This piece is part 3 of what’s organically become a series of journal entries around moving and threading in to place. You can read part 1 here and 2 here. This particular entry was written a couple of weeks ago, around Earth Day.
I’m at my desk in between client sessions reflecting on the last week and feeling very in between worlds. I’m flying on Sunday for my residential session at my graduate institute (my first time flying since 2019). Anticipating this is pulling my focus and my continued struggle to root in is still present. But! Last weekend I walked in the Procession of the Species, an annual parade that inspires appreciation and protection of the natural world through music, art, pageantry, and dance in order to engender a sense of community with the land we’re in. (I’ve been playing with that language lately- “the land we’re in” rather than “the land we’re on”. When we’re in deep relationship with place, we’re in it- not on it.) This event is the pride of the town I now live in. So I’m really feeling a sense of one foot in and one foot out considering the pull of school in California and my desire to land here in Washington.
Part of my graduate school requirement is to do two summers of Community Praxis or fieldwork. I’d planned on designing a research study around the training I co-teach, Embodied Ancestral Inquiry, but since arriving to this place and feeling my struggle to root, I wondered if maybe a land-based project might be better suited to this moment. It’s challenging for me to be present in anything I’m engaging in if I don’t have an embodied connection and relationship to the land I’m living with.
I still don’t entirely know what organization I’ll be working with or even if this will pan out at all considering I’m on an institutionally appointed timeline, but in searching for ecological and restoration projects in my area I found a group walking in the Procession of the Species and volunteered to walk with them as water. A little bit about this event: the Procession begins it’s preparations in February and builds puppets and floats, designs costumes and choreography, and snakes through the streets downtown every year the weekend after Earth Day. Grade school classes, clubs, and organizations all volunteer to walk, about 3,000 participants in full, and each group participating is part of a different section such as land, water, sky, etc. They dress up in costumes, papier-mâché, or animate puppetry in an embodiment of the elements, animals, or plants that inspire them. It’s an entirely community generated event with no corporate sponsorships and the majority of materials and art studio spaces are donated by community members and participants. This multigenerational event marks the beginning of spring and brings upwards of 30,000 spectators. My group was part of the estuary section through the Deschutes Estuary Restoration Project, or DERT.
DERT is a small but impactful organization working towards the removal of the 5th Street Dam which creates the man made Capitol Lake, which prevents the Deschutes River from meeting the Puget Sound. This area was, and I suppose technically still is even if it’s been altered, an estuary. Estuary is the term for an ecosystem where a river meets the sea. Here in Olympia, the Deschutes River meets the Puget Sound, the Puget Sound being part of the Salish Sea. The downtown area of Olympia was built right on top of the estuary, literally terraformed in the early 1900s so ships could dock at the harbor at both low and high tide, and the creation of Capitol Lake in 1951 decimated what was left of this particular ecosystem. This affects plant and animal life, prevents salmon from spawning, creates poor water quality, toxic algo blooms, and sediment build up, and “plugs up the psyche of the people that live here” according to someone on the DERT team. DERT has been active since 2011 and works closely with many other ecological restoration groups in the area, as well as the Squaxin Island Tribe who has been advocating for estuary restoration since they were forcibly removed from the area to make room for “industry”. DERT has a number of ways they are enacting change including through legislation, community engagement, and education. Walking in the Procession is another way they advocate for this change and get people curious about what their goals are.
On Procession day, I arrived in blue linen pants and a white cotton shirt -many of my clothes were still in boxes and this being as close to dressing as “water” as I could get- and was given a tunic dyed in various blues to add ribbons or glitter to. Part of my role was to hold the end of a banner made of deep blue and sea foam green frilled tule with silver fish glued to the side of it and mimic the movement of water along the side of our group. Others were dressed in salmon hats or as heron or mussels, the kindergarten class walked with us as jellyfish, and there were four people holding a horizontal barrier as the dam with a pair each carrying one side of the dam. Every city block, the pairs would part and the dam would "open” and all the water and the creatures would cheer and rush through the opening. Then the two parts of the dam would catch up to the front and close again. In this sequence, our section was an enactment of a desired future as well as an honoring of estuaries. Two college students in the Environmental Studies program were dressed to the nines in sequins of rich blues and glittered greens, one had painted a representation of light streaming through water on her tunic. They were playfully acting as water alongside those of us holding the water banner and had expressed interest in that role, so a couple of blocks in we switched and they twirled and giggled and flirted and really embodied playful water. Which let me feel more into what walking the downtown streets was like. The buildings are old in a comforting way. Some blocks are crumbling and some have been restored, some blocks have more trees than others, all blocks were filled with people of all ages who seemed thrilled to be there. The other Procession participants all seemed to know each other. Some complained about the sun, which was unusually bright for the region, others laughed about sweating and stamina, and there was a cohesive feeling of simply being happy to be there.
