This feeling of being in the midst of change is still present: in myself, in Songaia, and in the world. I’m going to bring in some chemistry again and use an energy diagram to illustrate how I visualize the energy required to achieve a change. For every chemical reaction, energy is needed to move from the initial reactant compounds to the final products. Even if the products are lower in energy—at a more stable, comfortable state—reaching that state requires energy to do things like break chemical bonds.

As we move through transition, energy is also required of us. Energy to leave the things that we are used to, to accept newness, to live with uncertainty, to question habits and patterns and to envision and build and embody a new state of being. There may not be a lot of hope right now that the new ways of living that are to come are going to be easier than what we’ve known, but maybe we underestimate how challenging and demanding life has become. It’s during this transition phase that we have the opportunity to discover how much better things can be.

I envision Songaia kind of at the peak of the transition state, between the individualism of the mainstream way of living and the full potential of established community living. This full potential may not be possible in our current economy, maybe not even until we change the broader culture of judgment and blame and competition that is so at odds with our striving towards togetherness. But the fact that this community has thrived so well in the midst of “currently existing capitalism” is to me a great source of hope for what is possible.

Some wisdom I picked up from the Rite of Passage Journeys receiving ceremony a couple weeks ago has stuck with me. For the youths who were returning home, the transition to adulthood was happening whether they and their families recognized and embraced it or not. So a main purpose of the program is to bring intention to the transition, without which families often end up on autopilot, subconsciously resisting the changes that they consciously know have to happen.

Sometimes I am dismayed at how our inclination to resist change and conserve energy can work against us. I am beginning to appreciate how important mindfulness and intention can be, as if they are a catalyst in a chemical reaction, decreasing the height of the energy barrier during our transitions.

But the difficulty of accepting change can still sneak up on us. To transition from one trajectory to another, to allow ourselves to be influenced in our thinking and then to examine and adjust and our actions can be a humbling experience. The energy needed to cross over the transition state and follow through with the change can be surprisingly high…

Blackberry season is in full swing, and for the whole two months I’ve been here, Songaia has been blessed with berries. I’ve spent some quality time harvesting raspberries, golden raspberries, native blackberries, salmonberries, currants, white currants, jostaberries, and blueberries. Most of the time I’m pretty good at going for the ripest berries, but sometimes I’ll find a berry that I think is ripe and I’ll try to pick it, only to find that it doesn’t want to come off the bush yet. Depending on how hard I’ve worked to reach this berry and how sure I am that it’s the right color and squishiness, my response may vary. Sometimes I find it surprisingly difficult to accept the information that the berry is giving me: “I’m not ready yet!” Sometimes I want to believe that I know better than the berry, and engage in a tug-of-war. On the occasions that I win, I am usually disappointed by a sour, unripe berry.

I’ve had this experience many times. And the practice of transitioning from a sense of certainty about picking a particular berry to accepting that I was wrong and leaving it for another day can still be surprisingly hard, even when I approach most berries with more of a question of ripeness and a willingness to listen to the berry.

Maybe it’s a silly example, though, especially when so many of the changes we are facing come with real grief. Our planet is getting hotter and smokier and more uncertain, and even though this doesn’t mean there won’t be unexpected beauty and healing yet to come, we are losing the climate that we’ve known.

For a while, actually, I was craving change. But I may have slightly underestimated the challenges associated with the changes I’ve brought into my life. There is very little that is familiar to me now, here, in this new place; and even if what is familiar didn’t serve me well, I’m feeling the need for a deeper level of processing. Not only have my living situation, daytime activities, hobbies, and future career plans all shifted radically in the last several months, but as of only four years ago I changed my gender as well. For those of you with whom I haven’t shared this already, I am a transgender male, and I spent my first 25 years living as female. Between the hormone therapy, overcoming depression, and beginning treatment for ADHD, my life is pretty unrecognizable from the way it’s been for most of the last 15 years.

These are probably things that I should be sharing with a therapist and not in a blog post. But suffice it to say, I’ve experienced a thing or two about living in transition. It’s exciting, scary, unexpectedly exhausting, and unexpectedly wonderful. Personally, I am certain that the new life I’m stepping in to will be much more energetically favorable than my old way of living—and much better aligned with my purpose and gifts. And hopefully, with a little recognition of both the hard work we’re faced with and our capacity for resilience, we can mourn and dream and create and move into the next phase of life with the assurance that even though a lot of it may be new, we just might be okay.

