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.
Each of the 17 writers was invited to call to mind a specific place within the river canyon. They crafted a poem each, which captured how their chosen place had ‘spoken’ to them, attending to what it told them through sound, smell, touch, colour, light, temperature, and so on.
It was my intention for the workshop to be a collaborative experiment in bringing language into Sunseed’s regenerative technology toolbox. As a social-ecological transition project, Sunseed is set up to animate and restore the landscape, and many tools have been built and applied over the years to help the constantly evolving community group achieve this. Through their composting and waste water systems, solar panels, seed-saving methods, native tree nurseries, and kitchen laboratory, to name a few technologies, cycles are closed, soil erosion is minimised, and gifts from the earth are honoured and shared. 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.
Language conveys meaning best when it can land in the body. From my work in the environmental science and policy space, I know first-hand that it’s best to share messages in a way that can be felt by those receiving them, in order to foster mutual understanding and generate positive action for nature. So, this part of the workshop applied an embodied method to share the experiences described by each poet. 
Once each poet had something down on paper, we organised ourselves around a table that we imagined to be the river canyon. We became waypoints on a route that joined up all of the special sites that we had written about. 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.
I invited each poet write and share their poem in their native tongue, to express themselves in a way that felt free and natural, and add a diversity of sounds to the Los Molinos night. We hear birds sing in foreign tongues and nonetheless enjoy what we hear, after all. Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, and English decorated the evening soundscape. Some were kind enough to provide translations, as well.
It strikes me that all of the poems speak of quiet moments of connection with the canyon; moments that offered the writers a place to rest their bodies and boost their spirits. To read this collection of poems is to understand how the landscape sustains the attention, care and action of Sunseed’s community.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.
If you’re ever wanting to walk in Los Molinos, you’ll no doubt feel its potent, peaceful magic for yourself. Nonetheless, I have mapped the way woven by our collective song. Following this route might help you to connect with it through the eyes, ears and fingertips of the creatures who live here as you go.
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/.
0
