Happy Waabaabagaa Giizis (Leaves Changing Colour Moon). Enjoy this spoken word poem by Lyla June, an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Here’s an excerpt.

"It is dawn. The sun is rising the sky and my grandmother and I are singing prayers to the horizon. This morning, she's teaching me the meaning of hozhó. Although there's no direct translation from Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language, into English, every living being knows what hozhó means. For hozhó is every drop of rain. It is every leaf on every tree. It is your every eyelash. It is every feather on the blue bird's wing. Hozhó is undeniable beauty that surrounds us. Hozhó is remembering that you are a part of the Earth’s brilliance.”

Bring your shovels, let’s plant forests

Tree by tree, forest by forest, Kingston is growing into a City in a Forest. Help  plant our 2024 little forests, gifting your labour, love, and care to the Earth!

Saturday Oct 12 from 9 am to 4 pm, 111 Van Order DriveCalling all tree planters! We’re planting 900 trees in the courtyard of 111 Van Order Drive at Kingston and Frontenac Housing Corporation’s first Little Forest. Planting starts at 9 am and continues until 4 pm. Call or text Nathan Nesdoly at 343-363-0492 if you have any questions.

Thursday, Oct 17 from 1 pm to 7 pm, 205 Bagot Street

Get your shovels ready for another planting day, this one at 205 Bagot Street behind the downtown public library. We’re planting 98 trees and shrubs in a unique courtyard garden consisting of 4 pocket forests and 4 pocket meadows on another Kingston and Frontenac Housing Corporation site. Call or text Nathan Nesdoly at 343-363-0492 for more information.

Saturday October 19 and Sunday October 20 from 9 am to 4 pm, corner of Westview and Grenville Roads

Phase 2 of the Grenville Park Little Forest planting takes place Saturday October 19 and Sunday October 20 from 9 am to 4 pm. We have 1,000 native shrub and tree seedlings arriving, so come on out and spend some time with neighbours and friends to help augment our City’s tree canopy! See you at the park on the corner of Westview and Grenville Roads in one of Kingston’s coolest communities. Call or text Susie Everding for ‭(613) 449-4730‬ for more information.

Bring your own shovels, gloves, and water bottles if you have them. We’ll have extras available. And snacks!

"What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself?”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

We’d like to thank The Beacon Design Collective Inc (through Living Cities Canada Fund of Green Communities Canada) for their financial support of the Bagot and Van Order Little Forests, Trees for Life for their financial support of the Grenville Park Little Forest, and the private donors who’ve helped make our 2024 little forest plantings possible.

National Day of Truth and Reconciliation

“Land Back is people returning back and finding their place in those systems of life.”

Bomgiizhik (Isaac Murdoch), Serpent River First Nation

September 30 marks the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day. Little Forests Kingston’s acts of reconciliation, captured in our Land Acknowledgement written by Joanne Whitfield, include:

• acknowledging the harm of colonial practices on the Land, the Waters, and the original inhabitants of this place

• seeking to redress these wrongs by striving to come into a healthy relationship with the Land and Waters and helping others to do the same

• striving to live up to our Treaty obligations

• taking guidance from the principles of Natural Law

“We take guidance too from the principles of Natural Law which could also be expressed as treaties between Humans and the Natural World. This set of legal principles come to us from Indigenous legal systems. We acknowledge them and thank them for this crucial framework with which we can reimagine our relationship to the Natural World. These principles include recognition that we are only one species amongst many and that relationships with our non-human kin are reciprocal, requiring us to actively care for and respect those kin. We acknowledge that when we express gratitude to the Natural World, we are deepening our commitment to the lives of all. In this way, we hope to create an ethical space from which we can use Two-Eyed Seeing to make Katarokwi/ Kingston a place where all can thrive.”

The web of life is calling us forth

“If we surrendered to Earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke

yla June Johnston’s spoken word poem Hozhó reminds us that each of us is part of the Earth’s brilliance. Harold R. Johnson, in The Power of Story, reminds us that we are plugged into the neural networks, the mycelia, the root systems of the forest. Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us that if we surrendered to Earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Joanna Macy reminds us that active hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act.

Hope is a gift that unleashes our imaginations, expands the boundaries of the possible, calls for us to imagine more beautiful futures, and invites us into a web of belonging.

“Hope is a​n embrace of the unknown and the unknowable…​. We may be living through times of unprecedented change, but in uncertainty lies the power to influence the future. Now is not the time to despair, but to act… Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away…Together we are very powerful.”

Rebecca Solnit, Living in dark times

Let’s open our hearts and minds to the teaching of plants. Let’s weave a web of belonging with the Land, the Waters, and each other. Let’s rise up rooted, like trees. Let’s plant little forests as gifts to the Earth. As songs, poems, love letters to the land.

“Omdendum means to be hopeful, to be able to carry hope for the future and to be able to hold onto the goodness that we see in everything… Omdendum means really believing in a situation or in somebody, it means believing that there is a chance that the goodness will come. We need this now more than ever. We need to believe in each other, we need to believe in the Great Spirit of this land… We need to find a way to gather the strength of the Great Spirt of this land to move forward. We can learn how to do this from the animals, the plants, the sky, the stars and the moon. They are our greatest teachers. They are the ones who actually teach us about omdendum.”

Isaac Murdoch, Omdendum - to have hope

Active hope is waking up to the beauty of life

“Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. We belong to this world.The web of life is calling us forth at this time. We’ve come a long way and are here to play our part. With Active Hope we realize that there are adventures in store, strengths to discover, and comrades to link arms with.”Joanna Macy

Active Hope Foundations Training is a journey through seven questions that help you nourish your ability to make a difference.

“When we move beyond thoughts of individual achievement and consider what our actions, when combined with the actions of others, can bring about, we open to a more gripping story.”

Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone