This episode is about wild beach grass. It's about being invaded and invader, holding the banks together and growing faster when the sandstorm hits.
This episode was written and produced by Risa Dickens, featuring the song Marram by Matt Carmichael
Witch, have you sown your wild oats? Have you cultivated what is wild within you, what grows happily, what of you is fueled by the wind, the sun, and the lashing rain?
Did you ever make a map of your juicy dreams, not of accolades or income statements, but a scrying of places you wanted to burrow your life into, places you wanted to bring your skin, senses you wanted to bathe in? I did, I wanted to jump and feel the wind hard against my body, float like a dandelion clock, feel the lift of thermals holding me, wanted to breathe underwater and feel the tide, wanted to walk in the red desert and sit in a bowl of stone and carry a pack through mountains to the edge of my physical limitations, I wanted to feel a calm inside of liking myself, trusting my instincts, standing on my own, I wanted to know real love and safety in my belly and bones, I wanted to run in the sand holding my little girl’s hand.
Certain questions pushed up hard against my forehead when I had to wrap my mind around the fact that I had cancer, had in fact been dying for a number of years, invasive cancer floating though my lymphatic system like so many dandelion seeds, only caught it by the skin of its teeth, and one is: have I lived?
What does the fulfillment of life lived in this body feel like?
What does fulfillment of life lived fully, fat and gloriously, juice running down your chin, wild in this one body look and feel like for you, witch?
Have you sown your wild oats?
I have this image in my mind of you running out into a meadow rich with colours and textures we can hardly imagine today, hallucinatory in its diversity, wild grasses humming with seeds and flowers and tapestries of roots below ground, as you move among the wild grasses layers start to slip off, stiff formality, pleasant propriety, dusty and dysfunctional family dynamics, sweaty tight bras choking your ribs cage, that tie around your neck stifling your weepy gulp and your wildest resistance, tight clothes, tighter assumptions about what roles are open to you based on your gender, class, culture, habits that cling like subtle silken ropes, but it’s not silk is it? It’s fucking starbucks, mcdonalds, walmart, and amazon prime, plastic takeout containers, water bottles, union busters hog tying your wild horses with petroleum derivatives, draped around you in a shroud dampening your magic like all 5 ocean garbage patches choke millions of kilometers of living sea, I see all that falling off your shoulders, here, flying among the wild grasses, running your hands against the soft stalks, you and I and all of us here in the dark magic place where we meet between our ears, we are now and forever breathing with the breathing earth and also deeply free.
We can meet here, we can call it up from the memory and imagination of the earth and our oldest cells and the strings of our dna which are wild grass kin.
You are kin with wild grasses whose travels have been tied up with the human story for thousands of years. We are bit parts in a wild grass story. Stitching their rhizomes across continents and eons, holding the very fabric of earthtime together.
Before the Silk Road existed as a trade route for silk, for tens of thousands of years people walked between Russia and China and their earliest world-changing exchange was their wild grains. Each culture doubled the others growing season with a grain from their lands, and that allowed them to stay in place, and so agriculture began. A traveling seed was their tether’s end.
Wild prairie grasses are one of the world’s most endangered ecosystems, if you can’t see the forest for trees, how much less likely are you to see grasses as places, grasses as homes, as stories, as songs in and of their own right not just places with no there there, ripe for development, or just waiting to be sown with more productive, more highly optimized kinds of grain.
You are not land that should be more fully optimized. You are wild grass kin. You have stories of own.
Once I woke up in a small trailer park in the wild marram grasses of Sandbanks National Park. I was staying with my grandparents, my dad’s parents, both long gone now. He was British and she was Danish and they had fought nazis and had no desire to be colonizers and yet here they were, in so-called Canada, camping on the shores of a place in constant evolution, the waves and the wind in spring, winter, and fall draw sand into wild shapes pulling from beach and dunes to the sandbar in the vast lake and back. A place turned dreamscape in summer where many peoples, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, many ancient ancestors met and shared stories and seeds and skills and songs and their young people fell in love, and fossil records show invertebrates and mollusks met and spun their own paths here going back 450 million years. And now we were here, in a tin can trailer, rattling in the wind.
My Nanny and Dandan had left the old world after the war hoping for a fresh start, grandad got his first job in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan, the family had no electricity. They moved constantly. They were looking for their tether’s end.
Britta Quote
“so many moves, so much going on, because, you know, yet moved to the island and, and stayed with these friends, and then moved into.
