ecospirit

“So much of struggling is trying to send out hope, but having grief echo back.”  Hannah Sanghee Park, commenting on her poem, “The One Mockingbird Only Sings at Night.”

One response to the ongoing climate crisis, a disequilibrium verging on collapse, has been to grieve, both ritually and informally, what we are losing: individual species, ecosystems, as well as relationships in the age of Covid, and much else related to humanity’s historical moment.

Margaret Renkl’s NYT essay, “I Don’t Want to Spend the Rest of My Days Grieving,” published in late summer, refuses to travel that road. “Life is not at all a long process, and it would be wrong to spend my remaining days in ceaseless grief.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/opinion/nashville-summer.html?campaign_id=94&emc=edit_owr_20210815&instance_id=37986&nl=sunday-best&regi_id=91234879&segment_id=66316&te=1&user_id=8b7e582a945a3084f9bc576a342b9373

Renkl goes on to enumerate all the wonders that still remain in her local world of Nashville, Tennessee, despite tears in Mother Earth’s fabric.  Renkl’s essay is evocative and elegiacal, but she misses the crucial realization that one may find hope on the other side of grief, if one attends fully to the grief, especially with the support of others.  I have frequently noted in these pages Joanna Macy’s groundbreaking work in this area.  So much of struggling is trying to send out hope, but having grief echo back. Denial of grief, so common among eco-activists, only leads to burnout.  Naming the grief as a confession in the presence of open listeners can lead to reconnecting with the Earth’s wider intelligence embedded in her planetary organism like so many micelia, so that we may serve the whole system, not just our grieving or hopeful selves.  So grieving is necessary.  We are losing a lot, and we will lose a lot more. 

However, many eco-activists rail against grieving over the planet’s condition, seeing it as giving up.  The question is, does acceptance of what we see all round us, and of the implications of the findings of climate science mean giving up, as Naomi Klein has frequently argued?  Grief is the natural response to full acceptance, but working through that grief, and the accompanying despair, can lead us through those emotions to the possibility of hope, including, for some, renewed initiative.

I know that I have not attended grieving as much as I did when I led workshops along the lines that Joanna has long demonstrated. It’s a matter of practice, and if it is unattended, we lose the benefits. So, as an intermittent griever, what is my hope?  Its ground is my deep faith in Creation, and the remarkable power of evolution.  That latter territory is laid out in the emergent cosmological paradigm shift describe in Rob Messick’s Regenerative Universe (to be released next spring), affirming the cosmology of ancient Vedantists, world after world (see my essay in Dark Mountain). Stay tuned for an announcment this spring about Messick's upcoming book, which is a major event.

My elder, a West Virginia Quaker, said to me recently, “How wonderful it will be to watch what unfolds on Earth after we are gone.”  Perhaps not wonderful, but definitely fascinating.  Do we feel none of this matters if we aren’t here to observe it?  Margaret (Renkl), life is a long process, not from the perspective of a single individual life, but from the perspective of evolution; not just the evolution of life on earth, but cosmic evolution.

As for grief, I’lll give Wendell Berry the last word: Be joyful even though you have considered all the facts.