On June 29, 1776, five days before Philadelphia’s Declaration was signed, a different founding took place three thousand miles west, on the shore of a California lagoon. Spanish soldiers and Franciscan friars said the first Mass beside a creek they named Arroyo de los Dolores, the Creek of Sorrows. Within months they had raised a fort near the Golden Gate and a mission a few miles inland—the Presidio of San Francisco and Mission San Francisco de Asís, later known by the name of that creek: Mission Dolores. And the labor for these projects was largely coerced from people whose ancestors had inhabited the land for countless generations.
The people known today as the Ohlone were actually some forty or so autonomous tribelets, each with its own territory, leadership, and law. Ohlone people had built more than four hundred shellmounds along the bay, some rising sixty feet, structures that were at once home, cemetery, and land claim. They moved by season through a landscape they actively cultivated—burning grassland to keep it productive, harvesting acorns, shellfish, salmon, and waterfowl in cycles refined over centuries—sustaining one of the densest Indigenous populations found anywhere north of Mexico. Their relationship to this land had never required ratification—there was no separation between land and people. The Mission and the Presidio projects forced people who knew no other home to build temples to institutions determined to erase them.
In exchange for their life, an Ohlone person was baptized, becoming a neophyte, and was bound to the mission, forbidden to leave without permission, punished for infractions as small as missing Mass. Their forced labor built the mission itself: making and stacking tens of thousands of adobe bricks, tending thousands of sheep and cattle, working looms that turned wool into cloth, and breaking the land into parcels for an imposed agriculture from a different place. Disease did even more damage than coercion: measles moved through the mission’s population in repeated waves; birth rates fell far below death rates; the cemetery behind Mission Dolores today holds roughly five thousand unmarked Indigenous graves—a population lost within the span of a single lifetime.
The conviction of the Catholic Church that their goals and methods were universal and ageless, (justifying all means of human cruelty), were not strong enough to sustain the mission system when the Spanish Empire withdrew their sponsorship. In 1834, just 58 years after the founding of Mission Dolores, (the span of one lifetime), the mission as an institution ended, while returning nothing to the people who had built it.
California’s statehood in 1850 made things worse: a second wave of violence during the Gold Rush, the Californian genocide, arrived alongside eighteen treaties negotiated with California tribes and then never ratified by the U.S. Senate. The Muwekma Ohlone, whose homeland spans the East Bay, remain without federal recognition to this day, despite a documented, unbroken lineage—acknowledged by history and by their own persistent community, but absent from the one federal category that would formally recognize either.
Cause For Celebration
Despite the cruel realities of forced separation of a people from the systems that sustained them for millennia, the spirit of the people of this place did not break. In 2011, Ohlone organizers occupied a construction site in Vallejo for a hundred and nine days to stop development on Sogorea Te’, an ancestral village and burial ground. The occupation was successful in a real sense: the land was transferred to a federally recognized tribe, (albeit one with no connection to the site—because no local Ohlone group has received the Federal recognition that would grant them entitlement—another chapter in the long history of erasure that began in1776).
Rather than wait on a system built to keep failing them, the organizers founded the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust the following year around a mechanism that doesn’t depend on federal recognition at all: the Shuumi Land Tax, a voluntary annual gift from non-Indigenous residents of Lisjan Ohlone territory, moving resources by relationship instead of by law. The trust now stewards more than a dozen sites across the Bay, including ground reclaimed from an eighty-year parking lot in West Berkeley that sits on the same shellmound lineage this history began with. It has raised the first ceremonial arbor built in the region in over two hundred fifty years, and it is developing a cemetery to properly reinter ancestral remains still displaced since the mission era—a direct answer to the unmarked graves still lying behind Mission Dolores.