Duncan and we're there for the winter and the next summer moved to Cliffside, then bought this house at Muncie Road. We were there for maybe three years. And then Shawnee, like we just moved and moved and moved and moved and moved. When I tell people, they always think Dad must have been in the Army because we moved so often.
But no, that was just, that was Mom. Mom was bipolar, just keep going, keep going, keep going. Um, just never. Never stopped. Appelby was kind of her, she called it her tether's end. It didn't end up being tether's end, that's what she called it.
She would get quite depressed. And when she wasn't depressed and she was, when she was in her medic phase, she, she was just. Go, go, go crazy getting all kinds of stuff done, making stuff, baking, cooking, just then she'd collapse and be off to the hospital. They didn't have that diagnosis in those days, they told my dad, there was nothing wrong with her, she just needed to get her together and she'd be fine. Just not helpful at all. So she was not a, she was a very unhappy lady. She was raised during the war years, her teenage years during the war.
Germany occupied, um, Denmark. She's working with the resistance. And, a mother who was definitely not mentally stable. Um. I took it all out on Nanny. She was the least favoured of the lot. And, yeah, so she had a great childhood. To the point, I think that before the war, her father would, he was a travelling salesman for the steel company.
Um, he would take Nanny with him when he travelled to get her out of the house because her mother was so cruel.
She had a rough life, but it doesn't make that any easier or any less traumatic for the people who had to live with her.”
I didn’t see those cycles, those waves. I had such small pieces of her. She wrote me letters all the time asking to come visit, but I was a kid she sent those letters to and we were always moving too.
At Sandbanks she showed me paintings she had kept that my dad had done as a child. We sat outside the trailer at dusk, she smoked and told me: risa, never let anything get control of you.
In the Sandbanks brochure, the naturalists wrote:
Marram grass grows fast, walking in great mats of rhizomes, living under up to 3 feet of sand. The grasses curl their leaves in times of drought to capture water, and turn themselves away from the wind when struggling to breathe.
At Sandbanks, Eastern Lake marram grass crochets underground to hold the sand in place. They have a marram grass nursery to cultivate their indigenous species of the beech grass, and park rangers and volunteers plant it on the wild white dune edges to prevent ecosystem fragmentation at the places where humans have stumbled through.
On the West Coast, European marram grass is an invader. The British brought their beach grass everywhere they colonized, they imagined themselves a gift to landscapes, they imagined they were helping by holding shifting sands in place, perhaps they couldn’t see the difference between the grasses that were there and the grasses they brought. But the bugs knew, the beatles and the moths and bees, and every companion plant, at scale we know the difference between our homes, our ways, the song of the wind in our grasses.
European beachgrass is considered invasive on every major dune system on the west coast of north america. It has “superior sand binding capabilities” and depresses the diversity of local species, disrupting life in ripples far beyond the dunes. Crisis can make us rush and plant seeds of future heartbreak. “in the case of coastal dunes, ecosystem processes are frequently degraded by the invasion of exotic species, which overstabilize dunes and limit sediment movement, thereby impeding ecosystem function.”
It’s hard to accept but for our ecosystems to function, they need to be able to move, even flow away from where we planned our beach vacations and interpretation stations.
We can’t fix the sand in place, we can’t stop the spread of grass seed on the waves.
We are here in the messy effluvial present. We have to hold together, but not over stabilize.
I remember Granddad on the sand, waves on the great lake hushing and retreating almost like the ocean, hands in his pockets, sideways smile. Talking through stiff fascia like a man trying to reach his granddaughter while turning to stone. The Parkinson’s was well advanced by then, but he said it was different inside. He’d spent decades teaching high school Maths and English. He was re-enacting The Tempest all the time.
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Underneath what we could see, his system overstabilizing, poetry moved like quicksilver.
We have to hold on, but not too hard. Change is coming up and through our cells all the time, change is the mark of time. Our dna move through hooks and loops of bodies across great mats of time and from this view all of existence isn’t just relative, it’s relatives.
Carlin from Sandbanks Park on Marram Grass:
“ So, if you look back into the late 1800s, early 1900s in this area, the dunes on the West Lake Bar were impacted by human activity. Specifically, the. House being sent to graze on the dunes and what we, they noticed by from 1860 to 1920, by 1920, the sands were shifting at a rate of about 50 feet a year and it was going on farmer's field, it was doing that sort of thing and by 1921, there was a forestry station set up at within what is now the provincial park.
