Life on the Move

Musings on moving, and what its like to be a “nomadic settler”

This article is coming out on Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish year. While I am in physical community, I scheduled this article to share my intentions for the new year with this digital community, honoring this moment of transition. I hope to bring my full self, my body and mind, my history and my aspirations, into this new year. As we are reminded to examine our lives this past year for the sake of the year to come, I have been dwelling on my past, ruminating and reflecting on all that has changed. Over the past month too, much has changed. I have settled into a new home, I have applied to jobs, I have written, I have met wonderful people, and I have reconnected with myself, my family, and my home. There is much more to come here on Jewish Ecology, but after leaving Los Angeles and moving afar, there is a lot still to recollect. Here are some musings on this time of transition, and what moving means to me. L’shanah Tovah! – To a Good Year!

I recently moved back to my hometown. Well, not my home town exactly, but to the city where I was born — the very same watershed as my childhood home. 

I grew up in a beautiful place, surrounded by Redwood and Oak forests on one side, and a unique sandhill chaparral on the other. I didn’t realize how special this landscape truly was; I did not realize the privilege of growing up with multiple rare ecosystems and endemic species as my neighbors. Not that this landscape was untouched. My childhood home was part of a 1950s suburban development, a subdivision of a Spanish ranch, above the Zayante creek — a word I only recently learned to be the name of the local indigenous group that has been all but erased from local memory.

But I didn’t realize any of this until I moved away: Down to Los Angeles, a real city that made me realize that Santa Cruz was really just a small town. Unbeknownst to childhood me, there is in fact “nature” in Los Angeles — unique plant communities and wildlife that call the Los Angeles environs their homes. From the salt marshes of Ballona to the swamps of La Brea, up to the chaparral, forests, and creeks that have carved through the surrounding mountains and have been entombed beneath the concrete city, life surges forth in the sidewalk cracks, wherever there is enough to eke out life’s necessities.

Becoming “at home” in Los Angeles did not come easily to me. Every so often, for a day or two every couple months, I would make the journey back, six hours by car, “going home.” And then, days or weeks later, I would turn around, again, “going home.” I was never quite clear where “home” really was. Maybe it was on those roads, weaving through the hills and ecosystems of California. 

I spent my first year sharing a shoebox of a room with two strangers. That year, I spent more time at my friend’s dorm than at my own. I spent my second year in a big dorm with 5 friends — that is, until COVID-19 pushed me back to my childhood home. 

The spring and summer of 2020 brought a new meaning to my concept of home. I had spent the previous year cultivating my fascination with plants, and the time I had back in the landscape of childhood allowed me to reconnect with its wider community: I became formally acquainted with most of these plants for the first time. 

Moving back down to Los Angeles in the fall of 2020 — this time moving into an apartment with 6 close friends — I felt like I was moving into a new city. No longer living within the boundaries of campus, but instead living in the boundaries of my COVID “bubble,” home began to feel like a community. Our bathrooms were grimy, our kitchen perpetually a mess, but despite the world becoming so isolating, I felt constantly surrounded by people I genuinely cared about — and who genuinely cared about me. Despite the never-ending need to clean, this was a task we could share. Every Friday, my friends would gather with others in our COVID “pod” to host a Shabbat dinner on the concrete deck outside our apartment. We would cook and clean, bake and be merry. 

While I continued to move around the neighborhood year by year and my comfort in this tiny portion of LA continued to grow, my sense of belonging to the wider city of Los Angeles did not grow smoothly. Starting in the Winter of 2021, I began to take my studies more seriously — that is, I began trying to connect the ecology, history, and other courses I was taking to my lived experience in the city of LA. 

Going to a public high school, and not taking much US history, I did not have much of a genuine sense of how we got here. I did not understand how the past of the nation I grew up in, the state I call home, or the city where I lived led to our present situation. So I began to seek out books, learning, that could help ground me in this moment, in this place; to help me understand. I focused on environmental histories — books which connected social and cultural pressures to the environmental transformations brought on by American colonialism. I read book after book, but my “Aha!” moment didn’t occur until I was deep in a far-too-long final essay for my “Anthropology of Water” course. I wanted to understand how colonialism shaped our water systems — and in the “West” this is a fundamental question about power. To know my home, I must know its past. I must understand all the relationships I am bound up in. To love my home, I must learn to love and honor all my neighbors, ancestors, and kin. And together, we must learn how violence is impressed into our land, and work to heal these systems and relations.

The control and design of water systems, especially in California, is inextricably connected to socio-political power, electrical power, and ecological change. As a final essay for my course on the “Anthropology of Water,” I sought to use the Desague of Mexico city (the monumental effort which, over 200 years, eventually drained the lakes around historical Tenochtitlán), and the California Water Project (which now allows LA to draw water from the far north of California) as examples of how colonial water management consolidates power at the expense of communities and ecosystems. While I was working on this expansive essay, my grandfather’s health was deteriorating, his dementia was beginning to wear away at his faculties, but still, he could remember the work he really cared about.

