Reflections on Issue Fourteen
Permission to Grieve
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Thank you to everyone who had a chance to read Issue Fourteen over the past week. For those who have yet to read it, the reflections from other readers below may be a good starting point, or you can read “Permission to Grieve” first.
The Understory reflections between issues are intended to share thoughtful comments from readers that expand upon and challenge parts of the previous issue. This week has been a very special one. Both online and off, I had the chance to speak with friends new and old about the climate grief they are holding, and to learn from them in how they think about and approach grief. The conversations were host to interlaced emotions: sadness, joy, fear, anxiety, surrender, and hope. It is the layering of these emotions and the compounding effects of their overlaps that make grief so potent and also so vital. By finding the space to grieve and the relationships with those who can bear witness to our grief, we find pain. Therein we also find meaning.
Given the breadth and depth of the comments this week, I ask for your permission to change the format for this reflections issue. I am going to withhold comments about the individual posts. By doing so, I bear witness to these thoughtful reflections and invite you to do the same. As I have been reading and re-reading the comments in preparation for sharing these reflections, I had a soundtrack. I invite you to join me in listening while you read.
Many of the conversations and comments centred around questions of action, or rather our fears of inaction by diving into the depths of grief and never returning. Given the state of our climate, undoubtedly we need action. The questions I ask myself and hear others grappling with are what action should I be taking and how do I best ready myself for that action?
I found great resonance in Joanna Macy’s framing of “compassionate action.” In the recording that Peter Tavernise shared, Macy speaks of the Shambhala warriors who trained in the use of two “weapons”—compassion + insight into the interdependence of all lifeforms. She describes compassion as the heat to fuel our ability to “move out there and do what you need to do.” If we have not prepared ourselves to be radically compassionate, we are not ready yet to act despite the need. As Macy and many others share, grieving readies us by tenderizing our hearts and opens us to the suffering of our world:
“Compassion boils down to not being afraid of the suffering of your world or of your self. It involves being open to what you're feeling about that suffering (grief, fear, rage, overwhelm) and brave enough to experience it. It helps to know that we are all going to die. And you have this precious moment to get close to the suffering and see what it has to tell you. You can't heal something you're afraid to get near. Compassion is what impels you to act for the sake of the larger whole—or put more accurately, it is the whole acting through you.”
Now on to the words of others of which I am immensely grateful. As Joanna Macy says, “when you hear something important, tell it to yourself over and over.”
Comments below are in the original words, and so have not been annotated with quotations.
As Shared by Peter Tavernise
A friend of mine who lost her father last year said what kept coming up for her was: "Grief is the portal. Fear is the gatekeeper." As in, she knew she needed to go through the grief, that was the most real and healthy way to be, but the fear of feeling that grief, and becoming lost in it, was extremely strong. "What if I never get out?"
Somatic and leadership coach Amanda Blake, in her excellent neurobiology of human change class, Body=Brain, outlines the fact that no matter how huge the potentially crashing wave of emotional experience appears to us, holding back the wave is far more costly than letting it crash and then subside. It always subsides, there is always another wave. But holding back the waves is as futile as that metaphor sounds. The water creeps through the gaps into every other area of our lives, manifesting in stress-related illnesses and more.
Robert Bly used to say that the root of depression was un-experienced grief. The grief wants to be felt, but if you ignore it, what happens is it reaches up and pulls you underwater. Better to meet it fully. Or as I have been feeling lately, strongly: "Turn and face the wave."
There is a video of Joanna Macy describing how she discovered that Grief was the most effective portal for people confronting the reality of climate disruption to move through stages into acceptance, and from there into effective collaborative action—which became her Work that Reconnects:
Anticipatory grief is one we run into in climate coaching—alongside the Immunity to Change-type resistance of "I recognize that future is avoidable if we all change our behavior, but I don't want to give up all the luxuries I have now." Like the monkey trap, we can't let go of the shiny or tasty object inside the coconut, so are trapped.
"If we are honest with ourselves, most of us don’t carry the full reality of the world because it is too painful to do so." Like anything, it takes practice. Which is why I value my spiritual tradition of the Zen Peacemaker Order, and the three principles Roshi Bernie Glassman articulated: bearing witness, which must also go with not knowing, and compassionate action arising from both not knowing and bearing witness. Undergirding and scaffolding all of that are the noble truths you already began with, recognizing the reality of suffering, and the truth that while we will all feel pain in our lives, the suffering layer is optional. We do not need to layer additional upset over what is already there. Like you so wonderfully summarized Thich Nhat Hanh's Order of Interbeing, being fully present with what is, is enough. We open to the fundamental and radical abundance of each moment, and also begin to discern what is the appropriate right action/compassionate action in the midst of suffering.
