clear of the ash and debris.
And when they arrived at the home of the beaver family, there they were, swimming in the refuge they had made.
This particular beaver dam, this one little beaver family, sat at the center of a 7.5 acre space of unaffected forest. A space, a small, tiny space, that still held all this beauty and life, that contained the great possibility for hope and renewal, because the beavers were beavers and they’d been there.
This story tells us a lot about what beavers can do and how we might continue to battle the effects of climate change, but I think it can also tell us a lot about what to do in the face of our own conflagrations.
Even in the face of the world burning, there was still something living. Even at the place beyond hope, there was possibility. The beavers didn’t know that when they chewed down those trees, they’d provide a space for so much to live.
We’re not beavers and we’re not building dams, but when we show up for ourselves and our communities, when we write, when we share, when we listen, we are taking part in something, some monumental human effort to stay human in an inhumane world. There is no perfect solution, no all encompassing way to ease the wrongs of the world, but if everything is burning, 7.5 acres sounds like a hell of a lot.