Two nations mark two hundred fifty years on this stretch of coast this year. One does it with fanfare, with a holiday, and a dream of equality that was never written to include everyone. The other has spent the same two hundred fifty years proving that survival doesn’t require a declaration at all—only language kept alive in secret when it couldn’t be kept alive in the open, land bought back one parcel at a time when it couldn’t be returned outright, and innovative ways around the systems imposed on them from outside.
as a practicing buddhist, “leave no trace” is a guiding principle embedded into every teaching: leave no physical trace of your passage through the busy world, and leave no stinky teaching behind that muddies the waters of the dharma.
how do we practice this, living as we do with the legacy of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and industrial capitalism? do i join a monastery that maintains a culture derived from practices developed thousands of miles away within a separate but equally asymmetrical power structure as medieval Japan?
maybe—but what other options are there?
considering that i was born and raised in California, what models for living are available for living a leave-no-trace lifestyle in this place?
Let’s consider a moment like this.
dōgen, the go-to teacher in my particular subsect of zen buddhism, the Sōto school, was sharing his wisdom from a temple in a remote area of Echizen province in Japan in the 13th century. consider what was happening in California at that time.
California was arguably one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions in the world. people had lived here for millennia, and by 1500CE (3 centuries after Dōgen’s birth), there were somewhere around 80 distinct languages and cultural groups living in this place: in the coastal region; in the great valley between the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada; in myriad river valleys, watersheds, grasslands, and oak groves.
Consider this: upon arrival, on ships and overland, European colonists encountered a land that they believed to be pristine and uninhabited.
Let that sink in.
One of the most culturally diverse regions on Earth.
For anyone paying mindful attention (as we are entreated to do), this would seem to provide a textbook example of “leave-no-trace.” Look around. Where are the crumbling monuments and scorched places that a region with 80 distinct cultures would be expected to contain?
If you have the capacity to think about this for even a moment, it is likely to be almost unimaginable.
that being said, it would be inaccurate and unfair to say that the people who inhabited this place left no trace—on the contrary, the traces are there, if one knows where to look.
Let’s consider the traces left behind, in California, by the 80 or so distinct cultures that inhabited this place for millennia, before the ships came.
They left behind fire-shaped oak woodlands, park-like oak savannas with open understories, that early European observers admired and assumed were natural. They were natural, but they were also made—through precise, seasonally timed cultural burning that suppressed encroaching conifers, stimulated acorn production, and maintained the grassland-woodland mosaic that supported enormous biodiversity.
They left behind a superabundance of large game. The astonishing density of elk, deer, and pronghorn reported by early contact-era observers was not an accident of wilderness conditions—it was the managed outcome of burn regimens, selective harvest, and spiritual protocols around killing that functioned as de facto conservation law.
They left behind salmon run integrity—weir systems, harvest techniques, and first-catch ceremonies functioned together as a distributed watershed management system. The ceremonies were societal self-regulation—embedding catch limits and seasonal closures as cultural touchstones.
We knock on doors to ask for candy. They practiced similar rituals to ensure next season’s catch.
they left behind camas and brodaea meadows. These extensive bulb plantings, which fed both humans and animals across enormous areas, were cultivated through selective harvest, replanting, and burning. Europeans saw them as wildflower meadows—they were cultivated gardens in disguise.
Leave no trace, indeed.
They left behind tarweed and clover patches, in distinct patterns. Intentional burning created a patchwork of early-succession forb communities across hillsides—maximizing seed yield while simultaneously creating the habitat that makes species diversity possible. The quilt pattern that Europeans noticed in the landscape was an agricultural design, cultivated by people with intention and systems wisdom.
They left behind a near-universal network of dense, structurally complex riparian zones—willows, alders, sedges. These corridors were the circulatory system of the landscape, and they were kept open and healthy by people who understood the value of stewardship and systems thinking to their lifeways.
They left behind shell midden topography: shellmounds are found along the Bay, the coast, the rivers. They are features of the landscape now, that support unique alkaline plant communities. These indigenous communities had their landfills, but what they leave behind is kind of an accidental monument to valuable plant species that grow nowhere else.
They left behind stands of elderberry and hazel. Both were actively managed—elderberry for food and medicine, hazel for basket-making. Their distribution across the landscape reflects human intention. Where you find dense hazel stands, you are standing in someone’s workshop—again, disguised as natural selection.