I was telling my grandmother about this work, and she told me that she wished her husband was still present enough to have a real conversation about this work — he had spend the better part of his career working as a biologist for the California State Department of Water Resources— the very same institution that built the California Water Project. I shared a bit of the work I was doing with him, and he perked up when I talked about the Delta canal that ties Northern California to LA, but he could not follow the wider argument I was trying to make about dispossession and the danger of “total use for greater wealth.”

My Grandpa Ron worked to show the dangers of huge dams during a time when more and more valleys around California were being flooded for water “conservation.” He studied the algae that grew in the canals, and introduced bottom-dwelling Tilapia that would clear the canals of algae and provide a food source that he hoped could reduce the need for offshore fishing. He stands as an exemplar of what it takes to establish a niche for oneself within the complexities of one’s place in the world. And while he likely never understood that colonial power dynamics of dispossession and control manifested in the water system on which he worked, he still sought to support the wider community which it served. I hope to learn from his story, and carry forth his intentions — only with an understanding of colonialism and the ecology of love and freedom that was inaccessible to him.

Until I understood his legacy, I did not realize how personal my work was. Nor did I realize that in writing an essay on the colonization of water in California, I would later be compelled to do a deeper dive on Los Angeles’ water system. In connecting myself to the historical development of my water system, and later, the historical development of the city I was living in, I began to feel rooted in place. Doing work to resolve the damage done by colonialism — ecological restoration, historical-ecological analysis, and sustainability work — helped me feel that I had a place in Los Angeles, California. And not only did I have a place, I have roots here. They may not be deep, but I can work to deepen them by cultivating community and understanding. 

Attending school in the strange city of LA led me to realize that wherever I go, nature is all around. And moreover, wherever I find myself grounded in community, that is my home. Traveling back and forth, driving hundreds of miles between my parents’ home and my school taught me that “home” is a fickle concept. Traveling both ways felt like “going home.” 

And now I have left LA. Likely for good. I have returned to the land of my birth, but I no longer live with my parents — instead with my fiancé and new friends, with a lovely old lady as our landlord. We likely won’t live in this house forever, but I hope to stay here for at least a few good years.

Buckling up my plants to make sure they will make it safely into their new place. My home is incomplete without all the living relationships that I belong to and am responsible for. They remind us that a house becomes a home through relationship building.

Moving reminds me that home is not a single place. Nor is it just a community. Home is a relationship that we must cultivate. Through developing a responsibility to care, cultivating a sense of belonging, and rooting ourselves in community, we become “at home.” I have called California — not just Santa Cruz, nor just Los Angeles — my home for several years now, but I now see that our home is essentially shared. While I still have 4 walls and a roof, I feel at home under a canopy of leaves, or standing in a meadow of plants I know and care about. My home is expansive, with gradations that extend beyond walls and across political boundaries. I feel at home with my family and friends, but also the gifts and objects, plants and decorations that remind me of my past while also looking towards the future. Home is both a place and a state of mind, it is the understanding that we belong somewhere, and that our place only exists in relation to our surroundings.

Moving, my Home

Raised in Ben Lomond, 

Up in the mountains,

Santa Cruz County, California, 

Right by the sea.

Where I grew up.

My Home.

My roots deep as a Redwood tree’s,

My trunk 

nowhere near as tall,

My roots,

nowhere near as wide,

Yet grounded

Here I belong. 

Los Angeles, a world away;

Visits? Maybe. But never would I stay,

In a city of cities, superficially pure,

Towering buildings, never demure.

Yet away I went, for school, oh to learn!

To learn how together we be,

not to earn.

And so I learned of the water

the plants and the air

the people together, divided

unfair.

Belonging for all,

a home amongst homes,

dispersed from all corners

forever we roam.

But a home is essential,

a place, natural by life.

Quenched, sated, and cozy,

a bed for the night.

Wherever we find 

ourselves on the ground,

Community is wider

than time, species found.

My home is together, just broken

yet whole.

We’ll end here together,

We’ll find here our goal.

For home is not bound by walls or by land,

In love we will carry,

In hope we demand

In hearts and in moments, through joy, fear, or strife,

Home is our essence, moving our life.

I came home to the mountains

Returning to Santa Cruz County

Right by the sea.

Under the trees

Where I grew up,

My home.

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Thank you for reading Jewish Ecology. This blog aims to build a participatory dialogue in which important ideas at the intersection of Judaism and ecology can help us root ourselves in the World. This blog is not just for Jews; I aim for these articles to be accessible and impactful for anyone that is interested in building up an understanding of the role that spirituality, philosophy, and/or ethics play in bringing about a more peaceful, ecological, and sustainable future for all People and the World. If you can think of someone who might enjoy these articles, please consider sharing this blog!

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