I see you brought a bucket truck, we said climbing only, there’s no vehicle access.

He schools me, “They always say that, but usually there’s a way.”

I’ll show you, but we picked this company for climbing.

I reluctantly walk him into the back yard. Looking behind to see if maybe the other guy was there but I hadn’t noticed. This guy wore a bright, dirtied pink long sleeve tshirt, a different color from the rest of the crew. I was stuck with Mr. No-name. Fuck. He repeats, “There’s usually a way to get a bucket truck in. It’s easier that way.” Easier for whom, assholes.

No, we said no trucks. Plus there is no access. Even if there was, no.

My stomach drops, at this point, I realize if there had been access, they would have taken it. The way gangs of men do. Ignore. Assert. Bully. Pressure. Gaslight. I repeat all the things I had previously said. Conservative pruning. Only doing this because of the real estate neighbor. That one branch needs to be trimmed off his shed roof. Not too close to the leader. Don’t make the twinning leaders out of balance. Only some of the dead, never 100 percent. Nothing else alive trimmed. We want healthy trees, we love these trees.

Great way to start a Tuesday. Maybe it wasn’t intentional manipulation. We all know the mighty dollar reins over relationships making it a sleight of hands nonetheless.

All day I was wrecked. All day my nervous system on fire. All day the chipper left running next to our bedroom even when not in use. All day the little red machine loader with its human-ant driver zipped back and forth carrying branches to the chipper. All day the smells and sounds of gas powered machines whirled and whizzed. All day the swirl rises in my chest and pushes up heavy into my collarbone. All day so much guilt. All fucking day.

This panic, I know it. I trace the intensity to that fall semester after the pandemic shut down was lifting. Calls for return to campus. Not because it was safe. It wasn’t. Business as usual forced by others. Death was right outside every door. Workload overwhelm smothered by new expectations to care for other’s safety and mental health. My dean recommended university therapy for me. Prescription-required panic attacks started shortly after. This moment felt irritatingly like that one. This round though, death stalked back and forth outside my office door on a DitchWitch. It compressed soil. It ran over a newly planted serviceberry shrub. It broke branches off other trees. It zipped around like a bumper car making up its own rules.

I lost a whole day of productive plans to regret and worry. Probably not really fair to say it was lost. More like taken or given. It’s not safe, and maybe not even wise, to show up as a full-feeling embodied human being in this world of soullessness. When you do, consider yourself put on notice for an upcoming PIP. Or labeled as the crazy tree-hugging neighbor. Or simply told to deal with your mental health issues. There are drugs for that. My body knows this gaslighting cycle of asking for relational care, but being slapped with individualized problematizing.

Kinship is inconvenient. All relational belonging missing. For the rest that morning after the crew’s arrival, I slump inside my home office, peripherally keeping one eye on their stomping back and forth. Peering around the edges of windows in-between zoom calls to monitor. Betrayed by crew; betrayed my kin. Pissed off and helpless at the same time.

I imagine the Trees whispering to each other watching,

w a i t. i s s h e c r y i n g? s h e ’s a c t u a l l y w a i l i n g. p o o r t h i n g, n o n e o f u s
a g r e e d t o t h i s, s h e ’s t r y i n g t h e w a y h u m a n s d o.
o h h u m a n s o r r o w.

I’m near hyperventilating by the time I walk back in from scoping out the crime scene while the crew was away on lunch break. I head right into the kitchen. Take a big sip of water,

Come back into my body.
Just breath.

Shaking my head back and forth. I stretch my arms out to steady myself resting my palms on top of the cool kitchen counter. My head drops before I text my husband,

They’re on lunch break.
It looks so bare.
I feel so emotional.
Wahhhhhhh.

It’s my fault. It was the wrong choice. It was the wrong composition. It was the wrong foreman. It was just wrong. I don’t trust this group. I don’t even know what the fuck this one calls himself. These crews of nameless men act like their world is just lifeless construction worksites.

Why the fuck did I let this happen. I let the Trees down. We were just building trust. Fuck. I’m no better. Just another typical soulless human.

I never would’ve initiated it, but I have to take responsibility. We agreed after the neighbor texted,

Have you considered pruning that big corner tree?
I want the branches that hang on my shed roof off.
I’ll pay for half if you do.

The request alone stirred up anxiety spirals. There’s the looming liability of trees as property and their damage to property. There’s the cost of trimming huge old trees. There’s his legal rights to cut and chop branches and roots based on encroachment and easement. There’s no protection or rights for Trees; Nature is property to be controlled and resourced according to the US Constitution. It would be his gawd-given right. At least right now he’s asking rather than going all cowboy DIYing like he did to the northside of another lot’s elm when he built that damn gigantic metal shed. Which he could have moved 10 feet east on his acre lot and never would’ve had to mess with any trees. His acre has no trees. I need not say more to relay one’s character.

So. We agree. The chosen arborist had to meet some criteria though. After a couple handful of calls, we interviewed five on sight. Walking them around, we showed them the job, expressed clearly the conservative nature of this one. A neighbor requirement otherwise we wouldn’t have called you. No trucks on site. Wood chips stay and return to the yard. These are elders. They shade. The Twin Elms lend an arm for the saucer swing. I want them here, and I want them to be healthy.

I listen for how they talked. What words did they use when they saw that the trees are Siberian Elms. Any slights of ‘just Siberian elms’ or ‘the weed trees of the front range’ were out.

The first guy. We were not more than five minutes into the conversation and there he went, blabbering out his mouth hole, “Well, the elms aren’t the only issue, once you trim them you’ll still have the squirrels. They’ll eat away what’s left of the green. And ya know the only way to deal with ‘em is to pop metal in ‘em.”

Bye-bye. And a hearty fuck off to ya. I know guys like that from growing up in rural Louisiana. They don’t hear NO. He’d call at least ten more times to followup.

Many other suggestions were brutal in other ways even though the heath reports were all ‘good for Siberian elms’. They wanted such extensive pruning of main branches that then they would need to drill holes through the sides of the two twins and insert a wire cable to hold them together so they didn’t split apart, someday. Mind you, they are not splitting apart right now. They are actually two trees that grew next to each other. Twinsies. Touching into each other’s trucks over so so many decades. They all said, they’d long live past our lives.

Most companies would only do the ‘job’ if they could fit huge bucket trucks right up next to all sides of the trees. We required climbers. We didn’t want more soil compression and damage, as we are already trying to remedy that. And there’s no access for any size vehicle anywhere in the area. It’s the layout of these lots and other existing trees and one neighbor’s broken down car junkyard. We also hoped that climbers might be less inclined for big butchering hacks.

Four interviews in, I found the foreman I was comfortable with hiring. That foreman did not trash talk about Siberian elms. He said they were beautiful, just like I know them to be in their Dr. Suess-y ways. That foreman and I talked about how these old ones matter. How we are trying to preserve and protect against those who want them gone, eradicated, ground up, just out of inconvenience and modern human preferences.

He shared he talks to them as he climbs and prunes. That the Trees understand human ‘rules’ require tasks like these sometimes. And these tasks can be done respectfully. The Trees know us better than we know ourselves.

You’ll be the foreman that day? You’ll make sure the cuts are conservative and kind? You’ll leave the wood chips here so they can return to where they’ve always been?

His name was on the work order in the confirmation email sent the night before. I settle,
the Trees will be okay. They will know I found someone who cared.

But, relationships are inconvenient, after all. That foreman would not show up. I don’t know why. All I know is time is money. Efficiency matters most. Relationships are inefficient. Time consuming. Tick tock, tick tock. Relational knowing is the antithesis of the modern pace and our made up systems of hierarchies.

Coming back into trust is a practice. The Trees hadn’t given trust easily. Actions speak louder; intentions matter too. Predating prune day, I had removed the nails from the Twins’ trucks that held bright yellow plastic insulators for a hot wire fence. I had pulled away bits of chicken wire and even barbed wire that had grown around, cutting into their sides. Pieces of metal stakes banged in the roots on one side. What was the previous owner keeping in or out!

To make amends of past humans. I offered gifts. Crushed up home grown Nicotiana rustica sprinkled around the bases of all the already-here-trees. Whispered prayers. Water. A child’s swing, with permission, to the westward mountain reaching arm. Human laughter reverberating up from that seat through the branches. The Twins shelter the littler ones, the serviceberry twigs, the corner elm offspring, a sitting spot bench.

Their shelter is needed. Sun and heat have been harsh. We’ve been stuck in a compounded climate feedback loop in northern Colorado with our new normal of extreme abnormalities. A growing aridification of the Rocky Mountain west radically changing landscapes, ecosystems, and lifestyles layered with severe drought and wildfire smoke on top. E v e r y s i n g l e t r e e m a t t e r s, especially during what is currently the warmest, driest summer (and past spring and past winter) on record.

YTD amounts of rain have equaled only about six inches, according to CoCoRaHS Data Explorer. That makes us about on par with Tuscon averages. The majority of our rain coming in one week of May and a few nights ago. We spend our water allotment with five dripping hoses to all the Trees. Lingering longer on our new babies added this month of July: Northern red oak (Quercus rubra), Northern catalpa (catalpa speciosa), Skyline honeylocust (Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis ‘Skycole’), a Colorado piñon, Mt Royal plum (Prunus domestica), Golden Delicious apple, Crimson Spire oak (Quercus crimschmidt), Persian fruiting mulberry (modus nigra), and a baby blue Colorado spruce (picea pungens glauca). Those join four others we planted in the last three months. One day maybe they’ll reach far across to the others who were here already. In addition to the old elder Elms, we are trying to nurse after years of neglect a ponderosa, peach, and apple, varieties unknown. Each one of these teenagers with an odd 40 degree extreme southern lean. And I love them all.

Modern hope holds a dose of toxic positivity while the other hand has a death grip on inaction. I’m not hopeful. I’m grieving.

Prayers whispered for each one as I mixed by hand the native hard AF clay soil with the worm castings and other compost yummies. Pilling up wood chips in an embracing donut shape around them. I like to imagine these cute babies’ tendrils joining with our elders: the Twin Elms and the middle guardian Elm. The love that propels my grief honors with me the care for these 14 trees. Offer more whispers of love to spread beyond to the those trees outside of this man-made property lines, to reach to the grand Cottonwoods just yonder, to the Box Elders and their wonderful shade that’s a haven for the swarms of their namesake insects, to the prolific native chokecherries, and other our newly planted serviceberries, currants, and sumacs.

Grieving is inconvenient. And yet completely necessary for expressions of love. If I wasn’t grieving, I’d be a soulless robot zipping around. Humanity has been so trained to not feel anything. Feelings and felt sensations in their absolutely embarrassingly messiness are completely inefficient to capitalistic productivity, to churning through the next project, and flipping profit. Every moment we offer ourselves up to grief is a little prayer that slow drips into the heart.

At the end of the work day, my husband hugs me tightly when he gets home. Shuffles me into the car to get a burrito. A resettling of safety with artichoke queso and warm corn chips.

If we felt safe enough to be honest about our grief, it could be received as a gift for others and allow others to step up with tender connection. While human tenderness is not always comfortable, it is warm and sweet.

Walking to the car, I hear a sound of chainsaws off in the not too far distance. Do the trees flinch now too at that shrieking whirl? Do they send out whispers,
s t a y s a f e, b e s t r o n g l i k e E l m, f l o w l i k e O a k, t i m e m o v e s l i k e
S p r u c e, o u r t e n d r i l s h o l d y o u…

Flinching, I start whispering out prayers.

oh human sorrow…..

Hold tight to the tendrils of companionship, reach for each other in the darkness, feel the whispers soak down into the layers through these times of great grief and break open wonder….

xoxoxox with love and grief,

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Write the unmaking of your grief as a child - the ways children know how to grieve and then lose it.*

To all the ways I lost my grief - trained by others to mask and my own child instinct for survival - I offer compassion to the deep cavities of heartbreak and send a long breathe into those twisted up memories held in the tensed fascia of my body.

May the scars on our hearts learn to be pliable and the webs of memory holding our collective griefs release fully into the arms of Mother.

The Grieving Nest as Innate

The time before the threshold age of tweendom, I’d spend hours alone in the backyard under the loblolly pines of northern Louisiana. Loblolly, what a wondrous word to roll off your tongue, out loud, over and over, Loblolly, Loblolly, Loblolly. These Tall Ones, Loblollies, were one of my first loves.

They lined the west chain fence and created a wooden boundary line between my playhouse and my brother’s treehouse. The far northern side beyond the pines was a known no-go territory, for me at least. Under the loblollies watchful eyes, I’d sweep up all the previous season’s fallen pine straw into a large donut shape using a fallen cluster of needles as my broom. It transformed into a cozy ground nest where I’d spend hours being a baby bird fed and nourished by Mother up in the treetop.

Mom, when are you returning it back to the hospital?

The older brother, four years old at the time, asking them to return it as if they had ordered a jacket too big for him. A colicky kickstart to life on this side of the womb. Born to a woman in her own deep depression and grief after caretaking her father from colon cancer to cemetery. Maybe it was post-partum, I won’t know, she’s deep in dementia now. Maybe the why matters less than my holding compassion for how I know now that griefs compound and complicate when folks lack the tools and comfort to work with them. Our toolbox was empty.

The stories a family chooses to pass on, with an air of pride, regardless if they were flattering or not. The grandfather, Reverend Billy, whom I never knew, apparently was a man of god who led lively revivals under hot, humid tents in Mississippi. Revered throughout. My point of pride, according to the stories anyway, was being a challenging baby. I suspect I was gifted with his lungs. We were just singing out different sets of hymns.

Only your grandma would hold you through the night. You were always a challenge. I hope you experience what I did when your daughter is born.

Revenge in the form of punishment for what were cries for co-regulation. The nerve of me to pop out as a fully individualized being responsible for my own soothing, as a newborn. She did get her ‘wish’ in a way. I, too, was graced with a daughter much like myself and I’m forever in awe of her. I held and nursed that baby through all the nights and days with so much love and understanding. In ways, she reparented me and I am forever grateful. I had been filling up my toolbox in preparation.

Nature-nurture, baby. In my 40s, it would make some kind of fucked up sense. Colic, then, equaled a bad stomach, irritable newborn personality, can’t be breastfed, and needs to be managed by crying it out as to not reward bad behavior. Now, findings point to the central nervous system development of babies, born sensitive to over-stimulation and with not yet developed self-soothing skills. Layers of deep sorrow flood my body and linger in a tearful funk to finally have information that maybe I wasn’t a problem child, only a problem to some. Research also shows a correlation with a later ADHD diagnosis, which would have been so helpful to have known earlier, but here we are.

You’re too sensitive. Stop crying. Only babies cry. Cry baby. You’ve always been a cry baby. Cry baby.

My brother enlisted me in his hunting expedition one night at dusk. I felt wanted. My job was to lift and hold the large wooden dog house with scrawny 8 year old arms. Simple, yet important. He could then reach under to capture the bullfrog. His plan was turn him into a frog legs snack, I’d later learn. Plans went awry. I let go. I couldn’t hold the weight. Crushed - both the frog’s croak and my heart - under the falling house. Fear flooded my skinny body. I knew my brother’s wrath. Rejection - at least that feeling was familiar. Shame in my complicity turned my face beet red. It was my fault that the frog met his early demise. I wanted belonging so badly in this family system that it cost me a bit of my heart and soul. The consequences of killing another living Being not without sacrifice.

The loss of our dear Mother Earth and her Beings from our own behaviors. Our bodies and brains try to make sense and reorient to the sensory loss of life, of innate connection and true belonging. All the pathologizing of emotions and ‘climate anxiety’ is endemic to the same toxic disconnection from our innate grief. The betrayal of a family system who sever those ties. Earth grief, collectively experienced, yet we refuse to feel the loss of our one true secure attachment relationship. We stay in denial over our Earth grief. My Loblollies never shamed my attachment or ridiculed my homemade mud pie offerings.

There were other many messages that my little skinny dirt-stained body absorbed, that my child brain couldn’t reconcile. My mother sold my pet rabbit (an easter present) for $5 to someone who’d use her for breeding. I knew not of her trafficking plans. My brother punched my horse, a gentle retired giant Tennessee Walker because he thought horses were stupid. My rescue dog was run over while I was at college because he was driving too fast down my parent’s driveway. The woodchuck gutted open, exposing her unborn babies, in the woods behind our grandparents farm. The deer I was told to watch hanging outside the shop as you all skinned her. Their laughter echoed as I cried. Undignified wrong stories. The first lesson in unmaking is often your own family.

My list of loves and losses as an expression of my contrition.

To Fluffy, Smokey, Margarita the dog, and all the Beings,

Our furry and feathery Friends, who art pure love, hallowed be thy life.

Forgive us our trespasses, as I will not forget when we trespass against you. And lead us into our sorrow, and deliver us from humanity.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Unskilling Grief Groomed by Disconnection

Environmental Science was hazardous but not from climate change. It served up a repeating cycle of noxious methane where I was the body forced to absorb the toxicity of the system.

High school taught me what connections were safe and the ones not. English class was benign; Environmental Science was malignant. English was safe. It was the Honors class. Jay** wasn’t there. English had diagrams, neat and analytical. And since all good girls follow the rules, I excelled. Mrs. Pearl’s class though had Jay sitting behind me that year. He found ways to grab me during classes. When the teacher wasn’t looking, or worse, I’ve considered what if she knew, that’s a dark spiral. It would go one of two ways:

You’re not a good girl, you’re just white trash, inviting it. Slut.

Or the other equally bad in the eyes of teenagers way:

You’re such a prude. A goody-two-shoes.

I internalized all of this. No win, all guilt. The Madonna-Whore complex grooming in school: another successful system that unmakes.

I did what my beloved Pines taught me: compartmentalize. I sealed off my love of learning about our Earth right along with the internalized shame. I’m bad and not worth protecting. Earth must not be worth protecting either. Bodies and their exploitation. Many of us then have sealed off our love and attachment to Her body and our own because it has brought on mocking, hurts, harms, and traumas for many of us.

Take the coal rolling truck trend with the dudebros who spew black smoke intentionally when passing pedestrians and cyclists. A weirdly pseudo-suicidal behavior, technically illegal, yet increasing rampant along the Front Range. Like, ‘fuck you, clean breathing air,’ it makes no logical sense, so irrational that it can only suggest toxic disconnection.

Disembodiment is normed, preferred even it seems. Reinforced through separation language choices - the body not mine or yours, female not woman, truck not man who chooses to drive the truck and do harm. Severing the body from the brain keeps us as cogs in collapsing capitalism. The only way to make late-stage capitalism work is to break your body, so that you break Hers. There are many ways to be a helpful cog in the machine, like sitting in plastic chairs (or truck benches) for eight hours a day, five days a week or more.

The result was simple. I turned my back on studying Earth, as I turned my back to Jay. It was subconscious at the time and came to surface only through first meeting my career grief in my 30s. I studied characters and people in systems rather than stars and soil. Baggier clothes always part of my armor, supported by the 90s grunge style. I majored in English literature. I hide by keeping my nose in the books. I was vegetarian before it was mainstream.

Plants and animals, like some humans, meant to be of use to and in service of desires by those higher up on a made up food chart. Any of us ‘lower’ than subjected to disinterest and discarding when no longer serving their desires and needs. Requirements for survival: disassociation and disconnection.

