This full moon, they say, is the Strawberry Moon, and certainly in my garden the first ripe strawberries are blushing this week. For the last several years on our place, the first ripe fruits of the summer (strawberries are second, after the purple honeyberries) have summoned a small flock of cedar waxwings. These gorgeous birds, with their humming trills and rakish crests, are extraordinarily efficient eaters of fruit. We’ve always said that our goal is to grow enough fruit that the birds can enjoy their share and so can we. But this year, between the waxwings and the toddler, we’ll see if we get any strawberries.
We tend a permaculture garden: we’re dedicated novices in the multidimensional practice of trying to garden like an ecosystem. This means that the garden, and we, spend our summers imperfectly straddling the line between abundance and chaos. We have a few crops that we keep weeded and in rows (carrots), but much of the garden is more of a foraging adventure, and much of the maintenance entails cutting things back (comfrey?!!?) to try to keep a precarious and constantly renegotiated balance. And leaving what we cut to feed the soil, of course. Hey, there, Death.
It was snowing a few weeks ago when I talked to Jason Graham (M0sley W0tta): writer, musician, painter, storyteller; multidisciplinary Creative Laureate of Bend, Oregon; conversation facilitator; life-listener; partner and father of three.
As Jason was exploring the inherent dynamism of living in the world now, and extending the reminder and invitation to “find an allyship with chaos,” one of the things I was thinking about was my garden, and how the great sprawl of life there can sometimes feel overwhelming, and yet how right it feels that our garden is—for us and our kiddo (a future)—a place of exploration and resonance, rather than control.
The world is changing fast. And we human beings have always been brilliant, observant, improvisational, and creative players with change. Sometimes we forget that. And sometimes we remember.
In this wild bloom of a conversation, Jason and I affirm our powerful potential to make magic through intention, experimentation, creativity, self-inquiry, and genuine human (and beyond-the-human) connection. In these dynamic times, remembering that we “contain multitudes” may help us to discern paths and ways that, as Jason puts it, “we maybe have been tricked into believing are impossible.”
Jason has spent much of his career uplifting the voices, stories and perspectives of other Black creatives in Oregon—a state with a still-reverberating legacy of trying to make Blackness impossible. But “Blackness is equivalent to limitlessness,” Jason says, and I feel this in the Blackness of fertile soil, in Jason’s great breadth and depth of creative work, and in the rooms full of all the colors at the Black Artists of Oregon exhibit at the Portland Art Museum (which wrapped up this spring, in which Jason is represented, and which we discuss). In all this, there is an extraordinary abundance of Life finding ways through the cracks, across the electric fences, and into the next flowering of the world. Which of course is what creativity is for.
I recommend loosening up a little for this conversation and riding along with us. I’d love to know what harmonies rise for you out of this fertile “ecology of conversation.” If this episode shakes something awake in you, please share it with a friend, leave a review on Apple Podcasts, follow us on Instagram, and consider becoming a sustaining subscriber here at Kinward Moves.
Gratitudes for this episode include: to Jason, for all the ways his art is magic expressing in the world; to Intisar Abioto for curating the exquisite Black Artists of Oregon exhibit at the Portland Art Museum; to Oregon Humanities and Fishtrap for platforming Jason Graham, including at a recent event with Ross Gay where I first heard Jason say that “Blackness is equivalent to limitlessness”; to Ross Gay for his incredible book of poems Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitudes; to adrienne maree brown for my most beloved orientation, back in 2019, to the lineages and imaginals of afrofuturism; to my sweet garden for ongoing lessons in nourishment emerging from cacophony; and to all of you, for listening.
Happy Juneteenth, happy Strawberry Moon, happy solstice.
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