Brian recites "Be Cool, Little Seed" at the July Strawberry Social.

Be Cool, Little Seed
by "Mulch Carruthers" 
​
As an intern, half of my days are spent in the Songaia garden, which really is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. It is a hectic, chaotic garden, a riot of flowers and vegetables, both eaten, growing into one another’s territories and getting all quantum entangled. Most things in it I can’t identify and never will. I think this might be a dahlia, but I’m not for sure. This might be a carrot, but who’s to say? Not me, certainly. There are vivid, royal purples and vaguely pervy pinks where you wouldn’t think they’d be. A sudden shock of needless blue speckled in yellow. The omnipresent, weightless mass of green. The garden is a mixture of practicality and whimsy, not big enough or efficient enough for self-sustaining agriculture, but sprawling enough to be gorgeous and strange, to sit there and be weird, to be obsessed over and loved.

Some residents argue that they should only plant utilitarian, high yield foods, the better to survive when whatever inevitable Ragnarok is coming finally gets here, but to most of the Songaians that’s not the point. The philosophy behind the garden is, ‘You have to feed the soul as well as the body.’

I spend my mornings in the garden, weeding, mulching, picking fruit, berries, hauling horseshit, and in the afternoons I’m sent to make things in the barn or tearing down old structures or trying to process the food we picked in the garden that morning. I make dried figs and blackberry pie and blueberry fruit leather and zucchini chips. I’m going full on Little House on the Prairie here, I’m considering wearing a sunbonnet and dying of typhoid.


On my first day working in the garden, I meet Helum*, an older woman who pretty much lives for the garden, it’s human avatar, and I come to really respect her depth and breadth of knowledge.


She tries to show me how to weed the kale beds, a really important job as the people here go nuts about kale, parsing it like Chateau Lafitte, enumerating it’s qualities. The Curly Kale has overtones of pepper, and do I detect faint hints of cardamom? The Siberian Kale has a delicate, rosy-fingered sweetness to it, don’t you think? I can see pairing this with with a crisp apple salad, and a cider dressing would really make it pop. To me it’s all just kale, just barely this side of food, but I enjoy hearing them dissect the finer points of kale fetishism, although it makes as much sense to me as having a favorite brand of iceberg lettuce.


Helum tries to show me how to weed the kale, but it gets real complicated real fast. We kneel in the dirt and she identifies every single green thing. “So we want to weed around these little darlings, but, keep in mind, really nothing is truly a weed, they just lifeforms growing where we don’t necessarily want them to grow. These little ones are called Lambs Ears’, these fuzzy things, and how can you dislike something called a Lamb’s Ear? Let’s just leave her alone. And this fellow right here is Horsetail, which, yes, is technically a weed, but he has a lot of sentimental value for me, so let's just skip him for now. And this is Bindweed which causes terrible problems and is a devil to get rid of, but it’s a living thing and has just as much right to its life as us, so let’s not cut it back too much. It dreams, you know. It has hopes and feelings. This is buttercup, a weed, true, but such a lovely blossom! Would anyone really want to be responsible for ending its life journey?”

“Um,” I stammer. “So what should I actually do?”


Helum stares up at the sky, directly at, as far as I can tell, the sun.

After giving it a think, she says, “I don’t know.”


In another life this dithering would have driven me up the wall, so cloying, but when Helum does it I find it infinitesimally charming.


I come to really enjoy the gardening process, although I have no patience for it. I lack the Zen that comes with waiting gracefully. I fidget, I spaz out easily, I lose interest in anything that takes more than a few days to complete, I wander off, and gardening takes forever. We grow tomatoes, tend them, weed them, protect them from rats, squeeze them every couple of days just for the tactile joy of it, say encouraging things to them, and then, on their own langorous schedule, watch them turn lipstick shade colors, pick them, wash them, chop them, a quick puree, boil them down, can them in steaming jars, all this toil and wait to make something that’s worth $2.49 in the supermarket, practically free in the global economies of scale.