So back then, how they stopped the shifting sands was through a program of tree planting of a few species fencing as well as mulching. And that what ultimately stopped the shifting sands and allowed the park to kind of reestablish or in that area. Yeah. Now. We always say like when you know better, you do better.
So now how we stop shifting sands, we understand that it's a big deal to help a tree grow in a shifting sand environment that ignores the laws of succession and planting. So at least for the past 30 years, since Yvette Brie was the chief park naturalist, the, When she identified that there were shifting sands in areas of blowout and then increased use by visitation that was fragmenting the habitat, we use marim grass because marim grass, we understand to believe, the first plant to kind of wash up on the shore of just a barren sandbar and start start colonizing the bar.
So it's like marim grass is the first one, and marim grass is so cool. Some plants, right, can't thrive in the shifting sand environment. Marim grass actually, as sand hits the leaves, it stimulates root growth. It can expand a metre and a half a year by the rhizomes underground, so the way it propagates is those rhizomes and 2017 and 2019, which were really high water years in Lake Ontario you can see the damage that was done with high water levels and erosion, but on the, on the sides that were torn away.
What you see is this interconnected network like a net that held the rest of the dunes in place.”
…
Marram grass as one of these like pioneer plants or primary species, primary succession species What's interesting, I describe it to people, it's like the Like a reluctant, reluctant hero.
It comes in, it is the first to establish. But as soon as other species begin to move in, you will notice that marim grass is no longer found there. So, it's one of the, like on an open sand dune, we'll put marim grass. You'll see probably year one, there's not a lot of growth and expansion. It's year two and year three where you see it reach that peak.
grows out a meter and a half like you can in some instances follow lines and you'll see the shoots so you can See, it's all from the same parent plant it's real it's real Strength in is in how fast it can grow in that barren environment. It holds the sand in place for other species.
It fulfills a role and moves on.”
I’m seeding this wisdom from eastern lake wild marram grass under my skin. Help bring life to barren places, do what I can here, and then release. Be a good ancestor.
European beachgrass that was planted all up and down the west coast, in an attempt to slow the erosion of rising waters brought on by climate change enflamed by fossil fuel companies who knew the harm they caused and did it anyway, is being pulled out now in many places, sometimes with bulldozers and pesticides, sometimes by hand, one rhizome at a time traced under the ground, native wild beechgrasses planted in their place.
Research published by Published By: Coastal Education & Research Foundation in (May 2021) showed that manually-restored banks had more diversity and recovered better than banks that were treated with pesticides or had the invasive grass buried by bulldozers. But also, that in the short term, these spaces won’t look like they are recovering, which can lead monitors to assume that they are failing.
We need more hands, and a longer view.
Carlin from Sandbanks
“ It's called adaptive management. That's like the buzz that that we talk about We have to have thinking generations ahead We have to have that forward thinking but the reality is we don't know we so we need to deal with what is in front of us Manage to the best of our ability now But be adaptive be be nimble in the sense of, oh, we shouldn't be doing that.
Why are we doing it? And adjust rather than digging in your heels and saying, this is what's gonna work. Um, we are far more aware now, too, of like indigenous ways of knowing I've done some conference with the gentleman. His company called Creators Garden, and he does education. around the Great Lakes Basin about Indigenous people have been gardening this area for time immemorial. So, what we have and what we see and what we, from a Western perspective, are like, we need to conserve this nature. He, very rightly so, is like, whoa, you need to reconsider conservation is very Eurocentric.
It's very from one point of view, that actually harvesting in these areas, in some case, that's what some of these species need, because that's what has been done for centuries, and, and by thinking we need to keep it just how it is right now we could actually be doing more harm.”
I am Marram grass kin, descendant of those who traveled the world and made homes for themselves everywhere and tried to belong but who left holes behind them, always searching for a way to fit and be whole and well, always on the water to the next place, chasing a belonging that could never come because home was never safe.
Auntie Britta
“ I don't remember my grandparents.
But, um, Molen took a stick to, to Nanny and beat her up. Because she was going, she was leaving and going to Canada. So she had no relationship with her mother after that. There were no, no letters, no phone calls, nothing. And I remember I was 13, 12, 13. And she got a letter from her father telling her that her mother had died.