They also left behind absence: absence of erosion signatures in pre-contact sediment cores. Paleoecological cores from California lakes and estuaries show remarkably stable sediment profiles through the pre-contact period—low erosion, stable watersheds, consistent organic input. In contrast, the colonial period shows up as an abrupt, catastrophic sediment disruption. These 80 cultures left behind measurable stability in the geological record. The entrance of Europeans is literally visible at the sedimentary level.
They left behind black, carbon-rich soils in valley and foothill community sites—soils darkened and enriched by millennia of habitation, burning, composting, and refuse incorporation. These patches grow differently than surrounding soils. Farmers and gardeners notice them. They are slowly-accumulated signatures of long residence—in the best way: they continue to support biodiversity and utility to the stewards who tend them.
Landscape. Systems. People. Intention. All working together for millennia. 80 distinct cultures.
Europeans arrive and see nothing but a natural landscape.
I’m saying this over and over again because it’s so easy to gloss over if you don’t make the effort to consider the alternative.
What is the alternative?
Let’s consider the legacy left behind by the people on ships (and overland) who saw a pristine place and sought to save the inhabitants from their sins.
If we consider the legacy of a supposedly civilized people;
and if we consider that what was left behind was left behind by a diversity of peoples whose numbers were diminished by 95% within 150 years of contact with the (supposed) savior peoples whose numbers arrived on ships (and overland);
what would be the legacy of the people who intervened in the millennia-long experiment of California’s indigenous peoples?
Let’s consider the legacy of an intervening people, if their numbers were suddenly diminished by 95%. Let’s consider (if we consider the intervening people to be more civilized) what we would expect to have found:
(I hope fellow buddhists are practicing mindfulness here)
Where are the prisons? The structures whose purpose is the forcible removal of human beings from the social body, if we assume that such removal is a necessary function of civilization? No pre-contact California culture is known to have required one. This begs the question: what kind of society needs this many cages?
Where are the parking lots? Surely an ecosystem that supports 80 different cultures must require an impermeable surface with zero ecological function, and a thermal mass that raises ambient temperature, that exceeds the footprint of habitable buildings, to carry out its work of saving a population from their sins. Surely they would have needed a warehouse for their means of travel.
Where are the landfills? We found shellmounds that became soil, ecology, and monument in one. What about their accumulated poisons, leachates, methane—sealed from the biological processes that would otherwise transform them?
Where are the strip malls—the commercial vernacular of a healthy market economy—built for a lifespan of 30 years, and already obsolescing before completion? We don’t see the parking lots (larger than the buildings themselves), but surely we would see some signs of commerce.
Where are the stadiums—the enormous structures used for roughly 20 days per year, built with public money, named for corporations, demolished when the team demands a newer one? The Romans had their amphitheater, that was apparently well-used—where did these people display their spectacle?
Where are the hospitals? is it possible that these people did not allow their baseline conditions—diet, air, water, social cohesion, meaningful work—to degrade so severely that industrial-scale intervention became necessary to sustain normal human function? Did they not live in such a way that made such monuments to care necessary?
Where are the highways? Roman roads are still visible from satellites. American interstates will be legible to geologists a millennium from now. Impermeable, like parking lots, severing watersheds, fragmenting habitat, producing runoff laced with tire particulate that is now measurable in the tissues of Pacific salmon. Surely civilized people would have needed a structure to move vehicles between parking lots, no?
Where are the golf courses? Doesn’t a civilized culture need a chemically maintained monoculture on land that could support hundreds of species, with water consumption needs on an agricultural scale—poisoned earth, to support a certain shade of turf, for the leisure of a few?
Where is the advertising infrastructure: billboards, signage, the entire visual apparatus of commercial persuasion permanently installed in the landscape? How would people have known what products to purchase to maintain legibility as citizens and support the corporate infrastructure?
Where are the Superfund sites? Certainly, a section of the continent that was home to 80 distinct cultures would have needed places where industrial processes so thoroughly poisoned land, water, and soil that the collective body would have designated them national sacrifice zones requiring generations of remediation—if remediation is even possible.
Shellmounds? Were these people even human?
Let’s pause, and reflect.