It’s so crazily labor intensive and slow making food in this medieval way, you spend hours working and get a can and a half of peas, or three days to get a couple of jars worth of dehydrated cherries, an eternity for a bland bean salad. By the end you want to howl, ‘Save me, Monsanto! Inject me full of GMOs and gluten and corn syrup!”


I learn that it’s no use planting a crop unless you can tend to it, no use tending to it unless you can harvest it on time, no use harvesting it unless you can preserve it or gobble it all down immediately, and there’s little chance of you eating it unless it tastes good. It doesn’t have to taste superlative, but it at least has to be medium good, because if it doesn’t, you’ll pretty soon fall to the temptation of giving up this life of toil, getting out of the sun, scraping the dirt out from under your fingernails, acquiring a straight job, investing in oil and arms manufacturers and ordering the cheese fries.


But that’s where I and the Songaians differ. Tastes are just a bit altered here, and things are a big hit if they taste a little like soil and dirt. They eat salads without dressing. They eat nut-free collard pesto with nutri-yeast. They eat cold kale soup, and even if I had to conjure something unappetizing up, as a joke, I could not have fathomed this. At first I wondered if I was just being a sensitive little nelly on this point, wondering if these foods are actually bad or just foreign to my palette. I still haven't made up my mind. Sometimes it seems like there's an element trying to prove something with this food. It’s like saying, ‘Look how much old-timey effort and resources we can put into making something that only a Wiccan pixie would dare to eat.” I wonder, can any revolution succeed by eating Cream of Nettle soup? And if it can, would I want to be want to be on the winning side?

But still, the process of gardening is intriguing.

“Gardening is all about sex,” Helum tells me. She’s showing me how to cross-pollinate the zucchini. It involves taking the yellow squashblossom flowers, the male and female, and mooshing them together, sexing them up. You squish the stamen or pistil or whatever it is of the happy yellow penile head into the vaginas of the female flowers. It’s erotic from an inhuman, removed, God’s eye point of view.

She says, “And then we’re going to take a piece of masking tape and tape the female flowers shut in a little chastity belt.”

Afterwards there’s happy, spermy Crayola-yellow pollen on our fingers and we dispose of the used, floral penises, spent and limp.


“Squash are very promiscuous,” Helum explains. “If we didn’t tape them shut they might breed with other strains of squash that we don’t want in this bed, it just ensures that these little darlings keep their maidenly virtue. What hussies, what trollops, these squash are, if given their way. They are proud to announce their place in the oneness of things. ‘Look at my genitals,’ they scream with every bright, garish color, every labial fold.”


I’m 16% aroused.


A week later, a scandal erupts at Songaia as someone has been entering the garden and night and taking all the squashblossoms, especially the male ones for some reason. This means that the females aren’t getting fertilized, leading to little, stunted, erectile dysfunction squash. It’s such a weird crime, and the Songaians are genuinely disturbed by it.


“We can’t let this happen, people! Our squash are suffering!”


Squashblossoms are edible, so maybe somebody is taking them to garnish their salads. Lists of suspects are drawn up, armchair psychology is used to try to identify the kind of nefarious character who would take all the zucchini wangs in the dead of night, this symbolic castration of the community. They have me make a dozen signs to be planted around the squash bed, saying, “PLEASE DO NOT PICK THE SQUASHBLOSSOMS!!!” in an increasingly desperate and pleading font. They go full tilt Agatha Christie. “So, I saw you going into the West Gate of the garden last night, around 7:38. You know, where the squash beds are. Anything you’d care to share? Hmmmm?”


Even I come under suspicion, which shows how little they know of me. I’m the last person here who’s going to willingly stuff flowers into my mouth and gobble them, except if I thought it was funny, which of course I do. I even begin to suspect myself. Maybe I’m doing it somnambulistically.
We’re through the looking glass, here.


Helum is showing me how to plant a new crop of kale, which is much more my speed than weeding the kale. She demonstrates how to poke a little hole in the soft, wet ground with my finger and drop in a couple of microscopic black dot seeds.She says, “They only need to be covered with a thin layer of soil, just like a blanket for these little babies. Such tiny seeds! So much potential! And when you plant them, you tell them, ‘Hello, little seed. It’s time to wake up. We promise to make this as welcoming a home as we can for you and we thank you for coming generation after generation and sharing your lifecycle with us. You are welcome and accepted here, you are loved and wanted. Please bless us with your presence. And...breathe.”


