The Stream Giggled with Winter's End

The stream giggled with winter’s end and the light of Imbolc shone in its molten platinum flow. There quartz: a translucent cream webbed with dark fractures. There bright green aquatic plants: holding their clover-like heads above the gurgle. The crows and songbirds rejoiced in the newfound light on the other side of Imbolc’s threshold. The gusts danced in yesterday’s storm. And all around me the land seemed ready to awaken, ripening with almost-becoming.

I was doing a “sit spot” practice on a wooden bridge at Fox Haven Farm as part of my Land Reciprocity Circle, a year of collaborating with the land through foraging, phenological journaling, and skill-sharing at Fox Haven Organic Farm & Learning Center. The sit spot practice was marvelous. It was joyous. But mostly, f*cking cold. Forgetting your coat on a windy February day will do that. I normally don’t even venture outside below a certain temperature but weeks upon weeks of snow and polar temperatures make a cold windy day with a bright sun seem positively appealing. By the time our teacher Lacey called us back with a “caw-caw, caw-caw” from up on the hill, I was a bit sad to leave. Nature was waking up and I wanted to watch its eyes open ever-so-slowly.

Once we were back inside, instead of the typical introductions (that seemingly establish your place in the capitalist hierarchy), we exchanged sensory poems about our homes:

I am from the land where the two rivers meet. Where you can smell bluebells and wild onion along the streams in spring. Where fuzzy lichen paints itself in shades of bright yellows and green along the limestone cliffs. Where the trains and mourning doves call before the first light of dawn.

F*ck yeah! Let’s do this kind of introduction always.

Tools in-hand, we headed down to what Fox Haven calls the walnut grove. Down past the old fences overgrown with hare-brained honeysuckle and old telephone poles entwined with thick woody vines of wild grape. Down past the stream, fast with melted snow, some still showing on the shadowed banks tangled with bramble. Over the stream was strait-laced hackberry, tall and straight. Tulip poplar with some of its namesake flowers brown and rattling on the bare branches. Down further, following the stream, the honeysuckle faded. The overstory opened. The understory breathed clear with small trees praying to the bright Imbolc sun. Scratch the bark, and when you smell a mix of citrus and ginger, you know what you have found: Spicebush, the herald of spring.

Smooth bark and shoots from the ground like a bush, Spicebush filled the understory in a flatland near the stream. The overstory was dominated by black walnut, with its diamond-grooved bark. Pick a spicebush tree in the grove, Lacey instructed. With some guidance, we tended to and pruned our selected spicebush. Clear away the dead branches. Find overlapping stems and give one of them a bit more room. Always cut below a bud, to encourage new growth. We collected the pruned branches, to make a tea. Its citrus and ginger-smelling essential oils told you its purpose: it warmed the body in winter’s chill. Nourished you in winter’s end. A few more weeks and yellow flowers would appear on the trees, a dazzle of gold in the bare forest. A bright herald of the blooming to come.

Spicebush for me has always been a bit of magic.

Last spring, a mysterious tree appeared in my yard, just beyond my backyard fence. I was ecstatic. My mature pine tree had to be taken down earlier that year - it was dying from a blight and a local tree company pushed the sick creature the rest of the way over the edge with an inappropriate use of fertilizer after their treatment. I had sobbed for months over that tree, especially over my lack of time to say a proper goodbye before another company rushed to take down the dead behemoth before a hurricane blew through. And then it took me six months to find someone to come dig holes in my rock-blighted soil to place two dogwood saplings in the pine’s place - a kind of living memorial. Out of one, two grow. It felt like a focus on abundance amid grief.

All of that to say, when a mysterious sapling showed up in my backyard, it felt like a miracle.

Then late last summer, a mysterious black butterfly whizzed past my library window. The next day, it zipped past again, obviously on a very important errand, and more and more, it was joined by friends, similarly laser-focused. I thought, how strange. I’ve never seen them before! Where are they coming from?

Then I went on a butterfly walk in a nearby state park and found out their common name (at least in western science): Spicebush Swallowtails. But it was only when I saw not one but two of the butterflies resting on the mysterious tree that everything clicked into place. And a memory surfaced.

Two years ago, I made spicebush bark tea after my very first foraging class. I had searched and searched for a local ecology class that espoused the values in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, something that focused on Indigenous teachings of reciprocity and abundance (while carefully not appropriating cultural practices) and involved formally meeting all the creatures in our shared home. The class was actually my very first in-person gathering after the years of the pandemic (other than required work retreats), which was really my first in-person gathering in many, many years. Before the pandemic I had commuted three hours a day to my previous job and had very little time or energy for extracurriculars. Two years ago I came to the foraging class still bereaved from my grandmother’s death and still healing from a years-long auto-immune flare up (Epstein-Barr re-activation without a confirmed COVID infection). So, meeting people after so long seemed like magic. Walking along a stream and learning to recognize the plants seemed like magic. Pruning and tending to wild spicebush seemed like magic. And making a tea out of wild tree bark filled me with such indescribable wonder and awe. Magic.

After brewing the tea from that first class, I dumped all the branches that were too big into the rock break in my backyard - right where the mysterious tree now grew years later. Finally, the tree, the butterflies - everything clicked. I had my very own wild spicebush tree! A gift from Fox Haven. A living memorial from my first baby step forming a relationship with the land around me.

After the past few weeks focused on the scarcity-based systems that plague western science (well, all of western society, really), I needed the reminder, the nourishment, and especially the magic of tending to spicebush again through the Land Reciprocity Circle. The magic I felt from my encounters with spicebush isn’t trivial, it’s physically and spiritually real. For we realize we are not individuals at all, but a highly complex community of interconnected beings, exchanging air and nutrients and water and light in endless cycles backward and forward in time. The bark of spring’s herald nourishes us in winter’s end, and the smell of citrus and ginger stirs in us next summer’s fluttering wings. When I tend to and forage from the spicebush tree, I know I am the spicebush bark and the swallowtail. I am the sun through bare canopy. I am the fungus that nourishes the tree roots. I am the hill the mychorrizhae breaks apart. I am the ancient sea the hill once was.

I am multitudes.

Let me collect these wildlings and nurture them as the seeds of a better world. One day, a time will come when someone can plant them and live to see them grow.

• What if we marked time not with ticking hands, but with wild clocks? The centuries of tree time, drinking in the sun. The mere days of butterfly time, feasting on the sugar of wildflowers. Or, the "what ought to be" time of an always-imagining.
• What if we celebrated the waxing and waning sunlight throughout the year? What would our days look like if we organized them according to ritualized sunlight and not the arbitrary 9-to-5 work day?

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from Nichole Amber Moss filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.