Eighty distinct cultures. Eighty different languages. Eighty different cosmologies, kinship structures, ceremonial calendars, ways of knowing. Not one people with one answer—eighty peoples with eighty answers, none of which required a prison, a landfill, or a Superfund site.
This is the part that is almost impossible to hold in the mind.
Dōgen’s monastery is a monoculture: an island of shared language and isolated cultural identity. The colonial project is a monoculture: a multivalent operation of power, subjugation, and extraction at industrial scale. Both operating from the assumption that there is one correct way, transmissible as doctrine, applicable universally, independent of place.
The eighty cultures of California suggest something the monastery and the colonial project both missed: that diversity of approach, held within shared relationship to place, is itself the technology of leave-no-trace. Not one answer refined to perfection—many answers, in conversation with one another and with the land. The oak savanna is not a monoculture. Its stability is a product of the diversity of its understory.
California today is one of the most diverse places on earth—again, still, differently. The question the land is asking has not changed.
What is meant by leave-no-trace? What traces have we been asked to reflect on?
From where we are, in this present moment,
what would buddha do?
Where would dōgen go to dispense his kitchen wisdom?
Does one attempt to move a civilization whose legacy is prisons and superfund sites toward a gentler stewardship?
What of the legacy of 80 cultures, across millennia, who left behind healthy fisheries, and pastoral oak groves that supported a diverse ecology?
What is a buddhist, who devotes themselves to leaving no trace, to do?
Some of you have made music with me over the years. You know what being in the room with me is like. Since my birthday is coming up, I’m hoping you’ll take a moment to hear what I’m asking for.
This past year, I decided to start something new. I wanted to nurture spaces that are explicitly neurodiversity-affirming. I wanted to make music that reflects the histories and cultures of the communities I’m in—not a fixed repertoire, but a living one. I wanted more instruments, wider age ranges, and a room that doesn’t sort people by developmental milestone or tax bracket. I wanted people to be able to attend as often as they like without paying more.
And I wanted to charge less than it costs to run the program, on purpose, knowing I’d be fundraising constantly to fill the gap. For years I taught in programs I couldn’t have afforded myself. That felt like a problem worth solving.
Enter imeetswe. We’re in our first year, and this is our Spring fundraising appeal. It would be a bait-and-switch to offer sliding scale classes and then only appeal at fundraising time to folks that are enrolled, so I’m reaching out to you. If any of this resonates—as a donor, a sharer, or just someone who wants to know more—I’d love for you to take a look, and share widely. Thank you!
As someone who has worked with children and their parents for 25 years, I would say that I have had more than my fair share of positive human interaction. I know there are many people who love me, and I know that I am a good person and that I am lovable.
(In Christian summer camp in Oregon in the 70s, we even made pendants out of slices of wood and gimp {plastic lanyard cord}, in decoupage, no less, {we used shellac}, with the letters IALAC: I Am Lovable And Capable. Why am I sobbing right now? Those letters never did sink in, really. But I always loved camp, and always cried on the last day.)
(don’t worry, that’s not code. i’m just having a moment)
That being said, I have to work to remember all of this positive human connection, and sometimes I feel utterly invisible. Today, for example, when crossing the street on a green light, a car with tinted windows (I couldn’t see the driver at all to make eye contact) turned left when I was well into the intersection. I put my arm up (I’m not a small person) and had to take 4 full steps backwards, fast, (I don’t do fast), and I could feel the draft from the car that missed me by an inch, and slowed down not at all. It was like I didn’t exist.
Or at the store this evening, standing literally in the middle of the entrance waiting to put my cart away, and people moved around me as if I was not there. And when I did sense an opening and moved forward the slightest bit, someone surged by me and glared as if I had tried to ram them. I had moved about an inch at that point. I then waited even longer until there was a moment to act. Moving with care (and with dyspraxic, intentional motor planning) or any hint of hesitation was not an option.
