Climate Grief
Audio recording here.
Thailand’s chief meteorologist in the 1990s persistently argued that coastal communities should be
outfitted with tsunami alarms. It was a wild idea - an outlandish idea - at the time.
But, he had been studying the relationship between underwater earthquakes and tidal waves. And as he began to raise his level of concern - alarm, really - people thought he was fear-mongering.
As soon as his cautions were seen as disruptive to the tourist trade - he was pushed out of his position and largely discredited.
It was the day after Christmas in 2004 when an underwater earthquake off Sumatra launched a tidal wave that surged into the very coastal provinces he had warned about.
More than 5,000 people died in Thailand.
More than 225,000 died in thirteen other countries - in one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history.
I remember the newspaper that morning - the 26th. I was visiting family for Christmas. I was in college. My mind was taking in the facts of it all, but something about it was incomprehensible. The number of deaths, the suddenness and completeness of the destruction.
But by the next week or two - my mind was beginning to make sense of it somehow — as a once in a generation climate event.
Then the next year was Hurricane Katrina.
Some part of me broke open then - as maybe it did for you.
How could this happen?
How do we fix it? All of it - all the pieces.
But it wasn’t until the Gulf Oil Spill in 2010 when I felt pushed to real action. When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded - and millions of barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico.
I remember watching the Rachel Maddow Show that week…or nonstop for weeks…and they had this live feed playing throughout the show - it was from an underwater camera toward the base of the leak - just capturing the hemorrhaging of oil.
I was transfixed.
Both comprehending and completely unable to comprehend the consequences, the loss.
The loss that was both in that moment but also in the future.
I went down to Louisiana, tried to do something — to keep BP accountable, to listen to and spread the stories of people on the frontlines.
People like Chris - who lived on the Isle de Jean Charles - the historical homeland and burial ground for the tribe of the same name.
Chris believed he lived on the most beautiful place on earth - and he shared directly and calmly about the way his home was slowly eroding, slowly sinking as a result of storms and decades of extraction and major land disruption.
You might be someone who feels all of this very deeply.
You may have lived through a traumatic climate event or extreme weather. They Hyde Park fires here, the 2013 floods - a hurricane, a tornado - somewhere else that had been your home.
This is its own kind of experience - its own kind of climate grief.
And - we’re all living in climate collapse.
We’re all living in a moment of mass extinction.
We’re all living at a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we have less than 10 years to make rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of life - everywhere - in order to curb warming.
In order to prevent irreversible changes to complex systems of life that we can’t even predict.
And we’re all living in a moment when the Washington Post is reporting on eco-anxiety and climate depression in youth.
But this is not a service about how to take action.
There are a lot of really powerful climate justice movements happening across the world - fueled and often lead by those living this acutely - on the frontlines.
People like Chris - Indigenous communities across the globe many of whom with intact knowledge of how to live in balance, in harmony with the Earth as humans.
And right here at Foothills we have a strong and growing Climate Justice Ministry - pushing for needed oil & gas regulations in Larimer county and on air quality regulations at the statewide level, organizing carpools to church, cooking meals together to celebrate the gifts of the earth.
But this is not a service about how to take action.
I don’t have a message about how we fix it.
Because grief can’t be fixed - it can only be felt.
“We are bombarded by signals of distress” writes Joanna Macy, psychologist and student of Buddhism and deep ecology, “Not surprisingly we are feeling despair…what is surprising is the extent to which we continue to hide this despair from ourselves and each other.”
We hide the despair from each other often because many of us were taught that grief is - a problem, something to get over, to solve.
Grief is so uncomfortable — especially other people’s - I heard someone recently say.
But we also hide this despair from ourselves - deny it, cut ourselves off from it.
Joanna Macy’s work unpacks some of the ways this tends to operate:
We might be in a place where it’s all too upsetting and we prefer not to think about it. It’s not that you’re not aware of climate collapse, maybe you were once really active in change making, but now it’s just too overwhelming - maybe even paralyzing.
Or, you might think I’m blowing this way out of proportion and things are not that dangerous.
Maybe you think there’s no point in really engaging this reality - it won’t make a difference.
Or perhaps, you might be in the midst of your own very personal storm of grief and loss - or just life - and there isn’t any more space for anything else.
I think for me it’s been a mix of all of these - at different times.
I mean, what real tools do we have to be in relationship to an existential threat - to the potential loss of our own existence? It’s so total yet somehow so abstract.
As human begins, cognitive science tells us, it’s very difficult to process future-term threats, and our positivity bias allows us to continue to believe that life will go on as normal.
Our minds find it very difficult to even comprehend this moment.
But our hearts somehow seem to know, our bodies too.
Emotions. The way we feel.
Maybe the way you felt when you watched the images of the fires in the Amazon recently or the ones in Australia (if you did).
Maybe your heart-sank
or you felt angry - furious even.
