A gift is a recognition of plenty, of having enough to share. Or maybe it’s a recognition of need. I guess it depends, and I guess maybe it’s both. It’s the constant matching and mismatching, the commitment to place and time. 

I’ve even encountered this sort of denial face to face: on my last day of teaching at my former college (though I didn’t know it at the time) an acquaintance placed her hands on my shoulders and said “Oh Heather, don’t worry. It isn’t our fault. I’ve been doing deep spiritual work for 10 years now, and the climate is changing because our solar system is passing through negative energy.” This is a person who was an environmental activist and had been tear-gassed and kettled by police in riot gear at one protest.

However, this is exactly what I found myself doing after 25 years of teaching geology, earth systems, and climate science. What was abstract and interesting at the beginning of my career, over time became increasingly dissonant with what was not happening politically in order to prevent climate and ecological breakdown. Teaching young people about the climate system and its human-caused breakdown while they do not have the agency to stop it, while we scientists and educators plod along in our (mostly) secure lives and jobs, is morally problematic.

Our educational system ought to be built around a nuanced understanding of ecology, earth systems, and our place within them. Would we be facing the intersection of human and geologic time in the form of climate and ecological catastrophe right now if government and business leaders had earned degrees in Human Ecology? Or Earth systems? If they had to, as part of their formal education, learn how to grow organic food and care for farm animals? To harvest or slaughter, store or process, and cook that food for their community? To live in and be accountable to a community? I doubt it. Because every policy or business decision would have to be made in the context of living on a physically finite planet, informed by real, face-to-face interactions with humans, other animals, and the living systems that enable us to live here.

As we go about our daily lives as privileged people in rich countries, most of us don’t spend much time thinking about the climate emergency, let alone talking to friends and family about it. The problem of the climate crisis is so big, so all-encompassing, and the causes of it so intimately tied to the neoliberal socio-economic reality that we live in and have grown up in, that we cannot imagine a way out. So most of us just don’t talk about it- especially not to our families or associates. Especially not during the holidays. But we need to. We MUST.

Misinformation spreads faster on social media than the coronavirus spreads through a crowded room, and it can lead to poor decision-making by individuals and governments that then affects entire communities and even the long-term viability of life on this planet as we know it. 

If I’m absolutely honest with myself, this long weekend still is a treasured time. It offers much-needed space to enjoy several of my favorite things: creative cooking for others (with at least some foods we grew from seeds we keep), a luxurious stretch of slow days filled with reading, snuggling, game-playing and leftover remixing, and giving voice to our gratitude. But that’s not something that feels safe or even sensitive to say anymore. In fact, I’m not even sure how the hell I’m supposed to refer to today.

The more I thought about it, the more the disposable pie plate felt sad, more a sign of alienation, loneliness, and impermanence. The sort of feeling I get when I remember that we produce food via the exploitation of others in faraway places whom we never have to meet, never have to look at in the face, in the eyes.

One definition of care is that it comprises all the support and attention we need to make our world. Care maintains and contains and repairs the broken world in which we live and love and have our beings. Care is the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical capaciousness that lives at the heart of making and remaking our world.

Think of those who serve the cause of peace, honor their lived experiences, and dignify their dedication. Let silence and stillness remind you of what peace might feel like. Let it remind you that peace is possible if we rededicate ourselves to it.

A broken heart is a portal. It can lead us, if we let it, to all the other broken-hearted people who will no longer bear the world as it is. To all those willing to continue showing up with their still-soft hearts — gaping but beating just the same. Maybe stronger. To those who journeyed into the darkness with only their belief in the inexhaustible power and irresistable logic of love. To those who will eventually sit and rest in the darkest depths… and reach out their hand… trusting that anyone else who’s traveled this far also did so to escape, to start again.

Even if we have an inkling of the impact we wish to have, the path ahead is unlikely to be linear or easy to trace. As we collectively face intersecting ecosocial crises — and recognize the need to exist as part of nature and in ways that promote equity and mutual thriving — we cannot be certain of what we’ll need to know in the future. Why, then, do we expect young people to invest so much time in their education without first the chance to explore their identities and figure out what broken parts of the world they most want to repair? And why do we expect older people to grapple with a changing world in isolation?

And then — the most important part — we get to talk it all over together, as we deepen into our months and friendships together — our hopes, our dashed aspirations, our grief, our longings, our commitments, our fear, our aliveness. With eyes fully open to the predicament that our times represent (and an understanding grounded in the late David Fleming’s work), we get to find our way to meaning, together.

FLF offers practical workshops about farming, seed saving, composting, mycology, apiculture, natural dying in accessible, stage-appropriate ways to community members of all ages – toddlers-through-elders. They restore knowledge of medicinal herbs and plants that support preventative approaches to taking control of one’s own health through workshops on topics such as growing your own herbs, the endocrine system, digestive system herbs, and medicines of Black captives. Additionally, FrontLine provides food justice lessons about systemic apartheid-like conditions within food systems. Finally, language justice is prioritized at FLF, which provides interpretation for each public class and public meeting in Spanish, English, and other languages as needed.

Living soils and well-managed, clean water are essential for bringing hope to a part of the world that didn’t benefit from colonialism, capitalism, or globalization and is already experiencing intense climate impacts. The Maati-Paani-Asha Center at Gopikabai Sitaram Gawande College (MPA) aims to address the challenges in and around Umarkhed, India by modeling and supporting a transition to agroecological farming practices that regenerate soil, water and hope, increase food access and provisioning, improve food marketing practices, coordinate community infrastructure improvements, and disseminate novel psychosocial supports.

Plenitud’s founders were young – they followed where their interests pulled them, they experimented, traveled, studied, and discerned what they wanted for themselves and their world. Mentors showed them the way. Soon, they began to sow seeds. Slowly, their network grew, their farm grew, and so did their impact.

“Neither a blog post nor an email nor a playlist nor some poems will bring back the dead or create safety for those in harm’s way. It will not change the course of geopolitics or the hearts of the power-obsessed. It will not bring an end to apartheid or war. But it might help us hang on to compassion and moral clarity as conflict contorts into genocide. It might let us fall apart together and reassemble the pieces of our broken hearts into something new. Something more capable of bringing the other worlds that are possible into being before it is too late.”

“In a brutally colonized world, indigenous thinking offers vital possibilities for reawakening, realigning, and reimagining. Restoring and re-storying. Yet, even as we honor and are inspired by indigenous ways of knowing, being, and belonging, we also try to resist the tendency toward abstraction. It is important to simultaneously open ourselves to the world-saving potential of indigenous knowledge systems, values, and lifeways, materially support the well-being of indigenous peoples around the world who are protecting, preserving, and evolving their cultures despite fierce and ceaseless challenge, and resist attempts to further erode the sovereignty of indigenous peoples near and far.”

Because despite everything, Lucy the cat suddenly matters more than anything in the world. I need Lucy the cat to matter. Because if she doesn’t, then why bother mourning the climate crisis at all? When we mourn the climate crisis, when we remove abstraction and think about what it really means for the climate to change, I suspect we’re actually mourning Lucy the cat. We’re mourning her mattering.

Even as I failed to notice the rate the water was rising, the scenes became weirder. The yard now had a current. Car alarms were sounding in the distance. Fire trucks driving through the water created huge wakes. Sitting on the dock that was once my front porch, I was literally splashed with a moment of clarity at the severity of the situation when the waves created by the passing truck sent a ripple of water over my head, drenching my pajamas. The toilet and tub began uttering foreboding, ominous gurgles.