Dear Motherliners,

Apparently there is a term for feeling sad and powerless about the state of our planet: eco-grief.  Grief is a big wide word that tends to encompass all sorts of longings for ‘different.’  So, eco-grief narrows around a longing or a reality that reflects the scientific and emotional understanding that we humans are dependent on the health of our shared earth.  

But wo-man, tears can flow when you least expect them- they can creep out of the corners of you, seep out your pores, or barrel down your cheeks because you bump your head.  Tears are the watersheds from our hearts.  They reflect our love.  It is only in loving so profoundly, crying so profoundly, that our feelings can reflect what it means to cherish life and our earth in the face of such short sighted, devastatingly bad decision making. Decisions we must all abide, though we did not participate in making them. 

Never lose your tears.  Your ability to cry and see and feel the pulse of our planet.  Tears are like stethoscopes to the planet’s heart.  They listen .  They are a listening that echo our care for Gaia.  But, when we are done crying, the question remains as to how our actions will transform because we felt.  Will we adjust, will we fine tune how we care through the very way we choose to be on the planet.

I often muse and even dwell on how I might create actions that better realize how I envision a healthy planet to be.  Sometimes the limitations dominate the conversation in my brain, but at other times I am buoyed by optimism about how much IS still in my power.  It’s easy, understanding the way corporate and government behavior must shift, to think my choices add up to a big nothing, and yet, I could never believe that.  Because the universe does account for even the smallest shifts.  The introduction of a single insect into a garden can have a massive impact, and I know my choices most certainly do matter.  Not only in material reality but in the way a better choice lifts my spirit, encourages me, and inspires me with what is possible.

We are winding down to take a much needed hibernation break in December.  Hopefully everyone can find some time to let their ground lay fallow.  In the cold quiet, in the short dark days, where waking up seems to trigger dusk, we reckon with our limitations and our potential.  We rest so that we can receive seeds, and support their  germination.  Let’s work our way toward this sacred time and space by dancing together- around all the ways we grew in 2024, around our hopes, around our love, around our vision.