My body quickly learned it was a site of danger and revulsions. That awkward church sermon on the impurity and sinfulness of the female body because there was a type of god who punishes with monthly bleeding, cramps, and painful childbirth. A god who threw up a big middle finger to Eve for wanting to know herself. She failed to stay in her place just a broken bit of a ribcage, not even worthy of a womb.

I lie down, stomach pressing down in the grass, with my heart up against the soil, ribs pushing in with every deep breath, crying out prayers:

Oh, Mother, full of wonder, you are always with me.

Blessed art though amongst all,

And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, all Beings.

Holy Mother, Mother of all, pray for us disconnected, now and at the hour of our return.

Unlearning the Conditioning is to Rehuman

Adults, all angry and drunk, stomping through the house to get to the garage fridge where the large jars of Polish sun pickles were kept along side the beer and potato vodka. That same fridge also housed the generic brand strawberry and grape sodas, the former were my fave. The grandkids finally sent off to the movies. The Addams Family forever a reminder of our unskilled capacities in grieving. When my first grandparent died while I was in high school, my adults showed me exactly what I had learned about grief by that point. Loss makes people so uncomfortable that many will yell, usually at each other, maybe at you, probably simultaneously and definitely loudly, but also sometimes with a silence that could kill.

Grief held these and more stories deep in my body. Squirreled away like nuts to get me through the winter. Memories are the fascia of my relational ties between this body and those bodies, the human and more-than-human. The female body, and all her experiences, sinful at worse, unwanted or ignored at best, and just odd and scary in between.

I was so well groomed out of embodied grief that I naturally pursued a career focused on a Life of the Mind. The sterile kind that academia offers up on an ivory platter where everything neck down is overtly dismissed, ignored, and cut off with an air of superiority and a whole lot of bias and bullying. There was a great cost to that ivory, too, as there always is.

I made a bargain with the devil, and for awhile, it went well as I blissfully ignored my human-bodied condition. But when I hit 39 years old, he came collecting, serving up breakdowns of all kinds. They would be the gift of break opens in disguise; initiations back into my grief. Though at the time, I certainly tried to muscle and hustle my body into compliance as had worked up until that point. After all, there were many work versions of my brother asking me to be complicit in my own death over and over. Little sacrifices of soul. Tiny slivers of the heart cut out. Armored up to truncate the bleeding. Stay late. Work over. Sacrifice that relationship. Strive for more. These values, not those.

The losing of loss. The knowing that existed before the severing, shaming, and murderous cognitive dissonance. Our connection cut off at the womb of our human mother, then cut from our natural mother as we head into school, then any lingering connection cut and compartmentalized through conditioning so that we head right into being robot cogs in the capitalist machine by graduation. By the time we enter the workforce, we’re traumatized and severed from grief without any practices or community to process and heal with. Born knowing how to grieve yet through our lives and relational experiences, forced to lose that capacity.

Career and climate grief don’t really exist as kids but they get seeded. Maybe you hold some moments of memory of what it feels like to be in touch with that innate knowing for love, sorrow, and imagination. Career is as much of an identity as is the identity for kids with play, then that identity becomes as students, and then as workers in systems of careers. The shaped identities that exist because of productivity metrics, school art show ribbons, forced sitting and stillness, and critical judgments. All externalized identities in systems that sever you and me, the humanness of us, off from the natural world. Our one core shared identity of embodied Beings fractured and compartmentalized.

All the hardening off of our embodied capacities to grieve as if we were tomato seedlings and just needed a little exposure to the world so we could then be productive for its consumption.

Until you’re invited into the remaking of grief. That sweet sorrow-filled opportunity to reconnect your human living body, Earth’s beautiful body, and all the more-than-human bodied beings. From the body of a gangly Dr. Suess-y Siberian elm. To body of blooming blue flax. To long slender needle-like body of the ichneumon wasp with her intimidating ovipositor. To the bodies of the unseen. All the bodies in all the wondrous forms and unforms. I don’t know about you, but I just want to talk to them all — hear and feel their lives through my own body — nestled and held in that bird’s nest listening to love in the arms of the Loblollies.

Through the (re)making of my grief connection, I offer myself at the altar of collapse. Prayerful gratitude through surya namaskar and the return to true belonging:

I’m home, I’m home, I’m home.

The urgent sense of rehumaning comes with questions to you:

Will we, as humans, reconnect and repair our repressed grief (in enough time) to relearn being in right relationship with all of Nature, as Nature ourselves?

What was the unmaking of your innate grief? When and in what ways did you unlearn how to grieve? And bigger yet, how have you relearn your embodied grieving process to find your way back home?

*I received this prompt in my last session with Kati - @katherinestandefer who writes over at the Wild and Holy Moment and is the author of Lighting Flowers. Her 2020 book is a captivating read - I devoured in just a couple days (I don’t typically read that way anymore so big deal) that weaves her own (and family) story of getting a defibrillator implanted in her early 20s due to a surprising genetic long QT diagnosis. She then goes on quests to trace the origins for the parts and lives that go into making these life-saving devices - as she says “the cost of saving a life”. The familiarity of the landscapes of Colorado, Tucson, and Wyoming counter the Madagascar rural and urbanscapes. The precarity of healthcare in this shittyass US system and the indignity in which the system treats the human body and soul, all laid bare on the pages. Highly suggest reading this book along side her substack where she shares about her process for writing it - how writing the full self into public offers requires such body and soul (spiritual) work (on top of craft) to create moving pieces that are both raw and healed.

**Names changed.

What an opportunity to practice the kind of slow that partners with a demand that you don’t (aka can’t) meet your own internal expectations and timelines. The slow that says, failure is not that I didn’t post or write Dirt & Disobedience for 5 weeks. Failure would have been if I had forced myself to. Good jobbing is to lean into grace and compassion from others and myself. My body, soul, and mind all clearly were purging themselves of unwanted and unserving infections, each relevant to their realms.

Anyway, I’ve been cleaned out to make way for October, a month presenting itself as demanding in it’s own ways. Or perhaps posed as invitations to grow by letting shit go. To show up for the fragments, in the fragments of this chaotic time. Broken pieces of clarity, full bodied knowing, pattern recognition, forecasting options, noise, so much mother fucking noise. All that flies at us when we’re responding to the day-to-day demands of life-ing and caring for others (and ourselves) while simultaneously holding grief’s hand full of the resolve to ground into embodied action each day, for all of our lives and the more than human life. Phew. That’s a statement. All the while, knowing there’s not a goddamn thing I, or you, can do to control or predict which way collapse will go, other than how we show up each day, together.

To get back to the swing of things, I offer you interconnected fragments, meditations if I’m being generous, on some of the more raw reckoning through our individual and collective awakening from illusion.

xo

Bare chested yearnings while numbed out in captivity

The deadened dermis from nerve damage numbs the heart and blocks the light of the soul. Yet, time after time, the desire to rip off your shirt, to just sit there, even if just for some minutes, bare chested and exposed. Despite the threats, which are they even real. Maybe because of them. A raw fire flickers underneath all those layers of armor. At first gasping for air.

You thought your workplace was a place away from the noise, from the threats, like meaningless work that others had to worry about, but not you. That the bubble was it’s own armor to keep away the things that didn’t matter to your purpose and impact. Turns out it was a cage, ensnaring once warm bodies within its toxic iron, suffocating out the warmth and light as the bars grew closer together. This captivity is normal, they said, privileged even, are you honor to belong inside the cage?

Your identity equated to a job, company, institutional mascot. Or maybe you’re slightly superior from all that basic, and you identify as your field. “Oh, no, I’m not a Trojan. I’m a philosopher.” You can’t see your true identity tied to the soul roles you play for your community through collapse, like that of healer, space holder, defender, comedian, artist, firekeeper, or whatever your gift is.

It’s all the same. All excuses to tolerate treatment that pits you against others, competing for attention, resources, acclaim, or the next paper certificate of accomplishment (they’re actually digital now so you have to print it out yourself). All setting you up to be judged by the harshest judge. The one who evaluates and flings commentary about your worthiness of quality and quantity. You know her - your inner critic - which they help keep groomed.

To validate your imposterism, you tolerate or, even better yet, make excuses on their behalf, their bullying and regular micro-aggressions. That eventually, and quickly, fall into flat out sabotage and spirit murder. They pride themselves on being bastions of creativity, integrity, and innovation; yet, belittle you when you dream outside of the five chapter format. You don’t fathom it as brainwashing. You signed up after all. More so, you begged to belong, to that cage. You self-sacrificed and self-flagellated all along the way, even as you defend them as you breakdown.

Yet you feel the urge growing. It’s raw serpent nature. To yank your shirt overhead, unhook that restrictive bra, and breathe expansively, finally. Bare chested and rooted to ground, like the garter snake who swaggered by as you shook out your blanket to lay down under the apricot. To expose your body would be to expose your heart and soul.

Chest of sagging breasts from years of nursing an actual living life yet supple enough to perk up when aroused by a cool light summer breeze. The fears flickers, what if the neighbor looks through the fence and sees an aging woman laying there writing. Creativity’s spirit immediately cracks back, why are you looking through someone’s fence. And you should be so lucky.

The fears of policing other’s behaviors. Of monitoring women to know their place, to cover up, to blend in, now with #maralogoface, so that you stay shut off and fully clothed. Fragments cut deep like a skilled surgeon’s scalpel. Drips of blood pay the cost of living through times of collapses. Climate. Menopaused body. Work systems self-imploding. Education blown up to erase individual thought. Humanity sold for stock market portfolios prioritization. The sharp edges, not tidy, to lay you at the lap of the false demigods of hope. We’ve been worshipping at the wrong altar. The old one is hollow not hallowed.

Left holding the ashes in gritty acceptance

I remember how the 2020 wildfires turned clear street views into a fog of crispy brown with red outlines that sunk into town from over the foothills. A common placating response were chirps of, ohhhh, wildfires are necessary for regeneration. I suspect it soothed their cognitive dissonance or nervous system to focus on the chance that on the other side of that summer’s suffocation and corresponding virus could have something positive.

New trends meet ancient advice, but really they’re just churned into the death grips to hopium. We disconnected from the wisdom of when that was true, when there was time. Now it’s out of context and, as some might say, too late (you decide for yourself, I’ll share the data). What I do know is that when people say it’s too late, they get blocked, shut down, and reported online. Social scrollers can’t dare face what they won’t see.

Grieve for ignorance. Atone through the aridification. The woods, dried out, scrub brush is ample kindling. Did you know it has a name? Charshadow (n.) — The outline of trees left black after a forest fire. Let that sink into your soul. New human language to account for our ecocide - thank you, Leigh Fletcher, for this way of naming to bear witness.

The owl comes to escort you to meet death, the dying all around and within you. Burnt tree statues of what once nourished the kind of life we like to recall when we close our eyes and think of Nature. The charred skeletons perhaps provide refuge for insects and decay, but that’s the kind of life we turn from because it holds loss and isn’t pretty as a butterfly.

There is still life, but now you have to look more closely. You have to slow down, become more intentional in your appreciation of the life/death/life cycle. It’s gratitude for the fireweed, grasses, the variety of grasshoppers. The beauty in death is that it bares open her bare chest for all to see and witness. But these aren’t the breasts of supermodels. They’re the ones of conical boobs directing you to glance down to Earth, because they too are directed downward. She doesn’t worry about nosy neighbors who lets their dogs bark incessantly. There’s a fire burning inside that makes you flinch.

She invites your radical acceptance of death. Surrounded by nothing more than rocks and rumbling outcroppings with low scratchy grasses waving. Dry, dusty, edgy. Ecotone transitions are abrupt and condensed to an invisible line. Bald, bare, raw segments mostly, a small gathering of saplings spared.

Grief burns. Climate fueled fires scorch, often beyond survival. The remaining landscape mostly unrecognizable. It’s disorienting. Who is this new old body left after menopause burned up your youth, charred ashes of hormones and desire scattered around on the ground. Aging is not fucking poetic. It’s not duplicate poster children of Cindy Crawford.

It’s rough, raw, gritty. Like the edgy prairie grass blades, sharp with microscopic barbs that carry an itch to get under your skin without the salve to soothe. Unapologetic. The winds wave through the grasses and dry everything out a bit more even though you didn’t think it was possible. Maybe they can fuel the flames of creative fire. A bitter taste of hope lingers with the thought.

Fires that burned stronger than any other transformation to date. There is no false return or rewilding. Some landscapes are lost forever. Even places abandoned don’t return to the wilder landscape of before. Nature may reclaim but is forever altered and something different all together. I think the return or rewilding - that’s just the next false hope of today. The doomism and denial of collapse is the fake positivity of rewilding. It’s the denial of our impact, of how we’ve imprinted, of what we’ve lost and wont get back. It’s unkempt, it’s raw, it’s an unsteady wild. One that you wish you hadn’t looked through the fence to see, but one you can’t unsee no matter how tightly you squeeze your eyes shut.

Grief fueled the wildfire that burned through the landscape of my body and climate.

Collapsing conspiracies and name calling

It all sounds like a conspiracy though, Tamara. From change, to crisis, to now you’re saying collapse. It’s a bit much, don’t you think.

Heads in sand, is what I think. It’s the frog in the pot and the sand is getting so hot it’s vitrifying into sharp fragments. It’s overwhelming. Down right exhausting, the US, the clingy neediness, the daily what used to be easy lifts turned into overloaded, short circuiting.

Naturally, I then questioned myself. Do I sound like what I think conspiracy theorists sound like? I analyze the words I’m use to express my thoughts, feelings, and felt sensations. It must be me who is the one off kilter, not all these other folks, these friends, former colleagues, the neighbor with the side eye.

It must just be my brain who is in collapse, holding this as my non-stop running question. Menopause decline. Long covid perhaps. Early dementia signs. Maybe. Undiagnosed ADD. Who knows. Insert whatever latest possible health outbreak is or isn’t in the news anymore because it’s been deemed to or not to exist. Imagine, in just a few short months, what all has been eradicated: autism, covid, Tylenol, climate, and more. Praise be. Am I right…

Maybe the conspiracy theorist is not me. Maybe it’s you or that person over there. Do we know anymore. Where has our discernment gone. If we ever had any. Focused on business as usual. Waiting for rebounds. For some magical back-to-normal that’s been promised to be waiting around the corner. Oh, the next corner. Nah, the next.

In the meantime of waiting, we’ve misplaced self-sovereignty, a sense of agency, and god help us, any sliver of a moral compass.

The grief all that weekend felt unsettling. It danced with anxiety, and whispered, find your connections, be with your neighbors. No, not that one. Those ones. I put my panic to use. I made a huge pot of pinto beans cooked down with onions, garlic, and the last of the garden peppers. Pureed into a dip served next to the summer’s tomatillo salsa. Shared at the neighbor’s house potluck. Such moments the salve to the continuous cuts of isolation and gaslighting slices that spread as whispers of misplaced conspiracy.

Under the veils of ignorance and avoidance is connection. The pulsation of being alive. Expand and contract. Like growth, the breath, in and out, not linear at all. In regimes, I’m told, (first timer here I admit), there is no space for the active rest of contraction. This, too, is my design. We’re the goddamn leaders in exploitation and oppressive extraction after all. Greenwashed and gaslit so that we can keep waking up every day to live out the conspiracy that you laughingly accused me of.

It’s past time for us to trade new cars for community and urban development. And no, that EV is the same problem, different clothing. The shift from consumption of material goods to non material choices. From the newest, nextest of whatever distraction tactic to self-understanding and relational connection.

What people love about sustainability is the belief they don’t have to change a damn thing about themselves, and definitely not their lifestyle or the convenience that’s been killing us all. You’re offered a carbon trade off option to keep business as usual and soothe the cognitive and somatic dissonance. It’s like drinking a soda laced with aspartame, bleach, and horse tranquilizers, while bragging about being a health guru on TikTok.

But the latest and greatest wasn’t enough anymore. Now they’ve added in real threats… kidnapping, genocide, and accelerated ecocide. Like fully visible in our mother fucking faces and on Instagram. Yet, oh, but I bet my stock rebounded with AI investments so my retirement is stable again.

I’m sure it’s sustainable. I’m sure my 401k is safe or that it has time to rebound before I retire sometime between 2035-2055. Potentially right in the middle of that Earthly collapse forecasted to happen during that time. But I’m accused of being a conspiracist. My investment benefits someone else’s profit and continuous growth demand. We the privileged are playing into the system that is killing us.

My mom has been prone to the sway of evangelical followings, let’s say, like anti-vaxers or anti-science movements. I remember the moment she started storing self-canned food under all of our beds after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. I’m sure there were signs well before that, but I moved out in 1994. Her inherited rural southern depression era embodied traumas make me hyper-attuned to conspiracy tendencies versus interpreting the data from multiple sources to forecast it out as best humans can. Words and labels are so very weaponized.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s that they’ve stolen our collective future and we’ve all let it happen as we turn away to look at the next shiny thing coming being stocked at the front of Costco. I do love a good Costco run. Fear keeps us out of grieving. What if we all found radical acceptance that we’ve been sold a bill of greenwashed goods.

But yea, it’s probably just me and my conspiracy tendencies. Better get back to earning the right to live and paying the increasing cost of living.

xo

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Let’s talk collapse, death, and creativity instead.

The death that’s availability through collapse of our current mindsets and behaviors can offer rebirth, to creative life and new beginnings for sure (actual life, I don’t think we know yet). What that life/death/resurrection looks like won’t be anywhere near how you or I want it. It won’t come with the comfort and ease of what got us into this shit show. Nor can we control it, but, really, that’s the only sense of hope that isn’t performative and false.

Your body is your true home. Earth is our true home for these bodies. This moment. Yet these bodies aren’t able to keep pace with the accelerated damage and extraction rates we’ve done and continue to do.

If your menopaused body continues day after day to stay in that toxic workplace with overing behaviors that leads you to work 60 hours a week while running kids or aging parents around and holding on to all the emotional and cognitive stress and labor, you’ll collapse. It’s just a matter of time.

I’ve done that. I lived in a way that violated and ignored my true home, day after day. I’ve seen many clients teeter on that edge, too. Doing just enough self care to keep them from falling off of it. Until the day they are D.O.N.E. I always wish for them to be done by their own accord rather than by the toxic systems or a breaking body and soul. But we all have to find our own way of learning and often many of us are taught it comes through the hard way.

I might hope for a sustainable body. The reality of midlifed and menopaused offers me constant instability and fluctuation instead. I might hope for sustainable living on Earth. Collapse awareness offers me constant grieving and righting of my life instead.

Maybe I don’t actually want sustainable. Fuck sustainability, as it’s currently configured in the U.S.. Maybe it ‘works’ in other locations. Questionable though.

I don’t want to sustain this menopause body in pre-menopaused ways. I can’t even if I wanted to. And trying means throwing products, supplements, cremes, and whatnots more than I already do. Sure, no need to suffer more than necessary, but there’s a line that we’re sold into crossing in order to buy shit that that snake oil folks peddle.

Instead, I have to adapt to the ever emerging realities of my parts working differently than before and then transform my lifestyle and way of being in the world in response those changes that just keep coming. And you bet, hell yea that that means constant cycles of grief, loss, and (re)creating my identity as much as my wardrobe to go up another size.

