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.

Art as Hope

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that art reemerged in my life at this particular moment – that my impulse to begin tinkering with watercolors happened in the midst of deep grief, hard uncertainty, and painful despair.

There have been some really hard things happening in our country and world, and I realized at some point along the way that denying, minimizing, or bypassing any of it would never work. I had to accept its realness. My task is not to make the horror other than it is. My task is to find a depth of beauty that matches the depth of despair – to find a goodness that can stand its ground and hold its truth in the presence of swirling grief.

When we have been pulled into new depths of despair, it simply means we have to go deeper to find a love that can meet it.

Art helps.

When I’m tempted to believe I’m powerless, creativity reminds me that no, actually I am still in possession of immense power. Because when I’m creating, I’m using the power of my aliveness to dream up visions, put energy into form, and recognize beauty. Art – my own and others – reminds me that aliveness is thriving, as is our collective power.

In other words, art is an answer to despair and creativity is an act of hope. Because it’s hard to keep believing there is no possibility when I am literally creating it inside of me.

So please keep creating, friends. Your art matters.

Creativity, Aliveness, and Hope

This is what I’ve come to believe about creativity:

1) We do not create creativity. Our creative power just is. We support it, free it, nourish it, and channel it, but we do not make it because it already and always exists.

2) Creativity and aliveness are the same thing. Creativity is simply the energy of our life-force reaching beyond the boundaries of our selves to find expression in some tangible form – words, images, colors, objects, ideas, connections, etc.

3) Our aliveness is always pulling us forward into vision and creation. Creativity then is simply a matter of uncorking what is already alive within us.

I find this perspective incredibly hopeful. Because it means that all our visions and dreams, all we hope to create in and for the world, begins with what we already have within us. It also means that we actualize the changes and visions we want for the world with the same energy and power that animates our existence and being. And to get started, we don’t have to look any further than our own heartbeat.

The Both-And Space

For a while now, and especially since the election last year, I’ve felt pulled between two divergent understandings of reality:

1. Times are dire, and things are profoundly not okay. People are being hurt. Oppression continues to roar in old and new and imaginatively reinvented ways. And also: we’re heading toward ecological collapse that will mark the end of humanity on planet earth.
2. Everything will be okay and is already okay. There are deeper forces at work. We can heal. We will turn this around.

I’ve vacillated between the two, trying to figure out which story is most true, effective, and helpful, and to be honest, I’ve not been particularly impressed with either. When I step into the not okay version of reality, I quickly descend into manic despair, despondent self-loathing, and/or fatigued paralysis, all the while torturing myself with visions of apocalyptic hellscapes I’m convinced loom imminently and ominously on the horizon. Exhausted and overwhelmed, I turn to the everything-is-okay story, which feels better until I begin to look away from truths that ask something of me, slip into spiritual bypass, and run from pain (mine and others), none of which is in my integrity.

But in the rhythm of this back and forth, I began to notice brief flickers of peace. I realized they existed in the transitory moment when the pendulum passed through the middle on its way to the other side.

And the more I saw this, the more I felt pulled back to that middle, the space in-between my stories, to the very center of…something – the both/and space, where two or more things are true at the same time. Paradox. And this is the only way I know how to be in the world right now.

So life has sort of become a journey of descending deeper into: “wow, the world is really fucked-up, beyond what I ever imagined. How do we even bear it?” But also and at the same time: “wow, the world is a truly magical place, beyond anything I ever hoped for or imagined. How do we even stand it!?” Both may be true, but either by themselves feels like a lie.

I’m convinced we are living in a both/and time, a time in which we are being called to expand to hold more pain, more truth, more mystery, more paradox, and more magic – to make space for the multiplicities calling our names.

So I’m going in, looking hard at the world and letting the pain of it swallow me up, reaching, at the same time, for a loving stillness I don’t quite understand that meets me there and asks me to move in generative cycles of blended contradiction rather than in straight-lined, back-and-forth pendulums. And sometimes, in this quiet space stilled by paradox, I can almost feel something like hope, an unknown yet familiar thing, stirring under the surface.