Fires and floods, melting ice and rising seas, this beloved heating planet careening into amplifying extremes of climate destabilization. How are you in the midst of this emergent reality?

Many of us are navigating grief, a sense of helplessness, fear, anxiety, despair, denial, in relation to this collective circumstance that is rapidly growing in intensity. Climate change is being described as a superordinate trauma, threatening the survival of our species and all life of Earth.

How to be with this reality? Joanna Macy offers wise counsel:

"We might be able to slow it. We can try to reduce the harm coming from it. We can explore how to live and die lovingly because of it. But all of that we can do because we have a faith or sense that this is the right way to be alive, not because it will work. Most calls for hope that we’re hearing are from, or for, those fearful of living with death in their awareness . . . It is time to drop all hopes and visions that arise from an inability to accept impermanence and non-control and instead describe a radical hope of how we respond in these times. We believe it’s possible and necessary, through mutual inquiry and support, for our fears, beliefs or certainties of collapse to be brought to a place of peaceful inner and outer resourcefulness. Ours is a time for reconciliation with mortality, nature and each other."

from Joanna Macy's chapter in Deep Adaptation

photograph by Richard Virrueta

Our personal experiences are part of the whole, rooted in contemporary contexts and historical forces.

Contemporary heirarchies of power and dispossession, transgenerational traumas and brutal systems of inequality, colonization, slavery, wars, genocides, witch hunts and other forms of historical collective tyranny and terrorism impact every person living today. Life is participatory and contextual, and we humans are pourous, rippling with the currents we are immersed within. We internalize culture and we cocreate it, we push against, reconfigure, generate, and transform culture as we are living within it.

Our economic and power structure of global capitalism creates a driven psyche, benefits some, exploits others, maintains poverty, fuels disconnection, abuse, and disembodiment.

These cycles of impact of collective harms travel through generations in cultures, communities, and families. Our own personal lives are rooted in this living context of rippling shock waves of collective experiences of historical harms and ongoing injustices.

“But we are people with the gifts of both memory and imagination, able to learn from our many histories and create what does not yet exist. ….Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining….I am imagining all that is possible when people stand among the ruins of a colonial misery they can’t bear and ask, What could we do instead?” Aurora Levins Morales.

We carry within our collective, and within our own psyches and somas, deeply wise lineages. Loving kindness, care for Earth, care for the whole, right relations, interbeing, presence, embodiment, creativity, generativity, humility, ancestral knowledges of healing, rituals for being with grief and sorrow, mindfulness, and the simple and profound nourishment of meaningful togetherness and solitudes.

We can rekindle our living connection with these health-fostering lineages. We are carriers of living wisdom and can strengthen our intimacy with these life-giving currents. We can grow our capcity to become collaborative creators of cultures of love, inclusion, and regenerative innovation.

In the midst of so much complexity, practices of relatedness, connection, and imagination offer solace, nourishment, and strength for the work of these times. Growing our ability to respond, to shape shift, generate, heal, and be together truthfully and lovingly.

“In this time we are called to be both death doulas and midwives.” Joanna Macy.

“The work is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them ..If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible” ~ Francis Weller