And then to talk about sustainable living. Let’s cut the shit, there’s not much here in these modern, western (capitalist) human ways worth sustaining.Not mainstream wise. Of course, there are pockets of individuals in communities living in righter relationships. And I do think in collapse and death, there’s potential to grow those communities in awareness and action.

But in the mainstream, in meantime, though, what are we sustaining? The right to throw shit away because we hoard free plastic water bottles and t-shirt giveaways? You want more options of shitty fast food that’s killing you but you’re overpaying for it with underpaid employees working three jobs without healthcare? Truly, pause and tell me what sustainable practice are you wedded to that’s worth fighting for? If it’s truly is sustainable, then likely it has little to do with profit and economic growth, is my guess.

I don’t want a sustainable body in menopause, nor do I want a sustainable planet in collapse. I want bodies that can adapt and transform in response to environmental changes, together, actively.

Having wrapped up just yesterday, six months participating in a sustainability leadership program, I’ve been intensely thinking about the language of sustainability and when and how people use it. I’ve landed on this:

We humans have fucked everything over, generally, and not in a good fucking way. Not all of us equally or the same, of course. Privilege and money shall prevail some folks a bit longer or with a bit more climate migration ease than front line communities. But all in all, humans must have some perverse flaw to believe and behave in ways that are directly against our own best interests.

I came in to this program because I wanted to build local relationships and to strengthen how I talk about climate resilience (the inner work) with folks in sustainability and business spaces better. To understand how they think of our collective climate crisis because over the last five years of intentionally engaging in climate health work (focus on the cognitive, psychological, and community parts), I have found we aren’t on the same page often. I hoped that to know their language, I would know what matters to them and could bridge that gap to help folks prepare and live/work better. Ultimately, I wanted to equip organizations and communities with the tools to build climate-conscious, resilient ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Simple enough, I know.

Over these months of some twenty-ish presentations and tours delivered by regional leaders of various businesses, nonprofits, and governmental leaders, I’ve got a clearer picture:

Profit and growth. No big revelation there. After all sustainability + business = the triple bottom line. Because we can’t handle the truth that business as we know it has to die. It’s already collapsing. And unfortunately, we let this country drag our educational and healthcare systems into profit and growth models too.

One presenter honestly represented the triple bottom line as a hierarchy pyramid with economic on the bottom, then social in the middle and the smallest on top is environmental. All built upon the belief that every business in this western model has the goal to make money for themselves or stakeholders in large amounts rather than the covering my bills amount.

Other more common metaphors used to represent sustainability are often a three circle Venn diagram or a stool with three legs or three circles with environment/Earth encompassing all. The application of the triple bottom components aren’t equal in practice; his presentation was, at least, honest about it. And even John Elkington, who coined the triple bottom line in the 90s, admitted a couple decades later that it failed the systemic change to capitalism he hoped for and instead was co-opted for greenwashing and financial metrics.

Folks even in the sustainability space don’t seem to want to talk collapse either, generally speaking, I’m sure there are exceptions and you might be one of those. Up until this point, most of my climate trainings have been more in eco-psychology, climate aware therapeutic interventions, climate community public health and communications. In those spaces, sometimes we talk collapse, if it’s a space that honors and incorporates grief, that is. Otherwise folks want the pain to stop, the anxiety to go away, the trends to reverse, or to give up. But as a fellow participant in my sustainability leadership program admitted when I did facilitate a session on climate grief, he said, “grief is depressing, I don’t want to do this.”

In Buddhism, the First Noble Truth is to face the truth of suffering. In the Earth Holder Community of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Plum Village, I learned the teaching that the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows exist side by side. (They still offer online trainings and sanghas). And through that door is an invitation to interconnectedness and liberation from greed, anger, and self-inflicted genocide.

May we face the truth of suffering because another Noble Truth is the True of the Path - each of our role in cessation of suffering. Thay also said, “Seeing and acting go together. Otherwise what is the point in seeing.”

Years of overcompensating for weaker physical areas and avoiding hard intentional work, led to muscle imbalances in a menopaused body that ushered me directly in physical therapy last fall then to pilates to retrain.

A life of overcompensating for our weak human areas because we want to avoid hard intentional work, has led to such a drain on all of Earth’s systems and imbalances that have ushered all of us - the guilty, the complicit, and the innocent - into instability and a bleak future.

Retraining has a lot of suck. Doing something different than the easy is extra shitty more often than not, because it takes intention. And we live in a modern world that advertises numbing out and convenience. Even when cognitively we know it also offers a lot of strength, empowerment, and confidence.

Meeting this moment - addressing my body’s imbalances - isn’t done by hoping my body wakes up and goes back to its twenties. As if I could just hope it back to a time before pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause all separately had their way with me so I didn’t have to change my lifestyle, behaviors, comforts, and habits. Ignoring only lands me in more costly, exhausting, and dangerously limiting situations.

Meeting this moment - living in early (?) climate collapse - isn’t done by hoping our way through recycling campaigns and sustainability leadership conversations about far off transitions to more renewables. As if we could just hope Earth back to a time before greedy capitalism, natural resource extraction, and human exceptionalism had their way with our future’s future that is now staring us dead in the face. All so that we didn’t have to change our lifestyle, behaviors, comforts, and habits. Ignoring only lands us in costly, deadly, and dangerously limiting situations.

Learning now how to live well through and with instability is the invitation of this moment in the early part of collapsing bodies and systems. Ignoring and hoping others do all the stabilizing on your behalf is immature and dangerous. Preached by the influencers targeting midlife women with their products and services the compelling refrain that what you do now is what you do to your 70 year old self. There’s truth under that, sure, but what’s their goal compared to yours?

Nature doesn’t like efficiency, nature likes resilience. Nature doesn’t want one pathway, nature likes lots of pathways. We, too, are nature. Be more nature.

Climate solutions may be ‘easy’ to implement. Assign the money, then do them. By the anti-aging cream, then apply and watch yourself turn a decade younger before your very eyes. But we generally don’t do the harder thing. We fall short, often.

We as humans are so terrible at far horizons and long term planning. Is it because mostly because we don’t want to change anything we’re doing right now in this moment? I like the feeling of hanging out at a brewery, tasting hops, and chatting. I know not far down the road, my head will hurt, my fat will expand, and I’ll be blah again. We just want it to be different, down the road, and surely all the someone else’s will do it instead of me.

The cognitive dissonance of our mindset and the low emotional resilience in dealing with grief and collapse.

Now part of this goes well beyond individual thinking. We’ve been intentionally fed a crock of shit through fossil fuel campaigns with recycling and sustainability language that makes us think power of change lies in individualism or carbon credits and neutrality. All of it is cover for status quo. They want their cake and to eat it too right in front of your intermittent fasting menopause body. Fuckers. Rather than systemic change by holding businesses, organizations, and governments accountable to a collective good. And our inability to do that is in part because we’ve bought into the end result of greener capitalism rather than replacing capitalism all together.

I keep finding that people get stuck in short term solutions without willingness to change lifestyle because they require inner work rather than a quick feel good bandaid. Rationalization feels so good. Rather than, I have to fly this month if I want to celebrate my stepson’s graduation in real time so I won’t take another flight in this next 6 months or whatever ‘this but not that’ looks like in your life. Because I do believe there will come a time sooner than you realize when you won’t have the option to fly for that graduation and no I think the option is then start flying all over the world now to hoard the experience of other places while they last.

We can’t save the world. Nor can we fall into doomism or that feverish hoarding either. And we definitely can’t approach minimizing climate collapse impacts through ‘better, greener’ capitalism. So many sustainability conversations take that model because they don’t want to change the status quo.

The tour of the regional power plant this summer? Sure they have some renewable sources but the majority is still coal powered with a stated end date to phase out, but no actions visible to show movement towards that. At best there’s an inkling of reducing harm, but where is there the movement of creating good? Harm reduction or minimization is only one step morally ‘better’ than green capitalism’, which makes it a far cry from anything near regenerative, healing, degrowth, whatever word you like at the moment. (You can read more about four governing paradigms for regenerative business by Carol Sanford if you’re into that).

I’ve come to see that part of the cognitive dissonance is the language of sustainability all together. There is nothing sustainable about our lives on this planet. Just as there is nothing sustainable about the use of AI and technology. Yet the top three uses of it in 2025 so far, according to the Harvard Business Review stats, have been for therapy/companionship; organizing your life; and finding purpose. All of those need, could be answered by and with Nature, but instead we’re asking biased robots. But that’s a more intentional choice. And one that take effort and reconnection to body and Nature’s bodies.

I’ve come to realize we collectively don’t want to examine ourselves as a species that is fundamentally killing our own kind along with all the other species on this beautiful planet. Yet for some folks, there’s the itch that keeps them up so they turn to sustainable practices and conversations to get the feel good creme on that itch. They want to do less harm. And there are folks who genuinely want to do good. I’ve found myself in that camp for a long time. The risk is it can come with a high moral judgement of what other people should do. And should just should all over ourselves.

More kissing, more love, more Nature…

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I know collapse folks are already at this point of the middle finger to sustainability, but I felt like for some reason I needed to grapple with it over these six months in a business and leadership context. I’m convinced now more than ever that my work has to combine collapse cognitive awareness and climate emotional resilience partnered with somatic and community practices to people in these spaces. I guess the first part for me is calling the bullshitery what it is. Happy Friday. May you find awe and kiss the Earth with your feet this weekend.

xo

For me, summer vibes are full of book reading. I want to physically hold a book, turn a page, and smell the library. In a hammock under the apple tree. Camping and reading by the evening fire before the light goes. This summer looked different and different in an okay way. Reading with the back of our old VW Westie van (Otis) during a training workshop break with Dr. Clarrisa Pinkola Estés. Stretched out in front of a fan after a hot day.

When I flipped back through photos to see what I actually read (that’s how I keep track, I’m not great with booklists), three themes emerged (my qualitative researcher brain is always patterning, what can I say). I wonder how much these threads might feel like some of what you’re craving these days, too.

Death, Meaning-Making, and the Thresholds that Get Us There

No surprise to many given my gravitation towards grief work these last years, I found my way into death doula territory. Books that remind me that endings met with deep inner soul work can deepen our living:

• Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End by Alua Arthur

Funny at times you wouldn’t think it would be, tender, and delightful to read Arthur's journey to becoming a death doula along with insights from clients. Her accounts were so compelling and insightful that they made me seriously pause and ask myself, ‘should I become a death doula?’ She is funny, adventurous and a free spirit who runs Going with Grace to train others as doulas and also to guide those ready to live fully holding death in one hand.

• Caring for the Dying: The Doula Approach to a Meaningful Death by Henry Fersko-Weiss

This book fills a gap in our grief and death averse society. I read this one after Arthur’s and it was way practical for folks working with or helping a loved one come to terms with their end of life. I appreciated that about it in a very different way than what I loved about Briefly Perfectly Human because it highlighted tangible ways of supporting someone through making meaning of their life near the end of it. That feels really important to all of us. And I suppose it feels very personal too, as I witness my FIL doing this very thing for himself as he recieves support through hospice at home. It has offered us some tender moments to hear stories that matter to him that none of us knew previously.

Women, Rewilding, and our Ancestral Wisdom

In July (and again in October for part two), I attended a 5 day residential training with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés (known as CPE) here in Colorado. If I had a bucket list, this honor would be on it. The experience was so replenishing, insightful, and inspiring. A true living elder full of ancestral wisdom that I know is possible within all of us if we choose. The training led me to (re)read Women Who Run with the Wolves and read Untie books and start her many audio-only books including, Creative Fire and The Dangerous Old Woman.

• Untie the Strong Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

While I did attend catholic school as a child for a some years, I don’t find myself religious as an adult. What I took out of this though were prayers of sorts to the overarching Blessed Mother archetype to grant us guidance and strength in the continous life/death/rebirth cycle.

• Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Required reading for all of us as a life developement manual for navigating into becoming a woman who truly knows herself and her place in the world. wExpect to pick it up throughout your life and read different parts depending upon your stage at that moment and what your soul needs. Also, dear fellow writers, CPE submitted this book over 40 times to publishers before someone picked it up!

• Weyward by Emilia Hart

Hart’s is the only fiction book of the summer. (See that’s why I need help with recommendations). Witchy, nature-rich historical fiction spanning three generations of women in one family line in the UK (their last name is Weyward and is a nod to MacBeth’s witches as well as the arc of their lives). Send me your other witchy historical fiction books please!

I want to lean more into archetypes of balanced resilience, mythic storytelling, and the reclamation of instinct, magic, and embodied wisdom that we are not seeing reflected in our mainstream culture and work.

Human Power Working against our Innate Interconnection

Stories of how deeply we’re tied to the nature world and the power-hungry forces within humans that severs those ties and harms all of us.

• The Insect Epiphany by Barrett Anthony Klein

How insects shape our art, food, and lives over history. And, maybe not his intention, how we have profited and gained from certain insects so much that we have changed their existence and future, such as the silkworm.

• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

A memoir and science story of how trees thrive through connection even in times of drought, disease, and other hardships. Simard’s own life and journey in British Columbia as the child of foresters who became a forest ecologist and academic in male dominated fields. Another tale of how science and work that shows how Nature is inherently collaborative and interconnected gets continuously questioned as not rigorous by folks who benefit from competition to justify cutting down old growth trees for someone's profitable gain.

• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

A 2025 memoir from an Aussie who worked with Zuckerberg in the global expansion years of Facebook. It’s like you know it’s bad but this tells you just how fucked up power, money, and access is in immature hands. Also, really casts a whole lot of shade on Sheryl Sandberg of Lean In fame. Real sketchy and anti-woman, really. Another example of the seemingly no limit to man’s urge for power and domination.

I’ll wrap up with this. I’ve read on and off here on Substack, too, and feel a bit flat lately with this platform as I open to plagherism accusations, AI pros/cons articles, and whatnot. Then the lastest about how essays like this one aren’t marketable enough to capture paid subscribers so Substack apparently has been throttling free subscription newsletters. (Just read Substack Is Your Boss, and He's Dissatisfied With Your Performance before finishing the edits so check out his take and the details.)

Capitalism is so damn fucking exhausting, by motherfucking design. I came here in January to write to express myself, to experiment, to hold myself compassionately accountable to regular public writing, and to read other folks who are doing the same about topics that matter like the fall of society and climate. I want to be human again with other humans and I also want the global connectability of online. I imagine then I’ll always clinge to books, to their feel, smell, and experience. All platforms are designed to keep us lingering longer on them in hopes of making money for them…xoxo

These books were good reads and great reminders. Endings that come with death - literal and spiritual - teach us what it can mean to give life to something new. We can harness our wild wisdom that is inherent in all of us whenever we are ready to open to it.

GRASSHOPPERS

Rattlesnakes, flash floods, chance of wildfires - the typical Rocky Mountain west warnings. Grasshoppers though, that’s a first. I wonder maybe I was naive in assuming their low to no risk out here away from ag fields or home gardens. Their tiny jumping babies always signaled to me the begin of the arc towards summer’s peak. Holding the hope that my garden bed’s tender shoots have turned hard enough to not attract too much of their attention, too fast, especially for the ground feeders ones. Then it switches to watching for the climbers who prefer to cut and fell the taller garden shoots.

Each year, a new science experiment on what’s this season’s blend of spring temperature, ground temps, moisture or lack of, and last frosts overlapping with the cycles of each species preferred birthing boom. This is what climate-forward gardening requires.

As I approach the trail’s pavement edge, their exoskeletons brush upon dry tall prairie grasses. In a dry swooshing, they jump backwards from me, wanting a bit of their own personal space. I get it. I’m an introvert too. Grasshopper gobs is probably the scientific name for a gaggle of grasshoppers. I admire how they seem to bask in the hot, fierce winds blowing across the prairie lands off the foothills. Meanwhile, I quickly assemble sunglasses on my face to prevent my eyes from dirt and winds.

As a gardener, there was a time when I thought I had some say over them. (I know, heartily foolish). Control illusions are a pre-collapse mindset and behavioral pattern, no doubt. I’ll admit a previous Me of about a decade or so ago tried biological insecticide pellets sprinkled in the garden beds. I gave that up after a couple summers of weighting cost, stress, and effort. Besides, since the time my kiddo could catch one remains enamored of them to this day (junior high). I peacefully threw my hands in the air with that what are you gonna do resignation of acceptance. My relationship now is much more respectful living together. Honestly, my worries now are more of the invasive Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) that skeletonizes a fence worth of Virginia creeper in the matter of a week or less. At least it keeps them preoccupied and away from my grapes and raspberries for a bit longer.

Warmer, dryer springs will bring greater populations. That’s the trend for the aridification of the Rocky Mountain west. Most grasshoppers remain localized, outside of the aptly named Migratory Grasshopper. Interestingly though, I read* that some grasshoppers can decide to become migratory, thus flying miles and well above the surface. And when they do, their bodies change slightly to become thinner while their wings longer and more pronounced. Innate to grasshopper genetics is the ability to activate transformation. Primary triggers of migration are environmental: high population crowding, food scarcity, warm and dry weather conditions are some currently known reasons. Much like human climate migration trends.

Resilience in an ecosystem, not human defined, is the ability to adapt and transform in relationship with your environment. This is a huge exclamation in my brain because it’s another example that we as human beings also hold a genetic and innate capacity to transform IF we are in relationship to our environment rather than run away or isolate from it (also what a privilege if you can do either of those).

But still, I’m oddly fascinated about this warning of the grasshoppers, which led to this whole essay idea. What does it say about the human discomfort with gobs of grasshoppers? What phone call or experience warranted an official warning? My mind dramatizes alarmed tourists from Texas and California calling the Natural Areas resource office to complain about grasshoppers interrupting their wild Colorado experience.

Or perhaps their reputation of ravenous appetite, perpetually unsatiated, just travels with them no matter their locale. Or, even better, it’s the late summer mating season that churns the human stomach because they openly mount each other without care or concern over your disgusted gaze. And let’s be honest, you likely harbor more than a tinge of envy, am I right. After all Sunday school taught that plagues of grasshoppers cast smite upon those who suffer in vanity. All the many lies we have been taught in this country of chastity and absolutely no PDA, even for animals. Oh wait, humans are animals. What a sarcastic conundrum.

In a climate-changed world, I ponder, probably way too often, about which plants, insects, and beings will outlive humans. In collapse, it’s not that I believe the Earth will implode but rather life that we love and rely on for living will cease as collapse already has begun, whether we want to see and acknowledge it or not, doesn’t matter. Sometimes these wonderings look a little dystopian Mars landscape as for when I go to the place of ‘if we don’t wake the fuck up right now and shift our shit.’ In the transition time to that or if we can get our shit under control, then maybe there’s a version with some life.

Grasshoppers, though, are up there on my current list of potential champions, right along with bindweed and thistle. (Who makes your list?) But why them? What makes them so adept at thriving?

When climate-fueled wildfires burn hotter, life is left to those who can grow lower to the ground in the years after a fierce scorching. My grief feels much like these new fires. Comes on strong and quick, jumping from one love to the next. All I can do in those moments is pause and hold my own animal being. It burns through the ample kindling of all the losses in this parched menopaused body.

The landscape can host rebirth after a fire, and it will never be what it was before. Real resilience, not that toxic capitalistic bounce back shit. The death of old beauty requires the falling in love of smaller sprouts and signs of life giving creativity. Can we get over our own comfort enough to dream up a landscape in the future that isn’t Mars like? The charred tree skeletons left standing shadow the landscape still, although less. This new landscape leaves me feeling itchy, rough, and a little bit raw with the taste of gritty between my teeth.