So she'd gone, at that point, ten years, without talking to her mother, never resolving that relationship. And that really broke her up. “
I am kin with broken hearts and wild laughers. I didn’t know my grandmother had been tormented by her mother. I didn’t know that all cells produce daughter cells. Whether the the relationship is cancerous or not, they are called daughter.
I didn’t know my grandmother well, my parents divorced when I was two, but all my life, every time I moved, I kept this poem she had written for me and illustrated with delicate ink flowers, about how grandchildren are wildflowers.
I am kin with those who would hold on, but not too tight. I am learning from the marram grass to be honest about what isn’t working and adapt. I am related to all those who would break cycles to show their daughters love, to give them roots and flight, and a memory of being held at night whenever they were sick or scared that they can hold in their skin for the rest of their lives.
When I am hit now with the great accounting that comes from the reminder of death, that’s all that’s left on the list, really. I want to seed words and stories, pour them out while I can, for as long as I can, and make sure my kid knows her mum loves her every breath, her every atom and cell for every second that I’ve got left in the great cosmic hourglass.
We are invaded and invasive kin. We declare our kinship and alliance with all those displaced, all those children carried like precious seeds by parents desperate for a safe place to grow. All those sickened by the plastic world, all those furiously in love with the world, determined to cast our life-restoring magic while we can, and then move on. Move in.
Like marram grass, witches reach far underground, stitching our magic link by link.
We are rhizome growers, life in every nodule, never alone, impossible to kill.
Like marram grass, we just grow faster when the sandstorm hits.
Like marram grass we curl to protect what’s precious, tending water drop by drop.
We hold space for contradiction, holding the banks but not becoming too rigid, we live at the crossroads, the bend in the binary.
I’ve jumped into thermals, sat at the bottom of the ocean, and pushed myself in the red desert. Now my hair and eyebrows and eyelashes grow back stitch by stitch. Life is the urgency of home, of breathing in the sun on the patio. I’m in Montreal for 5 weeks of radiation, away from my kid during the week, and my stomach is in knots. I’m thrilled at the quiet, the space to rest and to write, the city after all these years of woods, but all I want is to come home to her soon and safely. I’ll burn the microscopic cells of possible future cancers away so we can live together a long time, so we can break cycles and she can feel loved enough to be both rooted and wild. Radiation damages all cells, but normal cells are good at repair and the cancerous ones die under the light of the too bright wave.
I call in both these things for all of us: a home to root, an end to wandering, a place of safety, and also: an untethering from trauma patterns, a freedom to roam and float and fly and make love and a home, a freedom from the plastic shroud and the all-consuming metaphor of property to see the land as living and loving, to follow species and plants and dreams in their happiest routes and waves. May we be like wild grass in a web of right relation.
May we learn to hold on, but not too tight. May we dedicate our brief flame of life to kindness, and allegiance to the grasses and the birds, and all children everywhere.
In the winter the grasses at sandbanks are hidden under frozen waves and you can't see where the sand ends and the ice heaves begin. Walking there is treacherous and forbidden, you can lose your way, find yourself on cracking peaks of frozen waves, slip down farther than you could have imagined to deep water below and ice above and no way back.
When the climate changed drastically in response to global warming before, what happened here was thousands of years of ice, ice a kilometer high.
Earth might seal her seeds against herself again in response to the disasters we’ve made.
Markets might crash, fires might rage.
May we keep our wild seeds warm, close to our hearts. And under ice or whipping sand, reach out in every direction, weaving the great root webs of care.
"A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo." (Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari., (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis p25)
You don’t need to know which way to go. A rhizome has a thousand plateaus.
Keep your own counsel and crochet a support system of loved ones, ancestors, community members, allies, book clubs, knitting circles, covens.
Keep your tools sharp and easy at hand, keep your stores safe as best you can, protect the vulnerable and look for allies among those whose central creed is simple decency.
Do what good you can and then move on.
Move lightly. Be gentle with yourself and with your ecosystem and your symbionts.
Keep your distance from those who would distort the truth or poison the ground.
Be like wild grass, gently reshaping your world.
Read indigenous authors on social justice, on earth science, on navigation, on re-imagining the world. Follow rhizomes and roots, hold the banks together and disrupt rapacious systems to make a green space for life in all its wild unfolding.
And if you need to let go, and follow the wind to try and make a home again, make sure you go bearing gifts. Remember who you are can be a gift.
Remember, we are marram kin, a story always being written.
