Volunteer Stories
A few shy stars blink the big night’s eyeLos Molinos del Rio Agua is a living landscape that sings out as warblers, collared doves, nightingales and sparrows. It hums through blocks of fallen sandstone and sighs through grass cañas and laundry lines. It laughs over stones and silt and gypsum shards. It choruses as frogs and crickets as the light falls. And it murmurs in various human languages around Sunseed’s patio tables, where orange trees cast shadows and listen in over our shoulders as we talk late into the night.
And the deep, quiet joy in my bones could be what’s holding up the sky.
Then, car headlights move across the canyon wall.
A causal glimpse of shattered gypsum and sandstone fall.
Just one quick and tragic flash
Before the busy dark resumes,
Frog chorus, human voices, and my joy,
Silver on the underbelly of the clouds.
One Thursday evening in April, we gathered around these tables for the weekly ‘existential night’ activity. On this particular night I hosted a poetry workshop, inviting 17 members of the community to come together and put the ongoing song of Los Molinos into our own words.


Language is not often seen as a regenerative tool. Rather, it is often seen as a purely human possession, one that distances us from mute nature and makes us more powerful – able to advocate for our own interests over what is sustainable for ecological systems. However, there is a sensory, interspecies conversation unfolding all the time. When we listen with all of our human faculties of perception, we acknowledge the expressive power of all the organisms around us. Our attention enables us to participate in this sensorial exchange, and our use of language can have an animating magic when we use it to give meaning and significance to what we have experienced through this participation.
When we interpret and describe what our surroundings have conveyed to us, whether a feeling, emotion, or message, we affirm the voices, the vibrancy and affective power of our surrounding ecosystems.


This is something that our Indigenous ancestors, and many living cultures that hold onto oral storytelling traditions, understand. To share our poems in the workshop, we created an imagined map, wherein each one became a waypoint for navigating the canyon and a verse in the collective song. This method was greatly inspired by Indigenous Australian Song lines: complex, beautiful systems of oral narratives that carry cultural information across Australia. Songs and stories that can be walked as paths across the land describe the social and political customs, ancestral lore, navigation information and ecological wisdom that enable one to deeply understand the land as they go.


It is a collective song of gratitude, a tender glimpse at the deep attachment they feel to Los Molinos del Rio Agua, as well as the reciprocity in this attachment. The land and its waters holds these people, peacefully and lovingly. It nourishes their continued dreams in return for all their efforts to call these dreams into being through their contributions to Sunseed.



1. 37.0886287, -2.0736533 – Dora Young
2. 37.0890267, -2.0726502 – Leonie
3. 37.0890352, -2.0726770 – Erika Peña
4. 37.0896536, -2.0711106 – Ashley Sheets
5. 37.0898718, -2.0728326 – Karolina Wajman
6. 37.0916947, -2.0742917 – Xavier Santotomas Mena
7. 37.0936973, -2.0761478 – Jonatan Mauricio
8. 37.0904366, -2.0752466 – Simone Sgarbossa
Author – Dora Young. See more writing at https://dorayoung.substack.com/.
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