Yet the common sunflower blooms on, unapologetic. Maturity brings on a natural drying of her stalks; yet her hairs, the trichomes, protect her by holding air near and predators far.

These hoppers spread all across the trail pavement jumping almost in cadence with the strongest gusts of wind. Perhaps it’s their riding the winds, metaphorically and literally. The adaptability of changing directions while still moving forward towards their next pursuit in their life of voracious enjoyment. Catching the up take as they fly, or are carried, to another point almost at times in an arc of a path rather than the linear directions we humans think of as forward. Getting in their way is really only the inconvenience of your legs or flying tumbleweeds. And even you block their path, they seem none the bothered by your rude interruption of their flight. Carry on they do.

My high school art teacher’s husband (can’t recall his name) was one of our school’s bus drivers. While I never rode his bus because they didn’t make it that far out for an in the country stop, so I can’t confirm this local urban legend. The story goes that he would stop the bus when grasshopper gobs blocked the roadways. The kids said it was because he knew they were aliens in earthly form. I’m unsure if that was out of respect or fear of them. Before graduating, the art teacher asked to keep one of my paintings copied from one of Bob Ross’s books of snow capped Rocky Mountains. She wanted it to visualize their retirement goal of Colorado. I wonder if they ever made it out here from Louisiana. I hope they did. I hope he found what he was looking for with the aliens.

Yet, when the winds of change are in the air for most humans, we are the ones who get our panties is a wad over a slight delay or change when our plans don’t go as, well, planned. So many of us seize up rather than allow ourselves to be caught in the updraft with curiosity and adventure or even perseverance. Hunkering down and digging heels into the status quo of yesteryear. Missing all together winds of change that might have offered innovation, new perspective, or greater clarity. Stories of regrets seem to come more from not heeding to the winds rather than regrets from opportunities attempted. Explains why online interpretations state that grasshopper sightings signify forward movement.

I’m fascinated by the notion that they’re always in forward movement yet forward doesn’t signify a specific direction. How often humans fixate on planning in terms of ‘the next logical step’ (said in my head in a deep voice) or rungs of a career ladder. Instead movement is good. It’s good for the body and brain, and it’s good over an alternative of stagnation and resignation that comes from limiting imagination and creativity. In the charred landscape of menopause and climate collapse, forward movement looks unlike the stories that modern advertising has sold us. Like the train wreck kind of fascination with those before and after massive amounts of plastic surgery that some folks do in constant, obsessive search for youth. If only they had grieved the loss and reborn themselves, what beauty would have been theirs and I know this is easier morally judged and said than done.

Movement and rest, the two things the exploitive workplace has fed us lies about. Grasshoppers remind us to confuse not moving with intentional rest nor conflate movement with intention. Plains grasshoppers spend about 46-80% of their daytime inactive. Talk about knowing how to rest and go with the flow of their environment. No wonder they piss off our puritan, capitalistic brainwashed belief set. It seems easy to imagine that many folks in this country spend that percentage of their awake time working. When folks think about rest they default to vacation or home projects. Completely overriding the body’s needs. It’s the intentionality to stay disconnected from the body in order to prioritize productivity and consumption. It’s by capitalism design. It’s not by nature’s design.

Grasshopper activity mirrors temperature fluctuations. From nymphs emerging out of the soil after overwintering to feeding to where they rest all vary according to environmental temperatures. When ground temps rise to 120, they start to shift more slowly into shade, or up off the ground and position their bodies to take the heat head on. While that temp may seem high and unlikely, actually when you consider manmade ground surfaces - asphalt, concrete, artificial turf, are typically 40-70 degrees hotter than air temps. And natural landscapes vary also, especially in Colorado with elevation, everyone knows you can get huge degree variation between standing in the sun or in the shade of a tree. Then summer cooler nights (below 80) they rest or sleep, but above that temperature their feeding and roaming activities increase.

Living in an older neighborhood of homes built mostly 100 or so years ago, many of us are A/C-less. As I work from home, I spend the majority of my summer days grasshopper like. My mornings I work outside on the back deck in the cool shade of an old Ash tree. Come 1pm I have to move under an umbrella or inside depending on cloud coverage and air temps. While it can be easy to slip into a sense of climate crisis feed moral superiority of ‘oh look at me, I live closer to nature than you do.’ It’s not easy and it’s definitely not always comfortable. We did cave in a couple years ago with a window unit in the bedroom so I could sleep more easily through the hot flashes of peak summer and menopause. And another one in the kitchen so that we didn’t eat only salads for months. They still are only used to bring the indoor temp down to a reasonable mid 70s and if and when we can, we much prefer opening up the house at night. Much like the grasshoppers night time preferences, hotter nights make me more active too but more so in that sleeplessness, restlessness way. Perhaps them too. Perhaps they feel anxiety over the hot night temps so they stress eat. Perhaps it just makes me feel less alone in this mess we humans have created.

What I do notice is that being outside often and living in a house with windows open often I have a greater sense of daily fluctuations and the impact of wildfire smoke from neighboring states and countries. It dictates the rhythm of my day. My clients notice when I’m inside rather than out, inquire about the weather or reason of that shift. All this to say, I wonder how much the convenience of climate controlled work and homes fuels our collective disconnection from the reality of climate collapse. Let alone steals from us the joy of being connected to our natural environment and relieves communities and cities from the responsibility of tending to outdoor communal spaces with tree canopies, trails, and areas to sit in the shade.

What all in your life has offered you such comfort and separation that it’s taken away your connection? Where has our over reliance tipped out away from being in touch with our animal being? What can help adjust back to the cycles of the days? Watching people leave work at the end of the day bundled up in sweaters in August when the outside temps reach record high triple digits isn’t just comical, it’s damaging. The mind and body become so conditioned to use more of the power grid thus lining the fossil fuel companies with more and more of our collective resources. Making people think that the answer is just switching to alternative energy - solar, water, wind - no, the answer is less. It’s always been less. They just don’t want you to know that. So the office building sits at 68 degrees and you rush to your car to crank up the A/C. Then you pull into your climate controlled garage and head in to hit the down arrow on your thermostat. Blissfully unaware of the environment.

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Resources:

• My own life and observation

• Garden Insects of North America: The Ultimate Guide to Backyard Bugs by Whitney Cranshaw and David Shetlar (I was fortunate that Cranshaw taught our insect section back when I completed the Colorado Master Gardener training many years ago. So nerdingly my copy is a signed one, ha.)

• Field Guide to Common Western Grasshoppers: Seasonal Occurrence and Behavior by Robert E. Pfadt USDA report available here

Oh, Lovie, you didn’t know.
NO is complete and changing your mind is your right.
That’s other’s guilting, pressure, wants were their manipulations, not your moral compass.

As a child in long braids, you were praised for being pleasing.
All the while carrying more than your age needed.
Rule following let you fly under the radar of critique and judgement.

You were a go-getter and giver.
Other mom’s said to their own daughters to be more like her.
Friends, I felt that wound deeply and I’m sorry.

Extrenal praise was a mother fucking leash suffocating life.
A system trained sitting for hours, holding in having to piss as to not disrupt.
Dening you had a body because how basic, animalistic, until you peed on the 2nd grade classroom floor.

You were misled about holding your own boundaries. We all have been.
Shamed, gaslit, and lied to about what they were, let alone how neccessary for living.
Blowing through six of nine known planetary boundaries as if life wasn’t on the line.

By design, you thought boundaries were the bad kind of selfish.
A luxury for other people. Never you. And definitely not Mama Earth, always giving.
Being boundaryless is just part of the job. The one you’re scared to lose. By design.

We were taught that being available makes us valuable, to others.
Profits from natural resources extraction made our living Mother a commodity.
Once drained and empty, you’re tossed aside. For what? Mars?

You can take back control. Know your own personal threshold.
Refuse to continue contorting yourself in unsustainable systems of work.
Stop before more irreversible damage is done. To yourself and Earth.

We’re crossing the threshold of planetary boundaries.*
In part because we’re so numb to crossing our own. Daily, silently, without noticing.
Until our bodies protest, energy crashes. We wonder how we got here.

My journey out of chronic burnout lifestyle meant unknotting the belief that it was noble to give my career my life. It wasn’t. That it was my job to save all the things and to do so meant I had to not have any boundaries. It wasn’t.

So that’s why I’m sharing with my Substack readers a free workshop I’m facilitating Wednesday, August 6th, on zoom (link available once you sign up).

Redraw the Line: Boundaries for a Sustainable Career

This is a chance to pause and ask:

• What are my personal thresholds?

• What would it feel like to protect them without apology?

• Where can I reestablish a crossed line? (within myself and with others)

Register here for the free workshop. And by signing up I’ll email you a bonus boundaries 101 workbook so that you create a solid foundation. If you can’t attend live, materials will be emailed out afterwards.

Let’s stop abandoning ourselves in service of systems that were never built for our thriving. Let’s rewild the way we work one clear boundary at a time. Any attempt to live well together through collapse of social and earth systems requires that we do the internal work. Boundaries is very much an internal job.

I work with lots of folks who want to pivot in their careers and often you can’t leave your job right now, but you can still transform your relationship to it. I actually tell clients that changing your relationship to your career is the most important thing to do before you leave and even if you don’t. And it starts with honoring the boundaries that make your work sustainable, your energy sacred, and your values non-negotiable.

This workshop is open to anyone in any field who would like to have clearer boundaries and learn how to separate our healthy boundaries from expectations that you may have of others or yourself.

*Planetary boundaries measure the amount of the human-caused pressures that nine critical global processes can take before risk to life is radically impacted past safe limits. Ozone is the only one we managed to reverse and we are nearing crossing a seventh - ocean acidification. Planetary boundaries are complex and this is meant as a playful comparison of how we have been trained to violate our own boundaries and Earth’s, as if our lives didn’t depend on these very boundaries.

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Friends, I first published this newsletter - Dirt & Disobedience - 6 months ago. Woohoo! And. Nothing goes as intended. But intention makes the lessons more palatable. Even if I don’t always like the gifts of change at first.

My proclaimed burning question was can we (I) write and find our (my) way through the messy, unruly edge of climate collapse, embodied resilience, and slow, defiant living and working? Especially while I often feel fragmented in my reflections and cognitive capacity. Sometimes capturing those fragments means glorious writing from the back of Otis, our Westie.

It feels like the dirty work of tending to a future worth loving while menopaused and midlife-ing. Dirty because I walk barefooted and work the soil without gloves. Dirty also though because mainstream society, what Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls overculture, slams down a grid of control over all of us and then makes us feel dirty and shamed for our resistance. That disobedience is not illegal as they’d have us believe but is us trying to live beautiful lives in service to our soul and other’s souls.

The desire underneath my burning questions of how to use my voice in ways that help expand our climate and personal conversations was never about carbon footprint stats and how to live a sustainable lifestyle. Tucked away here in the Substack category of Climate & Environment. I frankly do not care to convince you to buy an EV over a combustion engine or that reusable bottle over single use plastic. The minutia of individualized shitty bandaid decisions are not decisions at all. They’re just slick greenwashed masks of choice in marketing spurred on by the same evil machines and thinking that got us here.

I’m actually way more interested in talking with you about how we as humans, rationalize a single choice to soothe our cognitive dissonance so that we can sleep at night while quite literally the world burns and authoritarianism spreads like the climate-fueled wildfire it causes. Instead of looking, we roll over and face the other side of the bed that we’ve made. It temporarily placates the internal conflicts that we’ve create for ourselves while continuing our complicitness.

Discomfort is Key

Discomfort is the invitation, as I’ve written before. That discomfort is pointing to the critical fact that our nervous systems, bodies, and minds are not wired to sustain cognitive dissonance. It splits us. If we really could see just how split apart we are holding love for Nature while also doing numerous behaviors every day that destroys the very things we love including each other and ourselves.

Read for yourself:

All of us have had our minds, bodies, and souls colonized, institutionalized, capitalized by the ‘rules’ of old relationships of hierarchy and oppressions. We live in a time when collapse, extraction, and hyper-speed has shaped our inner worlds along with the day-to-day real world pressures of what should be criminal rising prices and erasure. These evil, soulless profiters through their capitalistic toxic patterns have placed death-gripping constraints on our the healing power of our grief, resilience, community, and creativity. That’s why resistance and education are now on the going extinct list of democracy. It’s by design that is hard to live a ‘modern’ life in right relationship with Nature and community.

Writing has been such a significant tool to teach me how to sit in and with discomfort. The process of stepping out of the comfort zone of status quo, misaligned values and behaviors, buying into solutions that we can purchase our way out of change and collapse. The irony, of course, is that writing itself is a major source of discomfort. In that, I face the gap between truth and behaviors of my own life.

The discomfort walks me back to a pathway of love, compassion, and surrender rather than hate and giving up. This newsletter was as an invitation to myself to experiment with the very discomfort of both our collective collapse and what my own voice had offer. I thought if I could tap into a deep true voice then perhaps I could find way forward that felt full of integrity and connection. What it invited in were lessons of it’s own.

The discomfort of lessons over these six months to sit with:

The noise and performativity makes it challenging to write, socially, even on Substack.

This is not new revelation nor do I want to contribute in these ways of critiquing platforms that we all well know why and how they function. Here we are with tech bros and bots puppeteering our words, our art, our innate creative souls. And, I’m so grateful to the creative community here. So…

My new personal guideline moving forward is if I read your full essay, I’ll heart it. You’re pouring your heart and soul into your writing, I know you are because I am too and you deserve knowing you are seen. Our ability to read, and heart someone else’s voice, has no limit. We are not given only so many hearts to doll out each month or week. No, we have full abundance in liking ability! How terrific. It’s a little but meaningful way I can mark my presence and our sharing of space.

💚 Hearts are abundant, folks! Let’s not hoard them. Contrary to mainstream social media rules, this is not a competition and hearting other people’s work doesn’t take away from your own. I’m going to check my ego more and send her to the back seat of bus so I can honk hello as I drive by your essay!

Writing weekly-ish essays show the complexity of collapse, much like grief, where both reject submission into neat categories and modern timelines.

When I first wrote my guiding questions for Dirt & Disobedience, I felt quite clear that everything would center around or radiate out of climate collapse. I filed it under the category of Climate & Environment. Even though I was gritting my teeth wondering, is that perhaps too aspirational, or even out of place, it doesn’t belong there? The later being a question I’ve asked myself each week as I wrote on, while also knowing many topics I typed were completed into words by a certain inner voice.

I was analyzing and second-guessing my writing as if it existed only as a category or a topic. What it is is an ever shifting perspective of a process we as modern humans have never experienced. Labels are just that though, they’re labels. Labels can be really handy because they do the work of telling you what could be here. Like the label on in a grocery story aisle. But we’re crowded with so much noise that we end up only looking at the labels and bypassing the content of great shit on the shelves. I don’t want to live a life where labels tell me how to think instead of making the decision for myself. I want to slow down enough that I can use the label as a data point but then make my own assessment to triangulate all the information.

Choosing to write using the word collapse at times lately even feels wrought for conflicting reasons that I haven’t fully yet unpacked. There are so many layers and intersections or perspectives. For example, I found myself spending so many essays early on talking about whiteness and white women’s complicity in the state of our current demise. Of course, those are critical layers in the overculture’s squashing grid that’s keeping us out of liberation.

By the time I finish an essay, it’s never truly and purely Climate & Environment. And I’m okay with that and when I’m no longer, I’ll shift again. I pivoted out of academia because I no longer wanted to be complicit to the grid pushing down on me. It was keeping me inside the cardboard box of institutional walls because I let it. My role in this second half of life is to liberate my own mind and body from the overculture.

Writing experimently bumps up against on creative scars and makes them feel inflamed pretty regularly.

In the training I attended last week, Story as Medicine, with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, she shared many nuggets about her own writing process and publishing experience with Women Who Run with Wolves. In the end, her writing advice is ‘don’t write to make a living. I never have. You have to write for love. Write because someone out there needs to hear what you have to say. Write from true heart and offer it out.’ That feels truthful.

I entered her workshop with nagging questions of: should I write those book ideas? Should I keep writing here on Substack? Should I…. I see now that those are all just nagging, distracting questions.

I signed up because I wanted to understand myself as a storyteller. The overculture taught me that I don’t feel like I can tell a good story. Dr. CPE shifted my perspective to understand that the reason I have grappled with being a storyteller is because story telling today is performative - see first lesson about writing on Substack. Estés says stories are not what’s written down. Being a storyteller is about how you feel, see, sense, and know YOUR stories. Then those stories that you tell are the ones that can guide others. And in them they hold your past, present, and future within.

That’s a way taller order than just showing up here every week-ish and pushing out fragments in the form of an essay. When I did hit publish on my first post, the current regime took office and so of course my themes were of death and rebirth - the universal life/death/life cycle.

Awwww, my very first substacky….

I write to find a way through this and build something better together and for my loves. It’s not going to fit neatly in any man or tech created category, and I’m so grateful for that.

The discomfort reminds me that there is wisdom in alchemizing old stories that hold us collectively back from taking genuine radical change so that we may slow down and shift our trajectory, even if it is only to love, resist, and hold joy together. 💚

Love them. What’s not to love. They offer a little extra space between you and the neighbor. Are an added access point. My rubbish bins stay put rather than having to drag them out to the front.

Not everyone or everywhere has this type of access. What a design gift.

I’ve long loved alleyways. And have had the joy of living in houses with them in Tucson and Fort Collins. So naturally, the other week during the 5 day Tour de Nebraska, I biked down the dirt and paved alleys in a few of the towns we stayed in or passed through. Often since many were villages of less than 500 people, my detours were the dirt roads or alleyways off of the one or two blocks of a main street.

Alleyways feels like intimate portals into the soul of a household and community. Like the backbone to the front-facing mask that we present ourselves to be in the world, just in this case it’s the neighbors. These often overlooked back corridors hold a mirror up to our relationship with each other and the more-than-human world. Glimpses into resistance and opportunities to build something beyond the status quo, and why it is so challenging.

We can only keep so much under control. Tidying up the front yard, trimming the lawn edge, raking fallen leaves. And yet, it’s exhausting to exert power over, and begs many ethical inquiries. Alleyways remind me that control attempts are only ever partial. There is always rebellion. Resistance. Disobedience. Our exertion only ever partial means that there is neglect of other areas, in our lives or yards beyond control or the controllers.

Many of us, though, especially if you’re reading this, welcome the wilding parts, the rebellious gardening. I call it cozy gardening. You may call it rewilding, as that’s a trendy word these days. My boomer farming father considers it chaotic, too far fetched from neat agricultural rows. Too dangerous to have tomatoes growing with borage and zinnias, or something. Too inviting for invaders or pests. Too diverse. Too much.

We don’t like too muchness from others very much in this country, do we? Wildflowers or volunteer plants get confused with messy and unruly. No, we, the collective societal we, definitely do not like a yard that is unruly. This dislike reeks of Man’s command over nature, as if we aren’t all Nature, but isn’t that the point. How well so many of us have been trained to subconsciously prefer the groomed aesthetic of manicured lawn and flower beds kept within the clearly defined outlines of pavers, edges, and fences.

