Hope, Capacity, and Possibility

{Thoughts on dealing with climate grief and anxiety in the spirit of sharing hope, discussing strategy, cultivating camaraderie, and imagining possibility}

When grief and anxiety flare, my first step is always grounded presence.

I ask myself: How can I be with myself right now? How can I climb back into my body? How can I not abandon myself when the waves of grief and anxiety come?

This reliably makes me feel better, but it also has the practical benefit of getting me back in touch with my intuition and inner knowing/wisdom so I can take grounded action if/when needed.

Deepening my relationship with death and grief has also helped immensely.

When I remember that death is and will be part of my story, our story, the earth’s story and make peace with that (which I would have had to do anyway, even with a perfectly healthy planet), I feel a little less panicked about the future and more grounded when it comes to my place in the universe.

And when it comes to grief: I’ve noticed that letting it move and do its work in me has this shattering function that opens up empty, liminal space.

And that’s a space I can work with.

I can bring intentionality and agency to that space. I can decide how to use it and what to put inside it (I try to opt for groundedness, possibility, and maybe even hope and magic if I can get there.)

I also remember that uncertainty is my friend.

Because where there is uncertainty, there is mystery and possibility.

So maybe the apocalyptic hellscapes my mind is conjuring don’t quite capture the whole truth.

I try to make mystery a space where my mind can rest in the in-between of not knowing everything and hold space for other possibilities.

And finally, I invest in magic, look for goodness everywhere, and practice feeling awe.

Not to bypass or ignore the hard stuff but to *deepen my capacity for it*.

This is our collective challenge: how can we find a depth of magic that matches the depth of horror?

Seeking the answer to this question is the quest of my life, and whether I succeed or not, it sure feels good and grounding to try.

Winter and Aliveness

Where I live, pretty much everything dies, hibernates, goes dormant, or flies away for the winter. Water stops flowing and becomes hard and heavy as a rock. There are days when the slightest breeze against skin is physically painful. The sun sets at 4:30.

And every year, there is that inevitable moment, usually around late January, when we hit the bottom of winter – when things feel so impossibly frozen and lifeless that our bodies temporarily forget that summer ever existed.

But there’s a rightness to winter. Because it’s just the truth – deep and abiding realness.

Winter reminds me of so many things. That stasis cannot support life. That death is essential. That as much as I think I want eternal, unchanging summer, I know in my bones there is something not right about that.

I sometimes think I want forever summer in my own life too – that energy must always be moving, ideas always flowing, activity always happening. But unchanging levels of energy and constant activity is its own type of stasis. And stasis is not organic. Stasis is not alive.

But we are alive, so winter happens inside of us too. And these times of dormant inactivity and motionless stagnation are required happenings in our own life-cycles and inner seasons. To live, create, and claim our own aliveness, we must make our own descents into winter.

And rather than fighting it, how might we embrace its gifts of quiet, stillness, rest, and death, knowing we are held inside of larger natural forces of life, death, and rebirth that carry us forward and around into a new moment, season, or possibility?