First, I want to invite you to share a time when you felt the presence of the sacred, when you felt an opening up or where you can retrospectively identify an epiphanic moment. You can leave a comment here, email me, send a voice memo, whatever feels good to you.
When we talked back in late 2020, Rabbi Sandy Sasso suggested that many humans’ first recognitions of sacred presence is likely tied to interactions with our earth. As one who is particularly interested in the wisdom and openness of youth, this idea captured me and quickly became a through line in conversations for our spiritual ecology series.
In one of my earliest memories of deep wonder, I might have been four years old. My dad and I set our sweet tea glasses on the concrete back porch. Caught by the wind, raindrops scattered and misted our faces, which we turned to the rushing clouds and greening air. We loved this.
We had always lived near the Ohio River, cohabitating with severe summer storms. We’d seen funnel clouds and crouched, pressing our heads to basement walls. Some nights, all night, the weather radio crackled and shouted in the darkness. I don’t think my dad was out of touch with our vulnerability, but I was.
That’s why, when the force from a particularly close bolt of lightning shook our porch, I sprang to my feet, zipped inside, and hid with my mom. My initial response to this display of atmospheric power felt like a turning away, but today, I’d characterize it more as an opening up that has widened over the years into a respect for the potential of our earth’s systems.
Now, as we sense intensifying changes in our earth’s systems, some of us spring to our feet. Some of us hide. Some of us turn to the advice of generations before and after our own. Our responses know no bounds. But as we learn from climate and environmental psychologist Renée Lertzman, it’s highly unlikely that we just don’t care.
“We struggle because the problem-solving mind tells us to run from what causes us fear and hurt. But we hurt where we care. If we run from a sense of vulnerability, we must also run from what we care about,” writes psychologist Steven Hayes. “By learning how to liberate ourselves, we can live with meaning and purpose, along with our pain when there is pain.”
In the spirit of this idea, that we hurt where we care, we’ve been investigating spiritual and emotional dimensions of the relationship between humans and our environments, between self and other, between every being in our communion of subjects. One of our primary aims is to find and practice understandings of challenging feelings as informative, constructive, and unifying.
In one instance of such an understanding, each term, climate educator and researcher Jennifer Atkinson surveys the students of her ecological anxiety and grief seminar.
“Over and over, what they say is that the single most helpful thing about the class was being in the room with others,” she said, “talking about the same struggles and being heard when they voiced their own distress.”
These students’ experiences hint at the multifaceted source of our despair, which includes the broad concept of a planetary health crisis, as well as a longing for fellowship and sense of purpose.
“I think the good news is that the remedy for our existential loneliness is the same as the remedy for the climate crisis,” Jennifer said. “It all lies in solidarity and collective action.”
The challenge, then, is learning to sustainably act. We’ll discuss remedies for burnout in exploitative environments in depth in our new episode (releasing this Friday), but for now, we’re focusing on ambivalence and distraction as related by climate psychology consultant Leslie Davenport and Zen Buddhist educator Stephanie Kaza.
As an exercise, you can think of what you’re wearing.
I happen to be in a graphic tee that I got for supporting a local farm, a flannel-ish button-up from Kohl’s, jeans from Goodwill, and old hiking shoes from some sort of outerwear outlet. I doubt any of it was made particularly sustainably, and I cling to the fact that it’s a collection of gifts and secondhand finds. My ambivalence, then, presents itself as a tension between the desire to wear ethically produced clothing and the challenge of accessing and affording such clothing.
“There can be this constant tension, and it can be very wearing to the point where people, psychologically, emotionally, just kind of check out because it's too hard,” Leslie told us. “It's very difficult to bolster engagement when it feels like you're constantly swimming against the current.”
When limited access to sustainably produced options meets an onslaught of marketing messages reliant on human dissatisfaction, we can struggle to find time and mental space for the relationship-building necessary for solidarity and collective action.
“You can't pay attention to trees and clouds and insects if you are distracted by a barrage of advertising, a barrage of internal needs of not being good enough,” Stephanie said, describing what’s sometimes referred to as the attention economy. “All these consumer forces are competing for your attention. And if they can get your attention, then they can sell the product or sell their scam—that also happens—so distraction is one major way that we become unconnected.”
Unconnected from our earth, from each other, from the fullness of ourselves. In my experience, this disconnection can lead to rationalizing extractive, exploitative, and harmful actions.
So, how can we reconnect? One helpful concept may be the Buddhist understanding of contentment.
"If people were content with what they have and who they are, why would they go shopping?” Stephanie writes in Hooked!: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume. “Learning to cultivate and acknowledge your own contentment is a revolutionary act in these times.”
This understanding of contentment isn't so much about the way things are—things aren't always just or comfortable or pleasurable.
Rather, contentment refers to our relationship with the way things are. In the practice of contentment, we disentangle ourself from opinions, reactions, concerns, horrors. And as a result, we have greater capacity to act.