In one of the Tour towns, the local historian stopped in front of the quaint Carnegie Library built in 1905 in a seemingly out of place Spanish Colonial Revival style. Proudly, the historian shared how a group had gotten permission to turn the corner lawn into a pollinator garden. Then she remarked how much of the locals hated it because it looked unruly and messy. They wanted the lawn back.

I recall similar resistance to more native or wild flower landscapes back when I did a lot of Master Gardener volunteering. As I think of it now, it feels more like a lack of tolerance for Nature. A relationship over rather than with. Isn’t that core to our current state? A lack of right-relationship with the more-than-human Nature (not to mention a current lack of humanity).

As I biked around, I got curious. In so many ways I believe our outer environment or home is a reflection on our inner landscape. So, I wondered:

What do alleyways reveal? How do we use them?

Alleyways as places of storage and infrastructure.

A location for tucked away items that you might want to forget. Utilities placement. Power boxes and poles. Cable lines and old land line phones. Trash bins. Your own personal mini metal dumpster. An old Pepsi machine hoping to be restocked and cold again one day. Old windows removed when someone succumbed to the Pella window salesman. Chain link fence rolled up and leaning. Storage for things you don’t want to deal with but can’t quite convince yourself to regift or toss. Those old tools or kitchen equipment that maybe one day your kid will want a part out of to try and fix something that has been engineered to not be fixable.

Storage also extends to the items we don’t want to forget, but seldom use.

Kayaks are the modern taker-upper-of-space to the old school canoes. Although I imagine in other regions of the country long canoes would be more common. Out west the limited bodies of water are narrow rivers and creeks with some reservoirs that all lend themselves better to kayaks and the popular collection of paddle boards. Kid’s oversized toys like tricycles or electric mini vehicles. Also a good place for outgrown toys. If the lot is large enough then it stores your grown adult toy of that RV you take out once every few years until you try to sell it, which goes about as well as selling a timeshare in Missouri.

Alleyways are also a space holder for much natural, cultivated beauty.

A south, west, or east facing one is a sunny place for raised garden beds. Or a narrow dirt area beckons to crowded sunflowers, and towering hollyhocks. Even lower lying overgrown lilies and irises love small alley segments as they often thrive in a little avoidance. Some spaces can hold a smorgasbord of pots for herbs and summer flowers of pansies and marigolds. That corner fence supports spreading grape vines and even more trendy Cascade hops vine trying to grow as tall as the sun.

And they also hold a more natural beauty brought on by human neglect.

Cracks even of the smallest and tightest amount let in enough light and water for many a number of ‘weeds’ to grow. Boarded up garage or storage windows. Human-neglected beauty also takes the form of overgrown corner of sunflowers that keep reseeding themselves thanks to the redheaded finches who love them so well come fall. Or the old raspberry patch on the side. Various types of vines overtaking or reclaiming man-made structures. Where we live, it’s usually Virginia creeper hiding Japanese beetle infestations. But I imagine the neglected beauty offers a glimpse into what our neighborhood spaces might look like if and when humans aren’t there to force control.

What do they reflect about our relationship with Nature and each other?

Nature continues albeit not in ways we plan or might want as humans. When I think of climate collapse and a time without humans extractive control, the notion of nature continuing along brings me some solace. I imagine some of the sceneries or lost towns from Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment, where she glimpses into how nature rebounds when humans leave a previously inhabited area either by choice or force like Chernobyl. Admittingly, sometimes my thoughts move more in a dystopian manner.

And sometimes in a more hopeful view, but steering clear of Pollyanna-ish “the world will be so much better without humans” vein. I get the appeal of that, which I’ve heard from others. Every option or variation has it’s impact and consequences. We’ve touched and changed near 100 percent of this planet, or so I read somewhere, so to me that means there will be repercussions and loss when we aren’t here. In the book, The Insect Epiphany: How Our Six-Legged Allies Shape Human Culture, I learned how humans have manipulated silkworms to such a degree that their ability to mate without human intervention is low.

While it’s unknown exactly what will happen if humans disappeared one day and we aren’t there to intervene in the ways we have. I do believe we have enough understanding that Nature adapts and transforms in response to environmental changes, but not sure how quickly or successfully, but both of those words are spoken on human timeline, and not Nature’s. In my work, I borrow from this ecological definition of resilience in that we humans as Nature ourselves also hold the potential to adapt and transform in relationship with others and Nature around us. The questions that have been ongoing for some decades is will we, and if so, will we in time enough? I’m not sure those are the questions anymore.

What do alleyways reflect consciously and subconsciously about us?

Alleyways are intimate portals to catch a glimpse of other people’s daily lives and sense the limits of our own wild edges. They crack the foundation of control that has been thrust upon our psyches through trained beliefs about beauty, individuality, and nature. False beliefs all he more reinforced by meddling HOAs. Alleyways show the level of collapse we’re willing to live with, or the mess we may secretly love. While our individual (in)tolerance for imperfection shows in our carefully crafted, or at least maintained against our will, front yards.

What do your hidden edges say about your relationship to control or what wants to crack open and grow?

The neglected alleyways show how Nature resists our illusions of ownership; our laughable attempt to control our environment. Front yards, neat and tidy, of regularly mowed Kentucky bluegrass, shaped hedges, and flowers contained by pots. Maybe Nature chuckles lovingly at these attempts because she’s showing us how abundant she is. I know that’s very anthropomorphic but it’s hard to resist the allure of lessons.

What natural instinct within you keeps pushing through your attempts to keep it contained?

Alleys are practical spaces of hidden abundance; liminal, fertile edges where seeds take root, invited or not. Unexpected growth brought in by winds, birds, or squirrels. A third year reseeded forest of common sunflowers with that accidentally delightful pumpkin vine protected within.

What are you planting or neglecting that might spill into another space? How are you planting seeds for growth in new areas?

Sometimes our choices spill out on purpose into other’s spaces. Like the hops vines that climb our corner edge of the back alley fence creating a green itchy thicket to separate us from a hot unsightly commercial parking lot plopped in the middle of our neighborhood. A heat block of concrete made more tolerable by old trees. Loudly reflects society’s prioritization of commercial part time use over residential full time living. Making alleyways sanctuaries and resistance to the status quo.

Maybe alleyways reflect more than neglect or storage. Maybe they show a truer (in)tolerance for imperfection, surprise, and collapse.

What cracks in your life want to break open wider and what might grow there if you let them?

If you have an alley access, what does it say about your tolerance for chaos, collapse, and the more-than-human?

Let me know!

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I don’t know the percentage of relationships that we lose across our lifetimes. But I know it’s more than we expect, and the loss is more painful than we’re prepared for.

Most of us aren’t taught how to navigate changing dynamics with emotional honesty and skillful communication. And I include myself in that category, even as someone who coaches others through these very ruptures.

The truth is relationship dynamics are complex and humans are extremely messy. Then when you add shifts into your own identity and work circumstances, you find yourself suddenly feeling isolated as you forge down less charted paths.

Some of that messiness though lies is how relationships start. Many of our relationships are built on circumstance - arrangements of proximity - neighbors and work colleagues and sometimes even family of origin, too. These ties are often functional, familiar, convenient, until they’re tested by change.

One change in particular carries a hidden, but profound cost. It’s the one that hits relationships when you pivot in your career.

You may walk away from a job or you may shift stay but away from a shared professional identity, like being a work-a-holic or my preference of wording - overing. You may resign from a long-held role, change industries, or step away from the typical career ladder path. Even if your pivot doesn’t involve leaving a job but is in how you relate to work by not centering it in your life anymore or by starting something new (marriage, children, hobbies, side gigs). Whatever it is, the issue is that that new thing or shift takes you away from the identity built within that relationship.

Clients have found themselves ghosted by a close colleague after sharing with them vulnerably that they were thinking about leaving. Some clients get the cold shoulder and passive judgement of “oh that must be nice to have so much free time for _____.” I was told by an old friend from grad school, “you’ve changed too much; I don’t agree with your new pursuits or new romantic relationship.” Whichever flavor your career pivot is, know that it may send a ripple through your web of relationships that once connected you with those people. (And that is by no means a reason to NOT still pivot).

The roller coaster of relationship loss takes most folks I know by surprise. It took me by surprise that hit with grief or disappointment depending on the depth of the friendship. At first, there’s heartbreak or betrayal because those ties were built on shared aspirations or long hours spent in the office or lab thus validating each other’s sacrifices.

Then when grief settles in, you have an invitation to reinvent your identity to something more true to who you are becoming. It is in that becoming that the relationship loss is solidified. I hate to say this about people but so many in our lives don’t want to come with us because our new choices threatens their own image of themselves and the reason why they’ve sacrificed so much of their own lives, especially when it for work.

That’s why later, there can be relief that flows after the initial discomfort of losing the relationship because you’ve outgrown what those relationships represented. You’ve aligned with your newer priorities and far too often these relationships choose to not come with us. In that there is opportunity to form new multidimensional relationships and deeper friendships with other people who want to talk about more than work or parenting.

In my years of training graduate students and coaching professionals, I’ve seen career grief again and again flow in when an education or work-based relationship is lost. It’s rarely named, but when it is, people exhale. Their pain feels seen. They realize they aren’t alone in mourning the unraveling in the social fabric of how our modern relationships fray when we dare to become someone new or bigger.

The systemic roots that prevent a genuine foundation of friendship.

Being years out now from working inside the Ivory Tower, I cringe when I hear higher ed folks or institutional leadership refer to their work colleagues as a ‘family.’ I flash back to youthful family portraits from Sears with matching t-shirts and in pastel colors. Then fast forward to the branded logo polo shirts and matching zip up vests of the modern ‘family’ workplace where actual family relationships would be called nepotism. Ick.

Sort of implies to me that work relationships are kinship and actual family relationships detract for the priorities. Questioning if there can be much of a genuine nature to work based relationships isn’t likely to win my any friends, ha. But it is critical context to understanding some of the systemic roots of many professionalized workplaces.

My own experience and expertise lies in how institutions, like academia, socialize competition, comparison, and identity entanglement. Those components can be seen outside of higher ed as well, likely in other knowledge based or creative fields and what some call white collar work.

Imagine roots of an invasive tree. Here in Colorado I think of a Cottonwood known for ever exploring roots frantically searching for water sources planted far from a river source. If planted in a neighborhood, the roots crack driveways and sidewalks or break into sewer and water pipes underground. All of that infrastructure reflects the relationships and the roots are the systemic constant yearning for more water, more of you, more, more, more. Okay, I like to overstretch a good nature metaphor. You get the point.

The systemic nature of modern institutions prompt cultures to engage in behaviors that directly erode friendships. You’re competing for resources, attention, promotion, and jobs. You’re comparing yourself to those who seem to have something you don’t. You confuse who you are with what you do for work. The pockets of people who exist outside those patterns are more of the exception than the norm. Often times the competition is so bad clients will tell me about how they found out their ‘friend’ at work has been badmouthing them.

Then add another layer onto this when you pursue work or careers that take you away from your home of childhood or family origin. Or you partner with someone from another part of the country or world. Educational and career mobility meets relationship mobility that often lead to some form of relationship rupture. I shared in a previous post - Career Grief is a Real Thing - about the scientists in my dissertation study. There were women who had a specific flavor of relationship loss as they had all emigrated for education and careers.

There’s a relational grief when you’re grieving a career where you’ve chosen to sacrifice relationships or have created emotional and physical distance from loved ones. Grief also changes us and thereby changes relationships. It’s best then to be intentional about that rather than let those changes wreck heartbreak on relationships.

My dissertation 20 years ago explored the intersections of those very dynamics and, in hindsight, was my first, albeit unknowingly, dip into disenfranchised grief - specifically career grief. So since then, here’s what I’ve learned about relationships and career grief.

Key points I’ve learned about relationship loss over careers

The ambiguity of work relationships is they are not built to last

Many friendships, especially formed in graduate school, workplace, and academic settings are situational. Those often rely on shared environments, routines, and mutual experiences tied to that institution. That system, as I detailed above, typically doesn’t have an environment that fosters relationships beyond the system.

Socialized under patriarchy, we often learn to turn competition inward, especially in tight, high-pressure environments like grad or professional school. In my case, that something looked like smart AF, mean girl competition or comparison would ruin friendships. Being on the receiving end of mean girl competition comes when you choose to pursue something that others didn’t or couldn’t.

Internalized competition and comparison ruined many grad school friendships. We’re all taught that if one of us succeeds then it must be at the detriment of the other. It’s a very zero sum game of scarcity. Reading both White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better gave validation and a better understanding that this competition is a socialized part of patriarchy. When women compete against each other they become isolated out of a community and thereby lose power to stand up against oppression.

After the hurt subsides in this type of friendship rupture, you can feel liberated. Losing relationships that were rooted in scarcity, comparison, and competitive identities makes room for more multidimensional, values-aligned connection. There’s peace and confidence that grows when you no longer have to shrink or get shrunk just to maintain the fake peace in an old dynamic.

Career pivots disrupt unspoken social contracts

Whether your career pivot comes from your own choice or the choice was made for you through layoffs, reorgs, or funding cuts, you will lose relationships. And some of those losses will shock you. Some may hurt. Others will feel like a betrayal. Or maybe you’ll just feel disappointed in humans.

A price of career pivots may be losing friends. I promise you will ask yourself at some point though ‘were those actually genuine friends? Did I, we, or they actually know how to be a true friend? Or were they relationships of place and career?’ Yes. Yes to all of those. At the time, they felt like genuine friends. Yes, - they, you, we - thought that we knew how to be true friends. And yes, they were relationships of convenience.

Changing careers challenges the implicit dynamics of those relationships. And when you step outside the shared path, others feel threatened, abandoned, or confronted by their own choices. Many friendships fade over time rather than end in confrontation. Silence or simply no longer being curious about each other’s lives replaces that former connection. This slow drift can be harder to grieve because there’s no closure, just drifting.

People are often unequipped to handle change in others

Many folks are not equipped to navigate transformation in others, especially when that change disrupts a shared identity or value system. Friends and colleagues may pull away, offer unsolicited advice, criticize, or ghost you not out of cruelty, but because they don’t know how to meet you in your transformation. Surprisingly over the years of supporting others, I find that so many folks in our workplaces lack the tools or emotional capacity to remain present as relationships shift.

This kind of relational distancing often happens even before you formally leaves or even if you don’t leave but have outgrown centering work in your life. The rupture can being quietly when you start to outgrow that shared identity that was once the foundation of your connection. This is particularly common in relationship formed during intense (sometimes traumatic) experiences such as graduate school cohorts, career-launching jobs, or early professional affiliations. In these environments, relationships are often built around shared struggle, institutional loyalty (that ‘we’re a family’ ick), or mutual survival.

I’ve seen this most acutely in professions where identity is strongly tied to the career, such as academia or other purpose-driven fields. In my own experience, a friend from graduate school became increasingly vocal about disagreeing with my professional direction as I was leaving academia. Though we had once shared mutual support, her engagement shifted. When I tried to address the disconnect, the conversation revealed a fundamental difference in how we each viewed work, identity, and fulfillment. She shared that she values work as the central focus of her life and didn’t agree with my evolved focus that work is just one thread of what I do and no long my main thing. While the conversation was painful as I had hoped she’d support the evolution of my career, it also clarified that not all friendships can be carried through career transformation.

Over time conversations fade because you realize how many of those centered around a mutual point of trauma bonding - the toxicity of overworking and never enoughness. Or even in more positive realms of research and writing ideas maybe that you’ve done collaboratively or just sharing. Blog writing and gardening articles seem less impressive or important when folks are trapped on the treadmill of more peer review endeavors.

Friendship loss can feel like betrayal, because sometimes is

Betrayal hits hardest when you’re already exposed and vulnerable, which is why so many of us live with guards up around ourselves to prevent this very thing. It’s in that moment just after you’ve finally turned in your resignation, your health takes a hit, or when your brave, creative self is finding its way forward from a life-altering experience. The pain compounds when folks who seemed close turn always, often with silence and absence.

I’ve had clients grieve relationship loss when hit with a major health event. They find that when they look to their work relationships for support, their friends within the institutional ‘family’ don’t offer to help, let alone check on them. Rather often the requests from the colleagues keep coming in highlighting the one direction of those relationships.

I remember going out for a beer with two close friends the day after I handed in my resignation. I was walking away from tenured professorship and department chair. It was a milestone moment for me. One that I had been building up to and final took. A bold step into the unknown. But most of our conversation circled around their higher ed work drama. There was little room for my big decision. I left feeling disappointed and hurt.

Later one of those friends, who had initially supported my coaching work when I was doing it as a side gig, unfollowed me. When I asked, she struggled to explain. I understood later that not everyone will want to witness your career pivot and that’s okay because they are still in the system I walked away from.

I’ve seen versions of my own story in what clients have shared. The side interest is okay and even supported as long as you keep hustling and committed to the primary shared work. As long as your limiting the ‘hobbies’ to centralize the career burnout. As long as you’re the superwoman mom juggling all the things.

These are the moments that don’t always look like betrayal on the surface, but they hit central in the body. They happen less through the open rejection, but more through their retreat. The unwillingness or inability to meet who you are in your becoming. The unfollows and silences aren’t typically malicious.

Sometimes people are just choosing familiarity of the institution or career over the discomfort of witnessing someone leave it. Not unlike leaving a dead romantic relationship. An ex said to me once as I was moving out, “I don’t want to have to watch you living your best life.” What a true statement that more people in our lives feel than they admit out loud.

Practice disobedience by building deeper relationships

After you grieve, know that you can rebuild and head towards more aligned, deeper relationships. But first…

Stop apologizing for growing beyond old identities and building a more fully alive life. Stay no to spaces that only welcome your past self or work based conversations. Choose depth and growth over history. I know we are suffering from a lack of friends in our modern world but that’s not a reason to stay in relationships that leave you feeling drained and small. Reclaim joy in living your best life, which typically means allowing yourself to be known in new, messy, liberating ways.

If you’re navigating friendship silence or fractures after leaving or just expanding your life beyond a career, let that grief be an invitation. Break ups can be break opens. Ask yourself:

What kind of relationships do I want to cultivate now that would feel multidimensional or relational rather than transactional?

With whom or where can I be fully seen not for what I produce or how overworked I am, but for what I am becoming beyond my J-O-B?

Start noticing where your current relationships feel spacious and where they keep you in the tiny cardboard box that is any career within an institution. Begin reaching toward communities and individuals who meet you in your wholeness not your job title. Experiment with new people by not asking (or answering), “what do you do for work?” But maybe “what’s your favorite way to spend a weekend afternoon?” Or “tell me about what recent non-work book or podcast you’ve enjoyed.”

We can be intentional about building multidimensional relationships. And often they’re going to be outside of your work colleagues and career network, I’m sorry to say. The systems are rigged too much out of the favor of relationships. In the end, that colleague or supervisor will typically choose the work metric or output over you. And that doesn’t make them a bad person. It makes them human in a rigged system.

Career grief and relationship loss isn’t then about who unfollowed or ghosted you. It’s about the invitation to invite others to walk with you moving forward.

You get to be multidimensional. You get to rebuild relationships that aren’t organized around productivity or prestige. You can invite others to come along and you can grieve those who chose not to. That is regenerative. That is resilience.

It is rebellous to walk away from the old in order to build a better, more resilient future together with others who also are ready for connection. Look ahead and see there are others who also want deeper connections….

