Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We do not need to bear witness to and grieve the loss of our tree kin, or other losses we might suffer, by ourselves. Trees, who have shown extraordinary resilience in the face of extensive injury, are companions well suited to our journey through sorrow to healing.
Kristi Nelson, Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living, is also the author of Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted. Her life’s work in the non-profit sector has focused on leading, inspiring, and strengthening organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Practiced and shared well, grief gives voice and value to the diversity of the life journey, expressing and crystallising the whole, often painful canvas of lived experience.
Those of us who are lucky enough to be living somewhere in the world where there is enough food to eat, water to drink, and security for us and our loved ones, are living in a bubble.
Take this leap. You are not alone. We are all in this together. Garnish support from and hold space for others. Let’s process, dream, and grow together. We need you now. There is no more time to waste.
While the common tendency with ecological grief, as with most forms of pain, is to turn away in an effort to protect ourselves, if we understand grief and love as interwoven, then to turn away from grief is to turn away from love, to close and harden our hearts.
At this critical planetary moment, the two of us are each considering what it means to deeply accept that our planetary home is in crisis — and how to move forward. Here are some of our individual reflections.
I can already see a growing recognition that connection, inclusion, creativity and celebration are the keys to a genuinely better future.
Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“
Reading Jeremy Lent’s excellent post What Will You Say To Your Grandchildren? and seeing it so passionately take issue with Jem Bendell’s “dangerously flawed” calls for Deep Adaptation, I just felt deep solidarity with both.
Here are a few stories about adaptation, to give a feel for actions that flow out of this type of hope — a hope that includes a hard-won acceptance of the very real possibility of impending collapse.
Today the monarchs are all but gone. That sad fact hit home this week as I read of the 97 percent collapse of the Western monarch population. No number of inspired “Ten Things You Can Do” articles, no amount of milkweed replanting, will revive a species once it falls into the past.