In the episode, Stephanie illustrates the power of this absence of grasping with a story about the banning of contentment teachings in Thailand (starting at about the 10-minute mark).
Another mode of reconnecting could have roots and branches in grief, which, as we learn from Jennifer Atkinson, is a social process:
“And that's why, when a person dies, we turn to established rituals…But our culture doesn't really have comparable social norms for recognizing or mourning the loss of nature or, you know, a stable climate. And so if you feel grief for the disappearance of snow on the mountains beyond your window or the death of billions of animals and recent wildfires, there aren't really any structures to support you. That's what's known as disenfranchised grief, which is a loss you feel but can't express openly because it's not publicly acknowledged, and that just makes the pain so much worse.”
However, when we find ways to grieve together and hold space for each other, as Jennifer’s students described, we can grow closer.
According to philosopher and theorist Judith Butler, concealing our grief “enforces both a sense of ambient death and a shared practice of deflection.”
In an interview with Truthout, she explained the importance of publicly mourning mass death, as with the pandemic and with principles transferrable to experiences of climate change.
“What one grieves is the life cut short, the life that should have had a chance to live more, the value that person has carried now in the lives of others, the wound that permanently transforms those who live on,” she told George Yancy. “What someone else suffers is not one’s own suffering, but the loss that the stranger endures traverses the personal loss one feels, potentially connecting strangers in grief.”
Environmental researcher, educator, and advocate Ashlee Cunsolo extends this understanding of grief to include beings beyond humanity.
“So the, the really amazing thing about grief is, even though it is absolutely devastating and horrible and such a painful experience, it's something that all humans will experience…So there's this unification piece that's there with grief, but grief also shows what we love,” Ashlee told us. “We only mourn and we only grieve what we love and what we've lost, so it's actually a way to tell us what we value, to tell us who we are, to tell us what we care about, and I think it can point to future directions in how we can make changes both individually and collectively through that recognition.”
So, again, I want to invite you to share what you love, what you hold close and sacred, what opens you up, what brings you into better relationship with others of all kinds.
With equanimity, we may be able to listen to these loves well enough to find directions through and with our changing earth systems.
Since we last spoke
Sanctuary and change with Willis Jenkins
We kick off our return to a spiritual ecology focus by asking environmental ethicist and religious studies scholar Willis Jenkins about the significance of understanding religion in the process of building a better relationship with our environment. We talk about the Lynn White Thesis, Laudato si', understanding Yellowstone as sanctuary, and more.
The power of wonder with Lisa Sideris
Former host Janet McCabe talks with environmental ethicist Lisa Sideris about wonder as it relates with science, religion, Rachel Carson, and policy change. We also return to a discussion on the importance of religious and ethical approaches to environmental issues.
More wonder with James Keys
We ask food access specialist James Keys about his experience and study of wonder—through thoughtful mountaineering, readings, sassafras foraging, etc. And we discuss the many ways we can access, experience, and use this emotion.
Zen teachings for the earth with Stephanie Kaza
Stephanie Kaza—a long-time lover of trees, practicing Buddhist, and environmentalist—walks us through some of the teachings and practices of Zen Buddhism that can help us get into right relationship with the earth and ourselves, which as we learn, are not one and not two.
Concerned Scientists at Indiana University call for climate planning
Host Jim Shanahan talks with Michael Hamburger, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, about the letter that Concerned Scientists at Indiana University-Bloomington recently sent to University administrators. The letter includes requests for a formal climate action plan and an implementation planning taskforce of diverse stakeholders. We reached out to IU Director of Media Relations Chuck Carney for comment and received a statement, which Jim reads at the end of the episode.
Existential loneliness, the climate crisis, and intrinsic hope
What if the science story and the emotion story are the same story? What could we do if we were to deconstruct the dualism of feeling and acting? In this episode, Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jennifer Atkinson walk us through their research on and experience with climate feelings, from grief to guilt to hope. We work on understanding how we can engage with emotions together to help us get into ever-better relationship with each other and the earth.
Climate-aware psychology with Leslie Davenport
While we're not in the business of pathologizing feelings toward our changing environment, we recognize those emotions can be difficult to work with. So, in this episode, Leslie Davenport helps us understand what climate-aware therapy is, why it matters, and how we can tend the interactions between our brains and the structures in which we exist.
Lamenting for the land with Ashlee Cunsolo
We talk with Ashlee Cunsolo, founding dean of the School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies at the Labrador Campus of Memorial University, about the connective capacity of grief, the role of land in Inuit mental health research, and the relationship between agency and letting go.
Naming climate emotions with Panu Pihkala
We've been talking a lot about ecological anxiety and grief, vague and muddy feelings that they are. In this episode, climate emotions researcher Panu Pihkala helps us name and explore what these wide terms hold.
Finally, a quick note of gratitude:
Thank you again for reading our second newsletter. In the future, you can expect more episode breakdowns and reflections, guest writers, host comments, and who knows what else! If that sounds good to you, you can go ahead and subscribe for free (unsubscribing is super easy).
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Until next time!
Emily