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I understand the complexity and heaviness that comes with unraveling. As a midlife woman, it’s complex to discern what is ‘from’ menopause, what always always underlying in a likely undiagnosed ADD brain, and what is healing from the exploitive capitalist hustle over the last decade.

Add on top the heaviness that is familiar to those of us who grapple with our collective polycrisis grief and how to live most alive through collapse anyway. In holding space for that both/and, there is always that sense of heaviness and there is also light. Lately, heaviness has tipped the scales a bit. It piles up, in inboxes, responsibilities, tasks to do, creative desires, parenting, worrying about aging parents, cooking, even gardening. That’s just the day-to-day sample contextualized within the layers of everything else.

Light.

It’s what I said I wanted this summer. It wasn’t a grand epiphany. Just some journaling clarity during a conversation in my client community earlier this week - our first gathering for the summer’s focus on Resilient Joy. I asked everyone what they wanted to feel this summer. Not goals. Not deliverables. But what did their joy and creativity want of them, with them.

What was the felt sensation they wanted to hold as their experience of summer? How would you answer that?

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I said, “I just want light. Something that I definitely have not felt since November. I also had unapologetic, with an asterisk next to it.”

How do I reconnect, then, to light, unapologetically? That’s the question I’ve been falling asleep with and waking up to since Monday.

To feel light, face death and shed the shoulds

The death doula, Alua Arthur, reminded me in her lovely book I just finished reading - Briefly Perfectly Human - there is no guidebook for life (do read this book, her stories are such a gift). There are only the unwritten rules, the made up ones, dictated to us by culture, family, capitalism. And too many of us will cling with a death grip to the things we believe we should do all the way until our last breath. I don’t know about you, but that exhausts me beyond my already chronic exhaustion of living and working through these times.

I know Alua Arthur’s words are truth: we are born, we break (ideally break open if we invite life to have it’s wondrous way with us), and we die.

Whatever imaginary guidebooks we’ve been following aren’t tailored to you or me. It’s just some invisible rule book with promises that if you do everything right, then you’ll feel happy, fulfilled, admired, rested, successful, and insert other marketing promised bullshitery. But more so full of threats about what all will happen if you don’t follow the rules, because it would have you believe that it’s your responsibility to save everyone in your life and work from whatever big bad wolf is out there lurking around the corner when actually they ARE the wolf preying.

Alua Arthur says that while we want the Hollywood ending, we don’t get that. I delight over rereading one of her suggested pathways:

Moments meeting death can help us tap into that deep sense of urgency to live life with aliveness - to the point where you’ve gotten enough. Sometimes those moments are other’s moments of facing death that we hold and witness the fears, often unspoken but felt. This year has been heavy with my own dad’s repeated hospital surgeries including another one this week. I live states away and can’t rely on my mother’s reports due to dementia. And then there’s my FIL’s cancer progression. These are the too common experiences so many of us face in midlife with aging parents. Needless to say. The veil between life and death is light and thin these days.

Other death moments are personal, intimate. Three summers ago I wrote “Living Love Revealed by Regrets” poem during the middle of an 11 day quest. I was solo backpacking and a fasting state for three of the days. The storms rolled in, both literally and metaphorically. I committed at the end to: “live so that I can erase each and every one of those regrets.” That night at 10,000 ft in the San Juan’s, I grieved and buried an old version of Me in my nest under a circle of pines.

So. Make the damn banana bread. Or the banana smoothie. Just get your fill of living. I want to feel full of living. I want that fill of enough. And in ways that avoid the western capitalistic overconsumption and exploitation of others to live way. Those taught ways are heavy - they stock our homes full of shit we don’t use and that can’t be recycled or repurposed.

Light as a practice of living

What I didn’t know at the time of that quest was I would need to continue grieving pieces off those old versions. The old versions were suffocating to light and life. I would keep shedding the old rule book because so many of the them are embodied, embedded patterns, memories, stuck stories, unprocessed traumas, and on. And to do that means intentional practices, and some of those practices are grappling with our inevitable death.

The truth I come to as I get closer to 50 years old is how much of our adult lives are spent unlearning and repatterning from out childhoods and young adultness. We are not meant to stay the same as we were at 20, thank gawd. The whole world this week is getting a front row social media seat to what happens when grown ass adults never mature beyond toddlerhood and yet have access to unchecked money, power, and social media accounts. Anyway.

I want a life that feels really nourishing and connecting, rich and fulfilling, like fresh baked banana bread or a smoothie on a hot day or after feel good movement. Light. And to hold light doesn’t mean toxic positivity or ignoring the heavy. What if light is more than a feeling and is actually more of a practice. A regular, daily or weekly, practice in living through times of both uncertainty and stability.

As such, I try not to ask anything of my clients and community that I don’t also ask of myself. To the question that kicked off our focus on a Summer of Resilient Joy:

How to intentionally bring joyful, creative practices into your days, in ways that feel just really good versus one more thing to do?

The answers back from them were rich. It was taking a spontaneously planned “skip day” to the beach with your kids. It’s wandering your yard with a camera, photographing tiny peaches from the tree you planted three years ago. It’s playing piano and singing. It’s listening to an audio book instead of writing the perfect essay or while exercising. It’s buying the jelly shoes for adult-you that kid-you didn’t get to delight in. It’s joy without output or productive utility. And every time I witness someone in my community doing this, it reminds me, we all are practicing living, being creative humans and that is light. It is in those practices that we regenerate our Resilient Joy to carry us through the uncertainty and collapse. Each little practice is one more moment of disobedience against the productivity norms of being a cog in capitalism’s greedy grind. Each little practice moment erases a future deathbed regret.

I suppose in the fragments of living the light still reflects. It may not feel as poetic as a piercing sunray but poetic nonetheless. Light is a feeling that holds also the opposition of heaviness. Light is a weightlessness. It’s an opening. It is a purging and shedding. A lightening of our load - mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and materially. Light makes space. Light highlights the delights. The joys and daily bright spots. It adds a softness to the fragments.

Light means choosing your own way back to aliveness, each and every day, inviting grief and love, even when the world is heavy and the skies are overcast. Some days are easier than others to practice. And that discomfort is okay.

I can intentionally invite Light, Unapologetically as a creative practice into my summer…off we go into summer…but first, a banana smoothie for breakfast!

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With a laptop holding my freshly collected dissertation data, I sold all my possessions to move to India for the year as I wrote and traveled. The year was 2006. The excitement of new adventures and transformation would give way to grief even before departure.

Once settled in Bengaluru, I would be unemployed for the first time in my adult life since before I left home at 17 for college. But before even leaving, I started grieving my career, even though I was closing that chapter by choice. Insert the stirrings of a massive identity and relationship crisis.

The other day, I set aside to write and dive into some deep thinking work on career grief, a topic I’ve been developing and coaching folks through for a while now. I got curious - where did this specific interest begin and what shaped my process of how I do that work? I found myself going back to the beginning. Or at least to what I conceptualize as the beginning of my own grief work, little did I know to name it such at that time. That year of 2006 would kick off what would become a spiral of my own, what I’ll call self-inflected as these were all internal choices, grief - career, identity, and relational - all of which intertwined, of course.

Short context: the course of those two years - 2006-2007 - I quit my first career that I did love, moved to India, wrote a dissertation, graduated with my doctorate, move back to the States, start my second career in a faculty position, and ended a ten year relationship. Fuckkkkkk. That was a lot. While all of that compounded, I can see how my choice to quit that first professional career, even though I was moving on to experiences I wanted more, spurred both a deep sense of loss and an identity crisis while also serving as a catalyst to bigger transformations.

What is career grief?

Over the last couple or so years, I’ve been directly working and writing on career grief - this specific type of disenfranchised loss arises when your sense of identity, self-worth, or purpose is intertwined with a career path or specific J-O-B that then is lost, shifted, or outgrown - by choice or force. It can be spurred on internally, such as with personal changes, moves, advancement, pivots to new dreams, like my own choices in my later twenties. Or externally with forced pivots through layoffs, budget cuts, field or industry collapses. Those are all examples of common career grief catalysts.

It’s ambiguous and cumulative, often overlapping with relational, identity, and existential grief. Which is why now in my work with folks through change, I see many folks try to fix or stop career grief from expression by flinging job applications left and right, switching from one frying pan to another, or thinking they just have to hustle and push through it. We don’t often face grief period, let alone acknowledge that career grief is real and it’s very different from disappointment.

Grief is not a problem to fix, it’s a sign of a lost or fractured connection. With career grief, it’s common that that disconnection can be to yourself, often manifesting as disorientation, emotional stuckness, and the need to let go of an old identity in order create the next bolder one. Sometimes that means you grieve in response to the realization that who you are becoming is another evolution from who you were when you started down a career path but now you have sunk costs, time, relationships, and identity investments.

Fuzzy beginnings with career grief: My own and my participants

Almost 20 years since I was in data collection for my dissertation, I reopened my notes. Two decades to look afresh at what I thought I understood then compared to what I understand now about how professional women transform their own identities and sense of purpose throughout their educational and career experiences. That’s what I researched back then - career strategies and social networks of women who pursued faculty careers in STEM in the US job market, more than half of whom were born in India.

In my interviews with women across various stages of their careers in academia, and industry, their career trajectories always included personal choices and professional incidents that spurred varieties of internal and/or external reckonings. Relationships built on mentorship networks and social support mattered most for those who felt successful in their careers and personal lives. Their grief flowed at times of major identity shifts across their careers with catalysts of educational migration, graduate school, marriage, children, and racism and sexism in the academy. Grief’s common expression came in the form of depression and crisis of purpose that often spurred questioning of their identities. Often mentorship at that point of crisis made such an influential impact on the women’s ability to shift meaning and move through that period with a sense of direction.

I know these were not rocket science findings (unlike one of my engineering participants who was indeed a rocket scientist). At the time though, leadership/professional research and career advice still projected a siloed, linear approach to decisions that kept personal separate and unrelated. The research knew that mentorship mattered, especially for women and minoritized folks, in the academy and male-dominated industries, but what I saw was the role that a specific type of relational support plays in helping someone navigate with greater ease their time of transition and transformation.

In so many ways, that sort of foreshadows why I call my approach to 1:1 work now “mentorship coaching” because there is such an important role that guidance from someone who has owned their own journey can play in helping someone else find their own meaningful path. It’s amusing to me now that my own beginnings as a researcher looked into women’s career choices and shifts all the while my own went largely unexamined by me at the time. By the end of my academic career though, I understood that as qualitative researchers, many of us are trying to understand something about our own lives or make meaning of something our brain can’t quite get it’s mind around. We get there when finally get there.

At that time, I was not the consistent journaler as I am now so I mainly have embodied memories that flowed in as I read my notes and reflected back on that time period. It seems obvious now that I experienced grief and depression that went unnamed and that I can now see grief reflected in my dissertation’s participant’s own stories, migration, and professional journeys.

The photos from that time mostly show a happy, smiling me so it would be easy to craft a positive public narrative from those - and, please know, there were beautiful, hard, and meaningful experiences from that year. I recall evenings I’d sit alone in a rented corner house room crying, paralyzed, unable to work or write. I’d walk to my neighborhood convenience store to buy phone cards for more minutes to call friends or family - searching for connection and soothing - never admitting how awful I felt for fear it might convey I made a mistake. Had I? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know how to navigate that time of transition or liminal space between positions - the space of unknown and uncertainty. I knew I wanted to write my dissertation. I knew I wanted to be in India. I knew I needed to leave my administrative career behind. My soul craved being right where I was in that moment of time, but cognitively I couldn’t make sense of why then I felt so conflicted.

I wish someone had been able to name that grief at the time. Grief could have told me that that time of in between was a threshold. That it was temporary, as well as necessary, to grieve so that I could have left go what was behind and welcome the dreams I was spinning into being. I recall feeling so lost and full of regret for leaving my career even though I didn’t want to do that work anymore. I had worked full time as a student affairs administrator through my doctoral degree - it’s how I paid for school and for that year off. Now I had given myself permission to pursue a bigger dream that had sat watching for that decade waiting for the right time to be born.

Since I didn’t know grief at the time, I leaned on some maladaptive coping patterns. When it came to work patterns, I gave into avoidance and procrastination of coding and writing. There was ample frustration at not understanding why I wasn’t making progress or focus, yet unable to get myself unstuck either. I did learn how to knit while I was there and, of course, I found the green spaces within the city to visit. One helpful choice was that I started attending a rooftop mediation yogic practice. It focused on pranayama rather than the western body-based yoga for exercise movement. That practice invited me to sit with my discomfort - all around from exposure to the elements as it was always outside to the elements at work within me. I’m forever grateful to the guru who allowed me to join his rooftop community.

Those closest to me at the time worked hard to cheer me up or offer advice to focus on the good. In hindsight, what I needed was to face my losses and hold the potential of the future. The pranayama practice was one that would help me learn how to sit with discomfort - to feel the feelings - rather than continue to avoid and compartmentalize the pain. Which I’m come to understand that Western folks who practice mindfulness to deal with their climate grief often do so to escape the pain. Thinking that it’s mind over anger or anxiety rather than an invitation to sit with those feelings.

Since those years, I’ve learned to develop a friendship with grief so that I have core healthy practices to work with the embodied response that arises. I understand now that career grief holds its own creative tension that invites you into alchemizing the old into something transformed and more personally meaningful.

Throughout our lives, we’ll be invited into transformational career grief

My time in India was bittersweet and life changing. I took the hard way to learn what it meant to shed, experiment, and reshape my sense of self. I would not yet learn what it meant to shed how I pitted my sense of my self-worth against my career successes. That would come in the next decade. But I can see how that year laid at my feet the work of Kali - the goddess of death and destruction.

Things I learned from that first taste of career grief of my own and my dissertation participants:

• Career grief often begins before the job title appears or changes. It can feel much more like an ambiguous type of grief - homesickness, disorientation, loss or something lacking, emotional stuckness.

• Underneath career transitions where grief is a companion, there often is a larger existential type of questioning and curiosity. I know it was for me - a deeper question of what do I want with my life?

• Systemic and structural exclusion and bias can serve as a catalyst for career grief because they create barriers, obstacles, and an emotional tax of enduring spaces that force you to try to survive rather than support your thriving. Many of my dissertation participants discussed being made to feel like they did not belong; holding a hidden emotional tax; and witnessing a collective grief from watching other women and minoritized folks struggle due to exclusion.

• Grief also comes from living and working in misalignment - when folks follow paths based on external advice or affirmation, the cost to their authenticity and purposeful living and working catches up. I wish I had used that year of grief to explore more intentionally what alignment could offer me. I see how a couple participants made it all the way to their first job after graduate school only to then admit it wasn’t their dream but someone else’s.

• There’s a relational grief when you’re grieving a career where you’ve chosen to sacrifice relationships or have created emotional and physical distance from loved ones. Grief also changes us and thereby changes relationships. It’s best then to be intentional about that rather than let those changes wreck heartbreak on relationships.

Ultimately, this trip down memory lane of old data and my own narratives felt like I was viewing through someone else’s photo album. And yet, as the stories are mine, I hold compassion for the things not understood fully twenty years ago. I hope grief has been a companion for my participants as my own journey reminds me that transformational grief travels with us across life stages.

So far, I have grieved two major careers and the relationships wrapped up in those. I know there will be more grieving and I will be ready to alchemize the love and loss.

Curious: what has your experience with career grief been? What were your catalysts? Tell me your relationship with career grief:

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Thanks for reading this as it has been such a gift to be able to rewrite the narrative of that painful yet critical time period in my career and life. The gift to see it, and my participants’ stories, through a richer grief-informed lens. If you’re interested in more career grief work, subscribe (always open access) and check out my updated Resilience Resource library for free workbooks and other tools to work with grief and career pivots: https://www.tamarayakaboski.com/resources

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Despite a burning fire within of childhood curiosity, I was trained in compliance. Like so many women, I was primed for the pipeline of good girl → good student → good overing employee.

I learned the price of questioning early. In school? Mouth-washed out with soap came the nuns threats. At home? The silent treatment for who would know how long. At work? Labeled a troublemaker or too soft, not _____ material.

My learned fearful cautiousness was deeply embodied in a Catholic school navy and green plaid uniform. Compliance worked in my favor of moving through the systems. Until it didn’t. My world of perfect external rewards woke up. For two decades, I had mastered the art of quiet success, better than average-enoughness. Until a B in my master’s degree shattered that illusion, which feels quite silly admitting that, but come on, who else slipped through systems being rewarded for silence with 4.0s. My professor of organizational theory, a Canadian no less which makes me question the American-ness of this conversation, explained my grade mark down reflected my unwillingness to question and outwardly engaging enough.

That grade was a mark and mirror.

What had my silence harmed, who had my silence harmed? Where was my voice?

Maybe spurred by that tiny cut to my ego, I viewed my doctoral education as necessary in my own unlearning of complicity and silence. My sociology and women’s studies courses cracked open the illusion of neutrality I had absorbed. I was so ill-informed and unaware without those courses. That’s both the threat and the promise for all this administration’s banning of books and attempted erasure of curriculum and programs meant to teach critical thinking and truths.

One memorable course was Dr. Croissant’s feminism and technology seminar. At the time, early 2000s, I was fascinated with the potential of tech work for women’s opportunities in leadership and creative positions to shape new worlds and feminist spaces. What a fucking fantasy, I was way off. Back then, I wrote about Judy Wajcman’s technofeminism, believing in the potential for mutually constructed, gender equitable digital spaces that could disrupt power imbalances. Instead, we’ve watched tech become the ultimate tool of patriarchal, white supremacists.

Living in this moment of rampant and obvious silencing of critical thought. A silencing meant to prevent any chance of unlearning complicity. I can see how these courses were seeds that have continued to grow their roots through to my core. I hope you know that feeling, too. Because of that rattling loose of learned bullshit, I do still believe in the power of education to be transformative. And that is the exact power that those D.C. MFers are scared of.

I devoted my own apprenticeship as an educator on hoping to inspire other’s waking up to their own compliance. One graduate seminar I loved to teach was on women and gender in higher education. There was always so much to grapple with and inevitably the content and conversations surfaced lurking learned beliefs, assumptions, and values. It was an honor to untangled those with folks. And it was a hugely more complicated and complex process than the snippets here oversimplify what actually needs to happen in a dedicated learning space.

In that seminar, content would always shift based on what was most pressing at that moment in time, but I would begin with two things. One was what it means to be in a space guided by feminist pedagogy. I see so much need for us, collectively and individually, to learn what it means to be in communal growth spaces. Many of us feel such comfort in systems that prioritize transactional learning and working. Instead, communal spaces are an invitation to shared responsibility, to ourselves and to each other. That there is an act of disobedience as it is the foundation to the goal of building networks of mutual aid.

The second was the individual responsibility to the collective. As very much a part of unlearning, we would scaffold understanding the weapons that white women’s complicitness wields by reading Mamta Motwani Accapadi’s 2007 article, “When White Women Cry: How White Women’s Tears Oppress Women of Color.” I chose that article because, well, White Women by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, didn’t exist yet in the world and because I was teaching educational leaders and professionals, which is who Accapadi addresses.