Behind us there was a 4th grade class who chose to represent the Axolotl. There was a big axolotl puppet on rods being animated by kids in the class, and each of them had a hat with a smiling axolotl on it. At some point, Procession viewers chanted “LET! THEM! FREE!” upon understanding we were advocating for the salmon in our effort to remove the dam and restore the area to an estuary. Hearing this, the kids started a call and response protest cry. “AXOL!”, shouted two red-faced blonde girls holding the STICKS. “LOTOL” cried the rest of the class in response. They held this refrain for over an hour and got progressively louder as time went on. I caught myself thinking “oh wow, they’re really ‘trying on’ protest activism”. And quickly realized no no, these kids are growing up in climate crisis with the ever-present threat of gun violence in their schools. The mascot they are championing is a critically endangered species. These kids know the severity of the crisis we’re in in a way I was sheltered from when I was their age. “AXOL!””LOTOL!” is a protest cry. From the voices of an oppressed group. Who feel, and are going to continue to feel, the consequences of inaction the most. Their entire conceptualization of what life is has been colored by climate crisis and species loss. I’m reminded of a recent Björk interview a client told me about. She describes “post-optimistic” vs post-apocalyptic and says, “the apocalypse is here, it’s happened” and the post-optimistic viewpoint is one that asks how we grow from here, now that we understand we’re already in it. She spoke of working with a younger generation and seeing the perspective they carry of “okay the damage is done, how do we live inside of it?”, and her effort to be humble and listen to them since the world is one they are inheriting. They are creative and solutions oriented rather than getting caught up in critique or discussion about why/how we’ve gotten here. Which isn’t unimportant, of course; but there’s a “tilt”, to use Bjork’s word, that the younger generations are ushering forth. I got to get a peak into that from these kids crying out the name of their beloved mascot.
I was warned about the “Seattle Freeze”, a pithy descriptor for how people in Washington can be cold and distant, but that wasn’t at all my experience. Someone gave me a literal pat on the back when I said I moved here two weeks ago with a hearty, “now that’s how you make community!” and people were genuinely interested in knowing more about what brought me to the Procession and what I do in life, which opened up some beautiful conversations around the nature of healing and the land. When I shared about my academic program with a woman in her 60s, she expressed a longing disbelief that a program like mine existed. “When we aren’t in touch with what’s natural, we get sick. In a lot of ways.”
Just like Decartes said the mind and body are split, a falsehood that still defines much of our modern Western conception of reality, he said there is a nature/culture split. This is another falsehood. I believe that culture comes from nature. It springs forth from nature and they are intrinsically intertwined, we just may or may not allow ourselves to recognize that. I’ll write more extensively about that eventually, but here we were at a cultural event celebrating the natural world around us. And having conversations about how disconnection makes us sick. The interconnection was explicitly there. The elder woman pointed out the crowd who were cheering when the dam “opened”, in exuberant support of what DERT is working on. “There’s been so much change. People were really against this idea at first and look at them now!” Someone called to her, she was one of the organizers of our group, and before leaving to take care of what was calling her she turned back to me with a wink and said, “I’m glad you’re here”. There is a current to support here- this is part of threading into place. And I’m feeling my way into this entry point.
That casual wink of mutual admiration was exactly what I needed in that moment. In this moment. Having the handful of people I met let me know their interest, rather than a cool unaffected gaze or hostile glares like I’ve grown used to in the last two places I’ve lived is helping me feel a sense of welcome and perhaps eventual belonging to this place.
If you’re enjoying this Journal series, you may also enjoy Working in the Margins of Our Movements: Subversive Spiritualities in the Decolonial Turn which focuses on how our relationships with land, place, the elemental, and ritual can support us in co-creating our way through the polycrisis.