The Grieving Ones

Written in response to Alan Urban’s recent post, “The Profound Loneliness of Being Collapse Aware.”

I am one of the Grieving Ones. Part of me is sad all the time now, and I can’t tell whether it’s my awareness of what is happening, which I carry with me constantly, or also maybe simply the awareness that I will not live forever and will have to let go of this beloved earth, this beloved life, at some point in the next few decades.

But it’s more than that, too. It’s the deepest imaginable grief for what we are doing to this amazing planet, these amazing creatures and beings, this unbelievably precious shared existence.

I remember sobbing through a showing of Josh Fox’s How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change a few years ago, which looks our new reality squarely in the eye. I couldn’t stop crying, even as he came onstage when the movie ended and made us all get up and dance. So I danced, tears streaming down my face.

I believe in taking every action we can, every moment, everything everyone said in the comments to Alan Urban’s thread. I told my college class the other day that we have about 7 years left. They listened politely.

One of them asked, What do we do? I said, organize, but I will follow up on that next week. I will tell him you should seek to have as much of the following…