The concept of “White women tears” reveals how the act of crying can be a weapon of deflection of said personal responsibility to the collective if used or expected to gain forgiveness, absolution, or deflect from others observing the tears. Those tears are an attempt to maintain compliance both of the criers and of those others around them. What I would witness when tears came into the classroom was a rush of some folks to comfort the crier. Thus immediately shifting the conversation from the hard truth and inclusive lived experience back to the norm of whiteness.

I don’t recall a time I taught that course when there weren’t tears at some point in the classroom. And it may not always be actual tears, there’s a version that’s internal but for all to notice so that they ask if you’re okay or what’s wrong. That would happen to. I get it. It’s hard when you’re learning how to face your own privileges and role in oppressive systems and relationships. And also, it’s powerful when you start unlearning and know that you get to keep relearning how to be in whole, healed relationships with yourself, others, and Earth.

One of the ways I know this work of disobedience is so damn powerful is because here at this late stage capitalism point of collapse, ‘they’ want to keep us from self-sovereignty and communal care of mutual aid. Our disobedience right now fucking matters more than ever, especially as a white women speaking to other white women. If we don’t continue to vocally and financially resist, the efforts will become more violent attempts to eradicate ours and other’s existence. History is there to repeat itself, if we let it, you don’t need me to harp on that.

There are so many versions of how folks can say they support inclusivity and equity and yet their behaviors, or lack of, completely undermines and harms. We are living that very moment right now with the rapid withdrawal of DEI policies and statements. But more and more I know we are watching the erosion of that power to empower.

That train left the station decades ago with the K-12 system falling in line under “No Child Left Behind” and higher ed hitching their livelihood to markets and external funding. We will continue to witness leaders bow to the regime and throw students/staff/faculty under the bus all in the name of money or their continued existence. As a former scholar of higher education and organizations, I see the writing on the wall that many leaders will dig their heels in to the status quo of compliance all the way through the crumpling collapse. I saw that within six months of the covid-19 pandemic shut down. The digging in supports the going back wishful thinking.

I hope I’m wrong, there might be time to break down some walls in advance and start build something better. It begs the pivotal moment question of do you want to hold up the wall or do you want to help break it down to hold a different space?

I reflect on whiteness and women’s complicity in my own journey because I want to make sure I’m doing better for others, Earth, and our next generations. And the women I work with now I witness them moving through the midlife transitions and having to unlearn the ways that brought them into overworking and chronically burned out. I want more for all of us - I want that collective unlearning and collaborative rebuilding something better likely off technology.

Compliance keeps harm intact. And that means as an adult, who happens to be running empty on fucks to give anymore to playing nice, unlearning compliance - actively, relentlessly, and doing better. I know, here I am talking about whiteness and gendered socialization again - two topics that don’t propel writers up the leaderboard. But if you’ve made it this far, consider subscribing:

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Climate collapse is bigger than all of us; and yet, instead of collective forms of care and action, it’s been disenfranchised, politicized, and profitized. Which is largely way so many climate conversations have an unspoken elephant in the room - an elephant (no insult meant to elephants, just metaphorically) that takes the shapes of white supremacy and patriarchy manipulating through influence, denial, and profit.

So without justice in climate conversations and work, sustainability is just one of those doesn’t stick, plasticy cheap kind of bandaids that you know if going to fall off within sight of the first drop of water.

How do you make sense of all this complexity and emotions if you don’t hold a justice lens or mindset, yet?

That means I am largely talking to white folks here. In my experiences over the years, it’s white women who push back when whiteness comes into these conversations and it’s white dudes when patriarchy and feminism comes in. Honestly, again speaking from my own position, it’s largely other white women who work to keep other women in line with complicitness.

Scaffolding this a bit, to understand the systems and mindsets that fuel the crisis is to then connect to the part that is hugely ignored, the resistance to solving it because we could have changed our current trajectory decades ago. Starting with the foundational fact: those who are the greatest bearers of environmental hazards are folks in communities of low income, the elderly, and folks of color and culture. This is by design. When we ignore that design we are acting in agreement - we are complicit - with the powers and decisions that intentionally hurt groups of people, and eventually you too. These systems have fueled the crisis, are run by humans playing ‘god’ with all of us, and thus makes it a justice issue.

Climate and health injustice: Fracking in Greeley

Years ago, I lived in Greeley, CO, a super conservative area of the eastern plains that runs along side more liberal Front Range wealthier areas. Greeley is located in Weld County, which has over 21,000 active well, but okay, it’s large geographically. Within the city limits of Greeley there are approximately 400 active oil and gas wells. To counter that, it’s helpful to know that the adjacent county, Larimer, has about 180 active wells with less than 10 in the city limits of its main city, Fort Collins.

Back to Greeley, there were two new fracking site proposals in the 2010s, which doesn’t seem like a big deal given those numbers. However, these two specific ones both faced massive protests and resistance, even getting national news spotlight. All because the location options were horribly placed — at the closest point they could be to schools. Legally, fracking sites can’t be closer than 1000 feet from schools (it’s 500 feet from homes). The developed site was about 1300 feet from the school building for a 24 well pad, but less than 700 feet from the school’s playground!

What made this extra scandalous is that the site that was drilled was the second school location after the first school location successfully stopped the drilling. The first school site was a charter school whose parents and neighbors were able to force Extraction Oil and Gas of Denver to relocate across town. At the time of initial proposal in early mid-2010s, that charter school was over 77% white in a middle class neighborhood.

The second school, where the site remains active, also resisted through massive push back and protests. That school is 89% Hispanic and mixed immigrant population serving and a public neighborhood school.

According to FRACTRACKER Alliance, 11 of the 24 wells were drilled and are actively producing. It took an independent* 2019 report’s data showing dangerous levels of benzene on school grounds to stop the remaining sites from being drilled. The remaining ones were halted from new drilling, as of this date, due to state governor intervention in 2020 forced Extraction Oil and Gas to withdraw undeveloped permits after that report.

The benzene report showed numbers exceeding the established safe levels for eight-hour periods of exposure, you know, eight hours like in a normal school day. Those levels were not a one time leak. The data from CO Air Pollution Control Division’s monitoring system showed that in a 3 month time period the acceptable rate was exceeded 113 times, including on active school days and that was with levels not even being monitored every day.

Benzene remains in the air anywhere from a few days to a couple weeks before breaking down. Benzene exposure is a well-known cause of cancer, specifically bone marrow failure and leukemia, as well as other long term health issues as it affects reproductive and immune systems. And it does not always show up as an immediate health impact but can take years to decades.

Environmental injustice is not abstract or fake-woke propaganda, but site-specific, racist, deadly, and profit-driven. It more accurately the modern face of similar racist fascism that we saw during the deadly Jim Crow era. That statement has got to feel uncomfortable AF and it should, which is why we’re here talking about the role of climate collapse, its existence and rapid acceleration is in our laps that are clinging to the comfortable nature of systems of whiteness.

Who’s resisting solving it?

While I couldn’t find comprehensive, clear, and updated stats, it seems that around 99% of CEOs for oil and gas companies are men; over 80% of the field’s workforce are men; and, 80% are white. Obviously that’s just one of the fields involved in the school fracking site case. If you look at the other power players involved: politicians, policy makers, and school boards, historically they are all disproportionately white men making decisions that affect folks who do not look like nor access the world the same as them. So when I reference whiteness as a system of harm, you can follow the money and the players yourself. Ask yourself: what are they protecting and why that/them and not other options?

Here’s another piece to this sour pie. There’s a new movement of climate deniers who claim that climate change is a pseudo-religion meant to oppress and control the American people. Which is ironic (I don’t think that’s the right word for this level of harm) because as in this example, denying the impact to a community, especially one of a vulnerable population like school children, is the very description of oppression and control.

The prominent voices driving this new climate denial or delay are largely white, middle-aged (or boomer) dudes with media platforms as right-leaning ‘influencers.’ Shock-of-no-shocks, these bro-fluencers are backed by large advertising budgets from rich (you can fill in your guess of identities) folks with an agenda. Don’t take my word for it, here are more details via this review by Parker Molloy, https://www.readtpa.com/p/media-matters-report-on-conservative. You can also reflect on what happened to Twitter when it got Musk-ed making the newer version one of great misinformation/propaganda and hate speech.

Point being, climate ‘denial’ is not about facts or fear of some new religion taking over Jesus’ place. It’s about delaying action that impacts the profit of the people who fund and fuel our collapse at the cost of more vulnerable populations - people, plants, and animals. As far as why are the rest of us not rich people are going along with the resistance, it’s because it’s more comfortable to refuse the cognitive, emotional, and lifestyle reckoning that those facts demand. This brings us to addressing cognitive dissonance as a possibility for transformation.

Discomfort is the invitation to transformation

Denial is the mindset of climate resistance not climate resilience; of whiteness not anti-racism. When I name white supremacy and patriarchy as core forces in climate crisis and denial, I’m not assigning personal blame, unless I specifically am, such as specific people in decision making positions or influencing ones, like the bro-fluencers. I’m naming the systems that uphold the status quo, and worse, inflict harm and oppression on others.

Cognitive dissonance. It the discomfort that comes from holding two things that are in opposition to each other. If not named and worked with it turns into resistance when it could turn into action.

Are humans innately wired to avoid emotional discomfort or have we all lost the capacity to deal with hard things in these last couple generations? Whichever it is, that discomfort seems to trigger resistance. There’s something visceral about knowing that ours and others actions have caused climate crisis and racial harm, or even what I’ve often seen called polycrisis or permacrisis.

The partnership - of discomfort and resistance - shows up in how folks react to conversations about race, power, collapse, and responsibility, which is why I often name the common whiteness issue of complicitness. This means we have to talk about whiteness and the discomfort for white folks when we do. I’m in no way saying I do that well as that isn’t inherently the focus of my work but I’ve held enough justice-oriented conversations and grad class discussions to know that emotions are central to how folks experience race - their own and others. Thus making emotional intelligence a skill set integral to understanding and challenging white supremacy and patriarchy generally and within climate conversations.

Research on emotional intelligence and white identity development exposes how emotions like shame, guilt, and fragility aren’t neutral. They’re part of how white supremacy sustains itself. When you feel shame triggered, there is a greater chance that your sweet big brain will go into resistance mode for protection purposes. And if you resist or shut down, you can’t learn or grow or listen to other perspectives. It is not surprising then that the communication mode of the deniers (deniers of racism, sexism, collapse, ableism, all of it) are the loud people who start pointing fingers, blaming, calling names, speaking lies, etc. That behavior for most of us (depending on our childhood and other held traumas) triggers shame and shut down. It puts you in the place they want you to be in.

We are living in an era where the powers that make edicts with their lap dogs doing the dirty work are banning the very language and experiences of everyone who don’t fall in line or fit their suffocating mold of suppression. What I increasingly see in the US is that emotions are shamed and silenced so much so that a lot of white folks reflexively defend against them. We’ve been trained that discomfort is something to avoid. But discomfort is actually a signal that something potentially transformative could happen.

Emotional intelligence models show that growth occurs when individuals name and make meaning of complex emotions, like those that arise around racial and gender privilege or when facing cognitive dissonance. By learning to sit with and interrogate these emotions instead of defending against them, individuals, especially those who benefit from dominant systems, can begin to disrupt them. Discomfort isn’t the enemy; it’s often the doorway into necessary change.

And yet, we are not wired for sustained dissonance. The body craves stability, homeostasis, which is why cognitive dissonance can trigger either deep transformation or complete shutdown (think flight, fight, freeze, fawn). If you have a chance to learn to how to get curious and interrogate your emotions in positive ways, then you can work to dismantle the systems and beliefs that keep you disconnected from yourself, others, and Earth.

As a white woman, the worst insult I could receive would be to be called ‘a Karen’ so yes, whiteness is an uncomfortable topic. There’s huge discomfort it bringing whiteness into conversations, often casually assuming we’re on the same page. But I find we often aren’t. We might be in the same room but we’re on on the same page other than many white folks don’t want to be called racist. (Unless you read news and comment sections, then it seems are totally cool spouting off their hate and ignorance).

We can’t address and stop the harm to our communities without addressing how they got to be marginalized, hellllllo white people. If we can’t accept this a historical and contemporary fact, then we’re just bypassing irresponsibly no matter how many plastic bottles we try to recycle unsuccessfully (because they are not recyclable).

Sustainability conversations are comfortable distractors from the work that really needs to be done. White supremacy thrives on maintaining power and profit appearances and partners well with capitalism to commodify crisis.

So when I see these new climate ‘deniers,’ I know they aren’t resisting climate data but resisting what that data asks them to feel and become. Instead they’re choosing profit for their continued comfort and power over others, people and planet. Climate work, like justice work, evokes cognitive dissonance because it demands that we confront complicity, privilege, and loss. The body seeks stability, so when we encounter truths about climate collapse rooted in colonialism, extraction, and white supremacy, many instinctively reject, justify, or bypass the discomfort. But true climate resilience is about staying present with this dissonance in order to adapt and transform together. It’s how we metabolize grief, build capacity for change, and move from passive awareness into embodied action.

Discomfort is an invitation.

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*2019 report: Monitoring results prepared by Barrett Engineering PLLC for 350 COLORADO available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/12o-2-vBCEdMSWasoFaN2QWetZiGIOsdt/view

Is __________ a good climate collapse plant option?

It all started with shifting perspectives on weeds and blooms.

This is the fourth summer in this house, a cute little urban cottage, built in 1906, located in the older part of town. Not old-old, but old for the West along the Front Range. The front yard was covered in grass lawn and bindweed. The grass parts have been disappearing slowly from our continual shaving off. I’m losing to the choking hold of the bindweed though. I’ve tried bindweed mites, continual cutting off, covering up with plywood! This season they will meet the flame weeder. I have little hope for any potential success there either. I fear that when it becomes too hot for all the beneficial plants that the bindweed will inherit the Earth and be part of what thrives. So be it - it’s green and will offer flowers to some pollinators.

The backyard also has experienced a transformation as I’ve learned about its own variety of dominating plants, which all feel way more manageable compared to the bindweed. Many of the ones in the back are known to grow in low nutrient soils and are, by mainstream standards, considered ‘weeds’ - lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), pigweed (Amaranthus spp.), and common mallow (Malva neglecta).

I’d be remiss though to not speak of the creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides), a variety introduced once to this soil and in finding it quite hospitable I spend much of the growing season attempting to managing their takeover. While pretty and pollinator friendly with their bell shape like the true Colorado wild bluebells, I understand the allure when people planted the bellflower over the bluebells.

I feel guilty alluding to these as weeds since weediness carries such a negative (and inaccurate) connotation. I generally keep disparaging remarks only for Yellowjackets, and yet, there too, these may just be the plants and insects that live through the drought and heat of collapse. We’re all doing our best, right? Wanting to thrive and, maybe, not meaning to choke out others also from thriving? But if we’re not in right relationship with each other then how do we know enough to shift? How do we stay in right relationship through the growing stressors of collapse?

Back to the weeds, just a little online reading tells me that all of these plants carry benefits within the right hands, stomach, and context. I, however, at this point do not have that type of relationship with them, at least not yet, perhaps in the future. Perhaps that is what a ‘good climate collapse plant option’ actually is and that what I’m about to outline next is something different all together - more human life comfort and status quo sustaining than truly climate forward thinking. All of this really points to the great need for me to become my own weediness elder in an isolated world lacking elders.

Cultivating and culling plants has brought me into a relationship with my small urban yard. Is it the right relationship? I’m still not sure I’ve got that part learned fully yet. I’ve been stewarding, though, by nursing the soil and tending to who all were already here, including the ‘weeds’ and their companions, albeit also hugely neglected at first. The backyard is so welcoming with its established apple and apricot trees, raspberry patch, and some mature ash and oaks host to this spring’s tiny young squirrel babies.

The most fruitful of the apples, a sweet green apple, has one 90 degree crocked branch that begs for someone to sit in. Of course, the kiddo obliges, how could you resist the sweet tree’s beckoning reminding me much of the beginning of The Giving Tree. The last three years, I’ve been successful with growing clover rather than grass and, of course you would believe, that the old apricot fruited for the first time last year. Although this year is looking like it will be more of a restful year for fruiting for both of these based on their blooms right now.

Part of my stewardship has been the desire for how to adapt this into a thriving space with food for humans, pollinators, and extra to share with the at times pesky squirrels. Being in Colorado with our aridification trend plus seasons of droughts, I’m very sensitive to the necessity of low water need areas so I pair it with installing drip lines in the raised vegetable beds. My amateur skills with sprinkler systems became evident with a few geysers of water so I’ll need to redo some of my design this year.

I made an area for Colorado wildflowers and other blooming delights. Oh, the prolific prairie sunflowers that grab my love’s long legs when walking by. The sunflowers are so very generous with their offerings. The longhorned bees love them so much and I never knew of their fierce adoration until the summer multi-flowered stalks created their dense forests of itchy. My hope is that this space offers migrating pollinators a rejuvenating reprieve from their journey. Or perhaps they decide to stay a while longer or move in - all are welcome (I’m not talking to you, yellowjacket).

Plant, shrubs, and tree selections for a heating and extreme weather impacted urban garden.

I grapple with climate forward gardening. To me, it means the need to adapt to moving shifts in order to transform how and what I am doing as I also continuously assess and change. Climate forward considers the local ecological climate shifts for long term adaptability while holding a relational intentionality of ethical selections.

I grow in zone 5b just off the foothills, which offers it’s own Colorado microclimate, before the Front Range flows eastward in the drier and hotter plains. Now I think about systems of water conservation, hail and sun protection (I’m at about 5,000 ft above sea level), ethical and safe ways of grasshopper and squirrel damage minimization, extreme temperature fluctuations of 50 degrees in one day, extreme heat, late and early cold snaps, winds over 40 mph, drought season on top of aridification, and on and on. You get the point.

The gardening of my father’s and my youth (in Louisiana) where we replanted every year in the established garden area and the rains would mostly keep everything growing, does not exist. The worries then were few and the usual, not continuous extremes. I feel nostalgic and envious of the advice my great Uncle Johnny, a potato farming Polish immigrant, would give to my dad after some minor gardening calamity: ‘Junior, there’s always next season.’ Is there? Will there be? What will it look like?

For a while I suppose we’ll continue gardening, depending on your location and what immediate shifts in collective climate policy we do, and most likely, don’t do. To me this why it’s so critical to be developing a climate resilient mindset and emotional skill set so that I can prepare for the radical change over the next decade and adjust now to ease that transition. There are no perfect solutions with this. There’s no one cure. And I see the invitation to apprentice with those ‘weeds’ now and develop that relationship somehow.

I work to shift my planning, expectations, and systems into a more climate forward mindset and actions. In practice, this will look different for everyone based on location specific weather threats and current resource access. Are any of these truly good climate forward plant selections? I don’t know; time will tell. And in the meantime, here’s what I shifted this season:

Asparagus

A relocation of two deep raised beds early this spring gave me a chance to turn them into asparagus beds. I know asparagus is a long game, and one that I’m hoping offers us spring spears for the next decade or so should we have climate stable enough environment. But knowing that’s not a guarantee or likely, I planted two sections - one full sun and one partial sun. And I chose two different varieties to see how they do - Millennium and Purple Passion. A positive is that due to their long root structure and having planted them in beds that are 1.5 foot high without a solid base means that they can be more drought tolerant once established with supplemental watering as we our new pattern seems to be rain-free summers here.