Thank you for starting with Kubler-Ross, and also for including that so-important sixth stage of grief. I love this "If your heart is breaking, you’re on my team.” We are all together in the world of wounds, or as the Bodhisattva vow articulates, may we walk together down into the valley of swords, in order to do the work that needs to be done so all may be liberated.
When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight.The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.John O'Donohue, "For One Who Is Exhausted, a Blessing"
As an aside, thanks again for introducing me to Dr. Renee Lertzman's work. I have been doing a deep dive on her website and also this interview with her (and Eric Utne) just came out this week.
One very important point to add. Pushing away experiences and emotions that we find unpleasant builds distance between us and what is actually happening moment to moment, inner and outer. What that means is that when pleasant situations and emotions arise, we find somehow we also feel distant from those. So we try to distract ourselves from even that disturbing recognition.
The reward for opening to experiencing difficult emotions like grief, is that we also build the skill of becoming more and more present with EVERYTHING that we experience. Which means once we build that muscle, we find ourselves more fully present with and savoring even the smallest joys—all as above in the poem, but worth articulating fully.
See Peter’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his
As Shared by Anne-Marie Brest
Grief is certainly one of the emotions that make people not wanting to engage with the topic of climate change, together with other negative emotions of guilt, shame, fear and helplessness. (This week, I found the following quote from Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication: "Climate Change has become one of the taboo topics, like sex, politics and religion, that does not get talked about...". It's certainly becoming the elephant in the living room and in the board room.) But unlike guilt, shame, fear or helplessness, grief shows us that the information about the climate crisis that we have received has been integrated: a new possibility for action can now emerge from that perspective of loss. The other negative emotions will show up as defenses and will prevent the integration of the information received therefore hindering or delaying any movement towards active engagement. As Peter Tavernise points out in his comment, that is the beauty of Joanna Macy's work. So as difficult an emotion as grief can be, it's actually good news when you are in that space.
David Whyte says it beautifully in his poem "The Well of Grief":
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe
will never know the source
from which we drink
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for
something else
Just reading this from my Awake In The Wild Teacher, Mark Coleman:
"With loving, there’s vulnerability. The reason so many of us are feeling so much grief about the state of the earth is because we love this planet. We love the creatures here, the species here. We love our favorite woodlands and prairies, meadows and creeks. And we feel tremendous loss. It’s part of the reality of this era.
With love comes caring for that which we love, and feeling the hurt that’s being done to that which we love. There’s now a term, ‘solastalgia,’ which means the grief and sadness we feel when we go into a place in nature that we love, and we know it’s being destroyed. This is an increasingly common experience."
To listen to his entire talk click here.
See Anne-Marie’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers
As Shared by Beth OBrien
When I was reading and pondering I could hear the music of the song "Great Spirit (Medicine for the People)" by Nahko Bear playing in my mind.
I started to see the symmetry between the earth and the people like Carl Jung explaining the collective unconscious, that there are parts of the earth, and the people who inhabit the earth, that are both genetically inherited. But here we now stand at the potential destruction of something so sacred that sustains our very being, and we are without words to express our grief. As a Thanatologist I have been in many conversations with people who have difficulty expressing their emotions surrounding losses they have, and still do, experience in their life. I conceptualise for myself that we all have many losses, and that they combine to be called grief. I believe grief to be intimate and personal. I like to use the word mourn to mean the public expresssion of a personal grief. We don't talk about grief openly and we only associate mourning with death, and we certainly don't talk about anticipatory grief and our fear of future losses of our climate. Here lurks an invisible, unspoken deeply painful knowledge of what is happening, but our conscious mind finds it nearly impossible to bring it to the open, to articulate, and then to do any action.
As a Logotherapist I can't help but think of this quote by Viktor Frankl,
“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
I believe some of the answers are there waiting for us in the very elements of nature we are hoping to protect. If we could dis-engage from the overwhelming amount of communication we receive and connection to the non-natural devices of the world, and retreat to the oceans, to the forests, to the rivers, to the plants and animals, we can receive the refreshing energy we so long for, and then, in turn, have renewed energy to accomplish our dreams of looking after our environments and ultimately the climate that surrounds our very being. Don't ask what is the meaning of life, ask what is the meaning of your life.
See Beth's comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers
I hope this week between issues provides the space for further discovery and reflection. Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. See you next Saturday with Issue Fifteen.
Adam
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Why I Write The Understory
We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The scale of the issue demands not only continuous focus but also the courage to take bold action. I've found that a persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause.
The Understory is my way of organizing the natural and human-made curiosities that capture my attention. Within the words, research, and actions of others lies the inspiration for personal and organizational journeys. I hope that my work here will help to inform not just my persistent consciousness, but yours as well.