I was born in the early 80s, raised on the rising curve of the ever-increasing labyrinth of digital distraction.

I didn’t know plants.  My family didn’t talk about plants.  If anything, they were something to fear.  Plants are poisonous or make us itch.  They are full of serpents and ticks.   Grass is something to mow, weeds are something to pull, and food came from the grocery store – though somewhere under it all, my body remembered my grandmother’s garden, corn and tomatoes and peppers and peonies, 1/20th of an acre at most in her tiny backyard tended with love, centered around a handmade shrine to the goddess remembered as Mary.   

In childhood I played in the woods for hours.  I perched in rhododendrons, fumbled through making toys out of fallen twigs, crawled in a snowsuit on my belly through tunnels of bowing branches.  When I wasn’t playing in the woods, it was the screen.  Pixelated woods in video games, stories about saving the world; and a whole lot of televised garbage that I now, as a father, would never put in front of a child (…except for Mister Rogers).  

My dad was a hunter before I met him and stopped after.  He built homes tucked into forested neighborhoods.  There was always pride in his work.  Every home built with intention is a poem.  My dad wasn’t a poet through his words, but the home I moved into at age 6 built by his hands was an expression of the prayer for shelter emerging from the conversation of the living trees and the trees felled for timber.  

When not sawing and hammering, he sat sketching at his drafting table in silent concentration.  He was an architect who never won an architect’s acclaim or salary.  He worked in his own way.  We barely knew what he was doing or what it took to do it.  

I build and I design now.  I didn’t appreciate it when he was doing it.  I build differently than him in many ways.  Natural materials, low-tech, off-grid.  It’s still wood and careful design.  2x4s and nails and the time to listen to the shelter that wants to become in conversation with the trees that already are.

I couldn’t recognize more than one or two trees until I was 29.  I didn’t make a plant medicine until I was 23, and no more past that first one until I was 30.  

Coming home starts small.  Industrial civilization gave almost every one of us a kind of amnesia.  Remembering is a daily act.   When I found my first permaculture book at 29, I didn’t learn a thousand trees.  What I learned is how deeply I wanted to remember and how to begin.

I’m 43 now.  For 14 years, I’ve been walking away one step at a time, frequently tripping, sometimes dancing.  What I’m walking away from are the factories, the sweatshops, the maquiladoras.  The data centers, the fracking poisons in the water, the pace of life where no one has time for each other.  

What that looks like is messy from one perspective and terrifyingly beautiful from another.  It looks like depending on each other a whole lot more than I was ever taught to do.  There’s been a good amount of crying and a good amount of laughing, often in the same day.  The “seasoned” wood you bought for your first wood stove is damp and you find this out in the middle of Winter in an uninsulated yurt.  The flock of ducks you learned about raising from a secondhand book is keeping you awake for weeks as they gossip loudly through the night.  

Remembering looks very different for everyone.  Most of us have to work.  Few of us can be full-time farmers or homesteaders, and those who can take their bruises and itches on the daily.

I don’t think we’re remembering for ourselves, though the difference in health I feel from when I let screens be my comfort is vast.  The blessings of letting the night be the night, letting the seasons be the seasons, and knowing the taste and help of the weeds growing outside your door are my joy.

Though I’m living off-grid and know the trees I live by, I’m no better or worse than someone starting their first small container garden outside their apartment.  We’re doing this together.  Going from knowing nothing to knowing something, or knowing something to knowing a little more of what nature teaches is the most important step.  Each for our own reasons, there are millions of us heading that way.  Something new is being made from something remembered.  

The headlines can tell the story of what happens when we forget the earth.  The headlines rarely tell what happens when we remember.  It’s too beautiful to put into words.  It comes through the senses.  We change.  By changing, we change the people and places we touch.  The original song starts to sing through us.  

It’s my sense that one day all of this digital noise will be forgotten.  It will be an interesting, maybe mythic, likely painful story we tell around fires.  I get to see it in small ways though I won’t live to see it in the big ones.  Right now, that’s enough.  

Every day I learn a new plant or a gift of a plant I had begun to know.  Almost every day, I meet someone who is learning too.  In them, whether they’re in a subdivision and working a computer job, or throwing it all away to go live an uninsulated yurt with a flock of rude ducks, I hear a strain of the original song.  

Together, whether or not we think of this way, I think we’re walking away from something and walking towards something.  We’re walking away from what doesn’t work.  From what dries the aquifers and erodes our spirits.  And we’re walking towards something that none of us can remember completely, but that all of us carry the seeds of.  

We all, all of us have ancestors who were intimate with the earth.  We never would have made it here otherwise.   It’s hard to come back, but not that hard.  It’s harder to stay.  I see it in the frightening autoimmune disorders and the spiritual crisis we label as mental health.  And I see the beauty that shines through everyone who lets in even a taste of the longing for something real.  

Though a lot of people talk about it there, none of this lives on social media.  None of it lives in our arguments or our divisions or our “management” of the land.  It lives in our memory.  It lives in the soil.

Soil can come back to life faster than most people understand.  The force of life has more intelligence than any of us can know.  When you learn to see like a forest, you see that you are surrounded by green and growing help.  You hear a music that stirs an almost unbearable urge to dance right out of the air conditioned and artifically lit boxes of our world into what is true.

Industrial civilization calls us up: to build higher, faster, more.  What is true calls you down.  

Here is a song from a dear friend about this.

Thank you for your remembering.  Thank you for never letting any of us have to be alone with this.  When our great grandchildren share the welcoming fires that burn gently next to our flowering gardens, I’ll see you there, watching from the otherworld as a breeze or the call of an owl, ready to join the next ones in their dance.

Everything you remember matters.  I promise.