Somehow these moments of invisibility effect me more deeply than when people are outright rude or hostile. Somehow, hostility makes more sense to my nervous system than not being seen. Living, as I do, in a big giant man disguise, I’ve become familiar with the ways that it makes sense for some people to show hostility. I try not to take it personally. But I seem so obvious, at least to my self. I can’t be invisible in the times when I want to be, so when I am, it’s unsettling.
(Sorry, I’m just falling apart, here, remembering when I was about 7 years old, and I called my Uncle Keith on the phone, and I had never heard an answering machine before, and when I heard his voice on the line I kept trying to get his attention: “But Uncle Keith! It’s me! Ricky!” My auntie and my Naná tried to explain it to me, but I was inconsolable for a while, kind of like now)
(Some of us don’t grow out of it)
Then there are the times (this hasn’t happened during the holidays, when it would make sense), when I run into someone I haven’t seen for a while, and we have a nice conversation, and they say “let’s get a coffee sometime,” and then I’ll follow through in a light way so as not to trigger obligation: “great to see you. I’ve got some time next week if you’re free, otherwise, let me know a good time for you,” and then I never hear from them. This actually happens fairly often. Sometimes I even summon the courage to try again months later, and crickets.
I do my best not to take it personally, because I know everyone is time-poor and every interaction creates an obligation and an offset that must be recouped at some other time in the week. It’s like running into a friend in the car next to you on the freeway, but their lane is moving faster than yours. And then you text them the next day: “so cool to see you!” and get no response (true story).
Ghosting, or non-response, has become normalized. For someone whose nervous system is wired for connection, and who builds his schedule around being available, I have never felt more invisible. It’s like we’re living in a post-relational world.
(It’s like I was wired for a particular purpose, that appears to be no longer purposeful)
I know I am extra sensitive, because of my particular nervous system. I also know that there are many people with nervous systems like mine who have not been blessed with all of the warmth and positive interactions that I have been so privileged to experience who are having a hard time these days.
(or maybe I actually am neither lovable nor capable, which would be a simple explanation for the whole shebang, so there’s that)
All of this just a long-winded way to say be kind to one another, and I hope you have the wiggle room to text back the friend you see in the car next to you on the freeway.
resources for real-time posting of ICE raids in the Bay Area
ICE has just landed a major invasion force in Alameda. Credible sources say they will be targeting Home Depots and other places where people gather to find work and access services, as well as businesses with large, low-paid workforces.
If you see something, say something. Look for dark-colored rented SUVs operated by teams with face coverings. They are highly resistant to being identified, and have been known to stand down and retreat when exposed. Look for openings. Block access with your vehicle when possible. Stay safe, and stay connected.
Here are some non-algorithm filtered spaces where you can post real-time updates. I will update this post as I have time.
It’s been very emotional for me to reemerge from the darkness of lockdown to return to building community through music-making. In my conversations with folks, it becomes clear that a younger generation of families don’t know about some of the ways we connected before, and don’t necessarily remember many of the ways things were different then.
In going through my instrument collection to decide what to bring to my family music classes, I brought out the box that contained the EBCMP banner. For those who don’t know, EBCMP was the East Bay Community Music Project, the organization I founded in 2012 to cultivate community music-making opportunities for people of all ages, ethnicities, faiths, economic access, neurotypes, and abilities, and any other way one might sort people into categories. I now continue that work as imeetswe, for reasons I won’t cover here. But I believe at this point in history, part of my job as a facilitator and advocate is to remind people of what once was, and what is possible again, and this banner is a powerful reminder for me.
We used to meet on second and fourth Sundays, and at this particular time we were meeting in the multi-purpose room at Malcom X Elementary in Berkeley. My mother would often drive over from the Peninsula where she lives, and join us. She was usually the oldest person in attendance, just because not so many older folks would join us often, but she did. Our second gathering in August of 2014 coincided with my mother’s 70th birthday, so we planned a ceremony to honor her entry into the crone realm (which, whatever your association with the word might be, is an honor and a privilege, and an important place in the community).
