The Land Remembers and So Should We

This session moved us out of the university classroom and into the field, grounding our work in community and lived experience. Practitioners from CSU LA gathered in Altadena, where we were welcomed by Ms. Louise, a longtime resident who lost her home in the fires. We began with grief. Through death-centered practice, we honored what had been lost, listening as Ms. Louise shared memories of raising her children on this land, growing food, witnessing the beauty of the peacocks that once lived there. Together, we built an altar to hold those memories, grounding ourselves in the land and in one another before attempting to rebuild.​

 

Returning to the earth required a different kind of listening. We leaned into the wisdom of gravity and into forms of building that have sustained human life for most of our existence. As we began constructing a bench and an arch in the community garden using earthen architecture, we were engaging a lineage of knowledge that understands strength through curve and resilience through support. The arch reminded us what consent has been teaching us all along: nothing stands without proper support, nothing holds without care.

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The bench became a planter rooted in indigenous landscape practices and shaped by community intention. We reflected on how restoring native plant life contributed to land resilience during the fires, and we explored alternative approaches to healing the earth, including mycelium-based soil remediation, which reminds us that the land knows how to repair itself when given the right conditions.

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Through this work, building became an act of remembering and reclaiming agency. With our hands in the soil, we confronted the idea that creation requires permission. We experienced that we already have what we need to shape our environments and respond to what is broken. What we began to build was modest, a bench, an arch, a gathering place. But what it represents is deeply expansive: a return to land, to the knowledges that we are capable of both holding grief and creating something new from it.