And then she folds her hands and closes her eyes for a moment.


“You want me to say that every time I plant one of these?” I look into my cupped hand, there must be five hundred seeds occupying less than half a cubic inch of space, and I am self-centered and small and weak and stupid, and I don’t know if I’m capable of actually saying those words in that order.


“Well, that or something like it,” she says. “Whatever comes to mind. Just give them a blessing, welcome them to our garden.”


“Okay, then.”


And Helum goes away and does whatever, leaving me on my knees in the deep, brown earth. And I try, I swear to God I try, to say the words each time I plant a kale seed because I’m trying to be a good person and not the monster that I secretly suspect I am. I try, but it’s hard, because I am not a sincere person, I just lack that capacity, I was born without that particular eyetooth. But I repeat Helum’s mantra, as well as I can remember it, which is not very well. I close my eyes when I say it, and have to consciously force my eyes not to perform a scoffing, teenagery roll beneath the eyelids, because maybe if I pretend to be a good person for long enough I’ll wake up one day and transubstantiate into an actual good person.


By the fifth seed, however, I’ve edited the prayer down to, “Little seed, little seed, just be cool.”


And this I am capable of saying with every one of those six hundred seeds, which will eventually grow a crop that I am incapable of aesthetically appreciating, because it’s kale, but I say it anyway, eyes closed like a ding-a-ling. And I’ll end up saying every day at my time in Songaia, maybe thirty times a day, silently, inwardly, when something bothers me, when I just don’t fundamentally understand the good gentlefolk who live here, whenever Cream of Nettle soup touches my tongue, when my personal furies arrive, which is all the time. I say, “Little seed, little seed, just be cool.”


I am the little seed in this clumsy metaphor, just to spell it out. It lacks the poetry of Helum’s blessing, but it still kind of works.


Let’s all say it together, shall we?


Little seed, little seed, just be cool.


And...breathe.


*Names in this story have been changed. For purely comedic effect. 

We have been creating a big, beautiful patio between the common house and the garden. It was first conceived by Fred Lanphear a long time ago and we have been working on it since 2014 when we put up a quirky bamboo shade shelter and covered it with a lovely handcrafted, artistic tent. 

We also built a little test cob oven...which was cute and fun...but was too small to cook even one pizza and all of the heat fell out of the bottom.  

In 2015 we got serious.  Well, Brian got serious and decided to really figure out how to build a proper cob oven (he is actually a rocket scientist).  So we helped him build it that summer.  

We loved the new oven!  Such great pizzas and pizza parties.  But the uneven ground was a real pain. 

In 2016 we had lots of pizza parties and experimented with the oven.  But the uneven ground was still a pain. 

So in 2017 we started leveling the ground and built the elevated patio space. That was a lot of work!  We even engaged the services of a proper front end loader.  We still found time to have plenty of pizza parties....and in the end we have a beautiful, flat, garden overlook patio.  

In 2018 we got lucky.  We had this idea that we would install a cement counter similar to the one at the Beacon Hill Food Forest...but were a little short on the skills to accomplish that.  But low and behold Larry Walton (an intern for that year) joined us with exactly those skills!!!  Amazing. 

It is beautiful...but it still needs the mosaic to be added (that is what the aluminum sections are for)...maybe this summer?

This spring we are adding steps from the common house level down to the plaza.  The plan includes a small stage two steps above the main level of the plaza.  We are inviting those of you who have a "heart connection" with Songaia to join us in etching our names in the bricks used to pave the stage.  
As we have sent out inquires to former interns to ask if they want their name on the stage we have gotten great updates from them.....check out our next blogs to hear where they are and what they are doing.  

Written March, 2019

I moved my bed closer to the window last night. It seems that I rearrange my room with the seasons. It hasn’t been intentional, but I’ve noticed that it’s been a pattern. And now I wake up to the early sunlight of these lengthening days, and to the scratching of the brown creeper that’s come, year after year, to build their nest in the cedar siding outside my bedroom window. I should say, the brown creepers that have come to build their nest, as they nest in pairs. Has it been the same creepers every year right outside my window? What of their offspring? Wikipedia told me this morning that brown creepers usually build hammock-like nests under loose flaps of bark on Douglas fir (čəbidac, Pseudotsuga menziesii) snags. Apparently, in human dominated landscapes, cedar siding makes a cozy nesting spot. In April, just as the native vine maple (t̕əqt̕qac, Acer circinatum) below my window starts to think about leafing out, the female creeper will lay 3-5 eggs that both the male and female will care for. ​

​Living as an intern is like jumping into a swimming. There's lots of spontaneous interactions in a short period that lead to down many pathways. It's impossible to know beforehand which road will unfold as a dominant theme or energy for my experience. However, it is this potential and versatility of being community that I believe is what allows so many different personalities to thrive and voice find their language of experience.  