We got together in the morning, and ate potluck breakfast. We had asked folks to bring pieces of colored fabric that could be torn or cut into strips, and some of us had taken some time in the morning to cut the many colors and textures of fabrics into strips. We sang some songs together as usual. Then, we had my mother sit in a chair in the middle of the space. As my mother sat in the middle, on her chair, each family in attendance, in turn, approached her (her name is Susan, or Grandma Sue), and gave her a kind reflection, and handed her a piece of the torn fabric. She had been instructed to tie the strips together as she was handed them. I don’t remember exactly how many families were in attendance, but there were enough that when each family had shared their kind reflections, she had a long, long rope of tied together fabric strips.
Then, as she held one end of the fabric, all the rest of us sang Que Sera Sera, a song that my mother loved (it was originally sung by Doris Day, and my mother was about 12 when it was on the radio, in a time when we were all connected by the songs that came over the radio).
My mother stood. We all sang, and wound the fabric around my mother, until she was all wrapped up in the kind reflections that folks had given her. And then, we unwound her, still singing, and then she walked around the families gathered and wound the fabric around the community, and it was long enough to encircle us a couple of times.
I wonder how many people remember that crone ceremony for my mom, or any crone ceremony for anyone’s mom, for that matter. She still remembers it, I’m sure, and I do too. For some, becoming a crone, or welcoming one into the community, is an important rite of passage–a recognition of having lived life fully, and of having a certain kind of wisdom that only comes from living a long time, and the importance of that wisdom to the community.
And what, then, was done with the fabric? Was it discarded? If you know my mom, you are fairly certain it wasn’t discarded. No, my mom proceeded, over the course of several months, (when she was also consumed with the many sewing and knitting and crocheting projects that she’s always consumed with) she turned the fabric strips into a quilted banner to represent the community. We used to carry it in front of us in our annual Spring Parade (you participate in an annual Spring Parade, don’t you? Doesn’t everybody?), and it was draped over the donation/announcement/signup table at our Sunday gatherings.
So as I uncovered the box that contained this emblem of a certain moment in a certain community of people who had chosen to gather because they loved to sing and move in community and recognize the cycles of the seasons and the ways people change, I admit, I cried. I had a moment. And because of how my particular brain is wired, it just made sense to share this moment with the community of people I find myself within now, who may or may not understand what I’m sharing, or what I think is important about a moment like this. I think about all of the moms in my community, and of all of the moms who might have moms that are moving toward the crone realm of their lives, and I wonder if they would appreciate being recognized in ways like I’ve described.
A crone represents a certain type of neurodiversity, and this community is organized to recognize the value of all of the different ways our brains are organized or disorganized, or differently organized. It used to be that to be old was a certain type of neurodivergence, because it was rare for people to live past a certain age. To be older is not so rare any more, but still worthy of being recognized for the value of simply having lived through many cycles of seasons, and styles of communication, and changes in hormone balance, and attitudes toward difference.
I share because I see something of value that I’m not sure the people around me see, and it’s just my brain’s wiring that makes me think that’s what I’m supposed to do.
In a neurodiverse community, all are welcome, all are recognized as having a unique perspective, and something of value to offer to the community. And we can, if we pay attention, and if we show up, recognize uniqueness within a community as having value, especially in a time where sameness is centered and strived for.
Thanks for listening. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for recognizing the value in the many ways of being a human being in the community we find ourselves in.
some of us recognize that we maybe only have five days left to connect with our loved ones,
while others feel that time is endless, and we’ll always have another chance, in the future, to eventually connect with our loved ones.
and those of us who recognize that we maybe only have five days left are recognizing that we’re not hearing from the loved ones who we want to be connected with, in our last five days.
we’re recognizing that we might not be the ones that our loved ones want to be connected with in their last five days.
how do we reconcile this, with our loved ones?
how do we stay connected, even in tiny ways, that don’t evoke a sense of obligation to make some kind of ultimate connection?
i miss you, sweetie. our connection means the world to me, even in the tiniest of ways.
time is silently ticking by, behind all of our big feelings about how we’re supposed to connect, and how we’re feeling disconnected from our world.
within all of these big feelings, just know that a ‘hi’ or an emoji is enough.
you are exactly enough.
i love you, sweetie. i want to be connected to you in the ways that you want to be connected to.