It wasn’t happening in your life - exactly…but it also was.
Maybe you felt overwhelmed
or overcome by just a desire to go to sleep - to just shut it all off somehow.
Grief can look like all of this.
Grief can be so uncomfortable, physically.
It can feel thick and endless, heavy.
“like when grief weights you down like your own flesh -”
writes Ellen Bass in this morning’s poem - “only more of it”
”When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;”
You might know this kind of grief - intimately.
In the death of someone you love - and who loved you.
In the throes of an illness that changed everything.
In the end of a marriage.
In the loss of the way you thought your child was supposed to be.
How did you learn to grieve? Who taught you how to grieve?
How did you know what to do with these massive emotions?
Shauna Janz, teacher of sacred grief, reminds us that grief is learned.
And by that she means - grieving - the process, the verb, the motion - the movement of our losses - is learned, we don’t just know how to grieve. We have to learn.
The models I had for grieving growing up - were not very helpful. It was a lot of sitting quietly, behaving while having my own awkward turn in front of an open casket.
I think I had to wear an uncomfortable dress and shoes - and no one actually talked about the person who had died — somehow finding everything else to talk about except the loss that was right in front of us.
But I don’t blame anyone for not learning how to grieve, they were offering what they had been taught. Many of us have been disconnected from rituals for grieving for generations.
And more than that - many of us have learned that in the face of pain, loss, grief - within ourselves, within our children or those we love - our learned response is to try to fix it…as if something is broken.
Shauna Janz works with individuals and groups of people to remember how to grieve. And she points to the struggle that many of us have when big emotions swell - not as some personal lack - but a collective lack of models of how to grieve.
What if the fear that sometimes rises - the fear that says - we can’t go toward the grief because we might get stuck, we might never get out - - what if that fear is because we’ve forgotten how to grieve? Some of us at least.
What if nothing is broken - not in the sense of something being wrong, or out of place.
What if - when grief shows up - it is likely exactly in the right place.
Feelings of sadness, despair, dread, grief, outrage, alarm in response to current or coming losses - are totally healthy and appropriate.
Grief is a measurement of our love.
An expression of our love, its one of the shapes love takes.
What if the opposite of falling to your knees and weeping for a planet burning is falling to your knees and weeping in awe of her beauty. It’s so connected - so, the same thing in a way.
The tears - or the anger - in the face of yet another unprecedented weather event illuminates the interdependent web of life of which we are a part. We feel the loss because we are that. We are made of that.
The pain - a certain kind of reminder of our connection - of our belonging to life — human and more than human.
Despair work - as Joanna Macy calls is - is not an invitation to stay in despair but rather to not avoid it.
Despair work in fact says that you must not avoid it.
That in order to live with vitality, to seek joy and connection, to pursue love and justice - we must grieve when grief is present, we must feel sadness when sadness is present, we must feel pain when pain is present.
We must acknowledge and move what is here - in order to know what is next.
Like the words of poet Nayyirah Waheed: “grieve. so that you can be free to feel something else.“
And so perhaps its time that we remember how to grieve.
To not look away, but to move in closer.
To let the tears flow as long as they want to flow.
To find a place to yell.
To sing a song about the earth’s beauty with both joy and sadness.
To open your vocal chords in anger - to lament - to call out to God, why?! why?! ripping your clothes, beating your chest — like the Psalmists in the Hebrew Bible.
To plead for mercy. In word or in song.
And we’re not meant to grieve alone, grief is meant to be witnessed.
By another person, by people you know well or don’t, within an aspen grove..surrounded by witnesses.
Remembering how to grieve means remembering how to be with each other’s grief.
To refrain from fixing
to move into witnessing
long silences
deep breaths
“We need more places to fall apart,” writes Dr. Bayo Akomolafe.
That’s how he describes what grief is - to fall apart.
Dr. Bayo is a self-identified recovering psychologist and founder of The Emergence Network - an organization of trickster-activists-artists inspired to rethink our patterns of responding to the climate crisis.
“As a practicing - or as a recovering psychologist - “ he shares - I was taught to “help: the grieving subject recover. To help you get back into the game - back into the cycle of productivity - to ‘pull yourself together’ if you will.“
Dr. Bayo argues that it is in the very slowness, the wildness, the mischief of grief, in the very discomfort of the indeterminacy of it - here, he says, exactly here is where a new way forward waits to be known.
A new, creative, regenerative way to live and to respond in this moment. That climate grief - grieving in response to climate change - is a necessary process of relearning and transformation - a necessary experience to integrate a changed reality.
A process that might just reveal a new kind of resilience - not free of loss, but one that has learned to live with the loss — and the way it sits right next to love.
That it’s through the wreckage, through leaving space for what actually is - that we can then hold life again between our palms, dusty and bruised - maybe even on our knees - and from that place be able to say to this life, to your life, our collective Life
- yes, we will take you
we will love you, again.
Amen. May it be so.