How do I share an authentic heart-space with people over an extended people without jumping on a repetitive intellectual hamster wheel of what's most familiar to me?  


Before coming to Songaia I had never really been tested in a thorough daily routine to share and express this outer reality with other folks in community. Finding and creating Love in Public became the primary focus for me because as an intern you don't really have a lot of private space to retreat back into. 

There was a song Anita shared with me that we sang loudly with the refrain "We may not have it all together, but together we can have it all". This conviction about happiness and radical simplicity was also important to me during my time at Songaia. That when there is a quorum of love and friendship. It is easier to show up to my day knowing that what we have together is enough.

I learned a lot about harvesting and cooking with new herbs like chickweed, nasturtium leaves and doug fir tips. It is like be a painter and discovering it's possible to eat with several new shades of color that had not previously been available. 

At the Bastyr Herbs and food festival I learned about foraging for many new foods like young oregon grape, stinky bob, and indian plum. It is really empowering to walk through a forest and start to gain confidence noticing how to eat and identify more plants. This speaks to the movement that happening of rewilding and of sharing identity with the earth that was strengthened during my time at Songaia. It has been healing to shift my story and energy to feel more strongly that I belong to the earth and that we belong to each other.    

I thought Susie Fox did an awesome job of sharing new tips and tricks in the kitchen. I learned about making fire cider and other shrubs to add apothecary medicine and flavor to salad dressings and sauces. The potential to add more plant medicine into our foods here is very exciting to me.

Elizabeth, Helen, and Anita also taught me a lot about how to nurture living things in the garden. Many of them are little details that filled in my knowledge about how to care for living things. 

For me Music and the Earth are the two most potent love languages that bond strangers and community members together. The space they occupy has a timeless quality that does not rely on intellectual belief system. The mirror and vessel they use helps me see myself and others with a kinder and more universal lens.  

 
Many of my favorite memories at Songaia involve the interaction of these two elements. Spending time in the garden. Finding connection, silence, and grounding with life giving energies. Then coming together with music to find a playful chorus that expresses delight in the connection of being together.   

I remember when Jacob showed me how to play dandelion as a trumpet during the festival of the earth as one of the spontaneous moments that shifted my perspective 180 degrees. It was right around sunset, and we went from a mindful contemplative garden walk talking about plant medicine and healing old traumas. Then Jacob stopped and picked up a dandelion and made a high pitched buzz. Moments later I gave it a try and we turned into a squawking flock of ducks running around and tooting to our own rhythms. Olive, Anita, Brian, and Misty Dawn joined us at different points that week to partake in the experience. And just like that the heaviness from our conversation lifted and we were in a very different kind of feeling in our hearts.

Songaia helped me dream of the future. Of the new stories and shared experiences being held by children and babies. My parents are aging and there is no story of regrowth from this new movement of people who are influenced by the great turning. Psychologically it is very difficult to keep telling a story that does not involve these types of new beginnings. How we dream and the source of our creativity our deeply influenced by our subconscous perceptions of how the village and our peers are changing into something new from what's existed in the past.   

I was also exposed to so many new ideas that are still fermenting in my experience...

Ian's deep awareness of bacteria as medicine for plants and people. Misty Dawn's perspective on personalizing a theatrical reality to help catalyst personal transformation. Elizabeth's generosity in teaching me about the ukulele. There are countless more examples that I keep going on and on. Little seeds and feelings that have left me curious about the potential for me to reclaim and remember some missing or forgotten part of my personality. Oh yeah! I can be feisty and tender and contemplative and musical all in one day. It was really positive to feel that there is a surprising amount of wiggle room for my ego's personality could adapt to a new setting, so long as there is a shared story of care and concern being nurtured.