Elderberries

To date, I haven’t been an elderberry syrup maker or anything. Only an admirer of her medicine and health offerings. Elderberry is likely a less great climate collapse plant option since elderberry can be prone to heat stress. Making this selection a bit riskier but it felt worth a shot before it gets too hot. I selected two varieties: York and Nova. Again, one planted to receive some shade now and the other full sun now but in a few years will have some shade of a “Hot Wings” Tatarian Maple (Acer tataricum ‘Garann’). That lovely tree with bright pink samaras in the summer is a more heat and drought tolerant newer variation of maples; actually a surprise of a variation discovered here in a Fort Collins nursery back in the 1990s. As the Hot Wings grows, she will offer shading for the York in a few years when heat from the western setting sun really cranks up.

Mulberry tree

Speaking of trees, that brings me to finally welcoming a mulberry home! Ever since harvesting and making mulberry jam from a neighbor’s tree some years ago, I have obsessed with having a mulberry tree of my own. I know well all the objections: too big, too messy, roots find all water sources including house pipes; and yet, I planted one. The final deciding factors were both my salivating tastebuds and the foresight for increased shade on our western front facing house. The variety I found in stock, as it’s not an easy tree to locate given the objections listed, is a Pakistan mulberry - longer berries and more heat tolerant. While typically recommended for zones 6 and higher, being western facing and with the heating climate this seemed to be a small risk when considering climate forward tree selection - you plant now for the climate of 20 years from now.

Ultimately, climate resilient plants and trees, like climate resilient humans, are those who learn or already know how to adapt and transform in the face of neglect, disruption, and opportunity. They don’t give a fuck about mainstream narratives of value and beauty. They know who they are. They hold a capacity to grow or persist under stress, much like the so-called weeds I found thriving in here at first. In a way, those weeds weren’t just climate survivors; they were climate thrivers. The creeping bellflowers, pigweed, and others spread without human care, without permission or prevention, at times, to a taking over point.

Maybe after I’m gone, the plants I’ve chosen for this urban garden and yard will be considered weeds by the next inhabitants or, in a little ego-fueled wish, they’ll be seen as weediness elders, showing a path to climate resilience that grows beyond the status quo norms of traditional beauty, nourishment, or worthiness.

What a delight this has been - a journey of experimenting, loving, and relationship building, a journey that’s taking root. One that’s inviting this question of where can we embrace the lessons of the weediness elder with her unapologetic wisdom rooted in adaptability, subversion, and relationship with the land all outside of dominant norms?

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I noticed that folks default responses often went in two directions: 1) a leap into action or 2) resistance. The leap may sound good, but I noticed folks often then skipped over their bodies signals and pushed off the complex emotions, which landed them in burnout, broken down, and hopeless. The other, resistance, showed up as body disconnection and cognitive or mindset barriers.

Both of these defaults happen with folks who care about the planet, or are in helping or climate work, or are well informed community members. These responses weren’t coming from the deniers and the disinterested is what I’m saying. Because these conversations have been so intentionally excluded in the US, we find ourselves ill-equipped to know how to recognize, let alone work with, the fear, anxiety, grief, and guilt. We can learn how to slow down so that we connect with our bodies and notice our emotions and stories in order to align with our values and engage in purposeful action.

Essentially that’s the flow at the core of the 4 step resilience building process: Access-Assess-Align-Action. It’s a regenerative way to stay present with the collapse - to witness and hold the love and grief - without getting paralyzed by it. And lucky me, I got to share my process on how to navigate climate embodiment, emotions, and mindsets in multiple forms: an article, a podcast interview, and a self-coaching workbook.

Free climate resilience resources - it’s a community effort to go through these times. 💚

Dropped this week ⬇️

Podcast Episode (available as audio or youtube video)

Coaching Through Climate Crisis: A Four-Step Resilience Framework with guest, Tamara Yakaboski
I joined podcast crew at Beyond the Page to talk about a process I use to coach folks through climate emotions and redefine resilience so that they can find connection and action. You can listen to the conversation if you're looking for language, tools, or just a way to not feel so alone in the climate heaviness. If you’ve ever felt stuck between loving the Earth and despairing over its destruction, this one’s for you.
→ [Listen to the episode here]

or watch it on YouTube:

Here’s what Beyond the Page said about this episode:

"What in nature do you love more than anything in the world?" With this simple yet profound question, resilience coach Tamara Yakaboski opens a pathway to climate resilience that transcends political divides and paralyzing eco-anxiety.

The climate crisis has arrived on our doorsteps, manifesting in unprecedented weather events, rising temperatures, and profound uncertainty. Many of us experience solastalgia—the pain of watching places we love transform before our eyes—along with eco-anxiety and climate grief. These responses aren't weaknesses; they're natural human reactions to witnessing profound environmental change.

Drawing on over 20 years as a social scientist and professor, Yakaboski shares a transformative four-step framework—Access, Assess, Align, and Action—designed to bridge the gap between awareness and meaningful climate engagement. Unlike conventional approaches that rush toward solutions while bypassing emotions, this methodology helps both coaches and clients process their embodied responses to climate uncertainty before taking action.

Perhaps most revolutionary is Yakaboski's redefinition of resilience itself. "I don't want to be a cut piece of wood that bounces back," she explains. "I want to be like a tree that can grow from a rock crevice or cliff edge." This ecological understanding of resilience—as adaptation rather than resistance—offers a powerful metaphor for navigating climate challenges with creativity and determination.

The conversation weaves between practical strategies and profound insights, revealing how reconnecting with nature—whether through forest walks, ocean sounds, or simply observing birds in urban settings—can reset our nervous systems and rekindle our capacity for hope. Not passive, wishful thinking, but active hope grounded in meaningful engagement.

Ready to transform climate anxiety into purposeful action? Visit www.TamaraYakaboski.com to access her guide on overcoming cognitive barriers to climate engagement, and start having more conversations about climate change. As Yakaboski reminds us, "We feel more hopeful and empowered the more we're in conversation with others."

Article

That podcast conversation was based on my article - Coaching with Certainty through Climate’s Uncertainty- that came out earlier this month in the podcast’s affliated publication, choice: The Magazine of Professional Coaching. You can access a free copy of the article, complete with self-coaching and coaching others questions, at the end of this earlier post:

Thanks, Garry and the great folks at choice Magazine and Beyond the Page for the opportunity to share resources on working through the messy edge of climate collapse. 💚

Coaching Workbook resource

🔗 Access my free workbook guide mentioned in the podcast - Climate Resilience: Your Guide to Navigating Barriers to Climate Engagement - for ideas on how to engage cognitive barriers that pop up when working with climate emotions.

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Mostly, thanks for being here. If you find this helpful, please restack and share with others. 💚

I used to be a full-on Earth Day romantic, tree hugger and all. I have the ink to prove it. At 18, I got my first tattoo at The Branding Iron, a roadside dank shop in Alabama. A two-dimensional Earth picked off one of flash sheets on the wall. I was riding high after hiking a stretch of the Appalachian Trail for spring break. The moment felt shifting.

But honestly that feels like a kind of immature love in hindsight. A cute youthful puppy love more so than a deep, mutually respectful relationship. Now, Earth Day has a tinge of an annual ritual of eco-performance. I cringe a bit to come across critiquing the one day Earth gets her attention. It comes from a place though of craving deeper conversations together on how we’re tending our relationship with Nature holding grief and love rather than more demos on solar panels and recycling tips.

My early version of connection to Earth was reverent, but in hindsight, perhaps largely symbolic, like a reusable cloth bag with a Reduce-Reuse-Recycle logo. The packaging made it easier to miss how intertwined eco-movements get greenwashed in a society that drives such a disconnection from Nature.

Our disconnection of mind-body-Nature fuels profits and productivity. The numbness makes it bearable to sit at computers all day or rush from hustle to hustle. While the frantic busyness forces the consumption of conveniences - the meal subscriptions, cleaning services, dog daycare, afterschool care, etc. Yippee, economy.

It’s taken me the last decade to unlearn and heal from the early indoctrination of the ‘christian white working class’ systems of any version of these: idle hands are the devil’s play things, work hard and play hard, man’s dominion over Earth, etc. So when I brought home sustainability ideas in high school it was easily dismissed as what their soft, emotional tree hugging kid would do, within reason. Becoming vegetarian in high school after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposing the turn of the century American meat packing industries horrors though was pushing it too far.

Back then, it didn’t occur to me that sustainability came with limits shaped by what was deemed acceptable within the other two pillars: economic and social. My younger, idealistic self latched onto the environmental piece. I took to heart the heart of sustainability was the environmental piece - a healthy relationship between humans and the planet. That’s what I took away from my environmental science high school class anyway. What I didn’t yet understand was that this Earth-loving stance was tolerated as long as it didn’t challenge economic and social norms of growth, consumption, and performativity.

When I declared my vegetarianism at the dinner table in the early 1990s, it wasn’t just a dietary change, it violated the economic and social lines in a family whose livelihood was tied to maintaining the status quo. My father was an independent broiler poultry farmer contracted with the big meat industry. They’re a hunting family and we lived in rural northern Louisiana. My mother attended southern Baptists churches on occasion. So, you see, sustainability needed to not threaten lifestyles and beliefs systems or cause a big stir in town of how could a good conservative family end up with a black sheep daughter. Needless to say, that didn’t progress quietly or without notice, haha.

My younger self didn’t have a clear view that sustainability had such an obvious connection to capitalism in its practice. As I left the farm to be the first off to college, thus reinforcing my burgeoning liberal softness, I studied English lit and hung out with the theater, history, interdisciplinary studies, and language majors. In my possession, I had a used 1970 copy of The Greening of America by Charles Reich, but I dared not yet read it.

Now all grown up like, I operate across universities, entrepreneurial and governmental sectors. I understand the emphasis within modern sustainability is on that economic part with feel-good connections to the other two. Ahhh, the triple bottom line. The 3P’s: People - Planet - Profit.

I hear arguments that in their combination, sustainability can be the pathway of actions protecting our future. This, too, feels naïvely (or manipulatively) outdated. A function of privileged global north folks ability to ignore human-caused depletion. An emphasis on profit connects to growth and, last time I checked that requires continued making of goods tied to the extraction of resources, for the consumption of more, and thereby the discarding of them.

As we waited last night watching oil carrying train cut through downtown separating us from home, I have to wonder how much the P for people is about comfort partnering with the bigger driving P of profit all at the expense to Planet.

Sustainability doesn’t disrupt, it preserves. It preserves comfort, existing hierarchies, and extractive systems. It allows us to feel good while avoiding the root cause of collapse. It’s business as usual. We, humans, and our endeavors have been unsustainable since the Industrial Revolution. There’s no other way around it.

Part of why we, especially in the US, struggle to break out of extractive, unsustainable patterns is our deep comfort with questioning our taught belief systems and our demand for convenience and instant gratification. Underneath that, I believe, is a cultural deficit in climate resilience. The tree huggers of my generation were given the warm embrace of sustainability that fed the illusion that people, planet, and profit could truly coexist mutually, even equally. I’m in some shared spaces right now where sustainability is the word used to talk about a new way of leadership and, honestly, I’m struggling because it feels very 1990s.

One of the biggest barriers to preparation or meaningful change is our reflex to bypass discomfort. We expect comfort. Let me reword, White folks, especially, expect and demand comfort. Sustainability is so comfortable (and whitewashed) that it even comes packaged in soft cotton t-shirts that I imagine are sold at Target (not that I shop there anymore). It is a real uncomfortable reckoning to come to terms with the fact that the White, wealthy, mostly BroDudes and their companies have known and caused our collective collapse - this can feel like some serious untenable cognitive dissonance.

I get it. Look, I see over and over across climate trainings, coaching, and group workshops. I witness how deeply underprepared we are for this.

When faced with overwhelming truths, I find two common responses. One is folks want to leap toward the small and manageable, like recycling (also, plastic is not recyclable - the end). The other is watching folks see or hear the word climate and then completely glaze over or shut down.

Cognitively, somatically, and emotionally, most of us are not equipped for what’s happening, let alone what might be coming. Sustainability can feel good to hold on to, I know. I want you to have something to hold to because we need to stay out of paralysis, doomism, or avoidance. We have each other and we can do more than what’s presented as sustainable or status quo, that’s all. And we have to do more than business as usual.

Here’s the other thing about Earth Day in the US, it largely was created and led by White, privileged folks. Many of whom failed to connect with those who had a much longer history fighting against long standing environmental harms that affected their communities - the Civil Rights and other social justice grassroots movements and leaders.

This matters for lots of reasons including because the bearers of the bulk of harm from human-caused climate crisis are: folks of color, folks living on low incomes or in poverty, the global south, and folks who are elderly, young, or disabled. Now the US has elected officials chosen because of their platforms of open hate, discrimination, and oppression who immediately censored climate and DEI related words to erase all of this so that you stay forced to focus on their profit. Here are some resources on my 2021 blog posts: Earth Day Reminder that Climate is a Justice Issue and Climate Feminism.

Obviously at a larger societal and national level, (and perhaps within many of our own families and communities), we are woefully unprepared to address climate crisis let alone climate justice and sustainability’s feel-good nature isn’t the framework to help us shift.

While I never want to shit on the work that makes our planet and people healthier, I want all of us to sit in the discomfort of why are doing this and not that. What we need isn’t greenwashed vendors at a fair or more education recycling. We need regeneration. We need climate resilience born from grief, from discomfort, from truth-telling, and togetherness. We have to learn how to live in right relationship with each other and the Earth and that’s going to require a different framework that status quo. It’s going to require a reckoning with climate justice and a deep reconnection within yourself and to Nature.

All that said, I will still be walking over to our local Earth Day celebration today after I finally publish this piece. As a lover of Earth (day), this was hard for me to write because I wanted to convey a loving, understanding tone because it matters how we talk about these topics in order to engage others and I want to offer compassion to my idealistic tree hugging younger self.

The choice to attend today has some eco-performativity, a little action-orientation, and largely reconnection. I want to sign a petition to protect some natural lands from a damn bike park proposal. I also want to hear some live music because human creativity feels like a salve on my soul these days. I want to remember to live my value of connection in community and be with folks I know or will meet. Climate resilience means holding space for the discomfort of growth and change.

I’ll offer these questions for myself, and any of you finding yourself in sustainability spaces:

What version of Earth Day am I showing up for: eco-performativity or reconnected relationships? How can I engage in relationships to build our community’s climate resilience? How can I shift into degrowth more?

Free resource on how to talk through cognitive barriers to climate engagement

Choice: The Magazine of Professional Coaching, published my article this month, Coaching with Certainty through Climate’s Uncertainty: A Four-Step Process to Build Climate Resilience. Here’s free access to my short article that’s full of reflection questions for yourself and others. Happy Earth Day!

Choice V23n1 Feature Yakaboski 1

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The modern cycles we learn is one of Nature’s VS work, with work winning every time.

Yet, another cycle - my own personal mini-cycles - has grown louder, often peaking at breaking points that give over in a surrendering way.

When zoomed in, I relearn about those mini-cycles rise with peaks and dip with rests.

Yet, the beginning of a spring cycle is more than popping green everywhere. It also beckons for shedding and pruning of old. Some shedding does come at a forced point, like the sudden moldy death of my longtime kombucha scoby friend this past week. Whereas some shedding is more planned, like the pruning of old raspberry canes I did the other week. Other shedding is deeper and cues a more existential crisis type, like owing 12k on federal taxes at the junction when this regime continues to steal our collective future to line their pockets, bragging about it all the way to our faces. Fucccccckk.

And paired with those moments of spring shedding (forced or chosen), there has been quite the counter push of joyful emergence this week.

The Plum blooms.
The Grape Hyacinths smell sweet.
Rootful coleus from cuttings ready for potting.
Gooseberry leaves emerge protected by thorny stems.
Hoppin’ Hops leap by the minute.
And cucumber cotyledons emerge in crayola yellow-green.

Another beautiful emergence this week was community. After teaching a short Climate Resilience course at CSU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute this Feb-March, a core group of them continue to meet. On Monday, I joined them on a field trip to our city/county landfill and recycling center. The information was gut hitting yet participating in this growing community of climate learners was healing!

Spring is intention. It’s a pulsation. A push and a release. Pauses for joy. Moments of cries.

Closing the laptop for the week. The exhaustion is a deep one this week. Dirt is always my therapy. I’m off to plant my seed potatoes. Two new to me types this year: Red Pontiac and Austrian Crescent Fingerlings.

Was that a grasshopper I heard flying! It’s too early…

The world doesn’t need more urgency; it needs more embodied, honest presence.

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The words lodged in my chest. What she didn’t know was my grandma - Merlene LaVerne - who raised me through junior high was an ordained preacher in the South. Merlene and I also share the same middle name. So while I’m not religious, the phrase, climate minister, connected deeply. Sister Merlene, while we held different views in some key areas, would feel some pride knowing how her hands guide me.

That phrase - climate minister - echoed something deeper. It stirred a memory of some years ago while on a solo day quest in the foothills of Sunshine Canyon outside Lyons. I wandered naked holding a prayerful question to Nature of how I best can serve. I was at one of those urgent moments of heeding Earth’s call to alchemize my own climate grief. As I reached a rocky crested outcrop, a hummingbird hovered in front of my face momentarily as if to welcome me. Then, I followed a wild turkey further up to higher rocks that offered up one large flat horizontal slab as if I was taken directly to sit into front of the altar at the church of Nature.

My journal notes will confirm this sequence and the impact it had on me, yet at the time, I didn’t yet understand what was happening. Looking back, I can see it as a moment where my own grief cracked me open to lay out the beginning of a vow - a quite, enduring devotion to grief, to Earth, and holding space for others. While I don’t proclaim to be a grief expert, I am a devout follower of Grief as a deep devotion of my love.

My own relationship with grief then has been shaped by these personal experiences, such as our house flood two summers ago, in contrast to cultural proclamations. Though many of us have learned in this society that grief should be individual and private, locked away and not burdened upon other people. In part, we are a grief-averse society; it’s messy and doesn’t offer immediate gratification. Grief is very inconvenient to capitalistic productivity demands, as well.

Grief is really the beginnings of breaking open, like my moment on the mountain, but then, for most of us, it is met with an expectation to zip it back up and keep it closed off instead. I feel that cultural conditioning every time clients and friends apologize for sharing their grief with me. I always hope to assure them it is such an honor to hold space with them. What I’ve come to know stands in opposition to how most of society treats it. Grief needs to be sacredly held in community.

Climate grief is not just about personal loss, it’s about the world collapsing around us. It lives in that same cultural blind spot, but with even more complexity. So many folks feel this grief, yet our culture doesn’t give us a way to process it, and it actively resists its existence. The extra layer of acknowledging climate grief requires us to take stock of our own internal decisions, and often, inactions, that are a part of our collective experience of collapse.

Moments of climate grief and crisis weather-related destruction, are not isolated experiences anymore. As climate disasters and impacts increase, more of us will find ourselves and our neighbors grappling with unexpected grief on top of the rebuilding or other impacts and losses. This is exactly why we need more practices to hold space for climate grief in our communities. We have to relearn.

I had a chance to speak about this on the Beyond the Page podcast this week, where I shared a story that illustrates just how real and immediate climate grief can be, often quite unexpectedly. In the podcast and related article*, I shared a climate grief story from the week after Hurricane Milton wrecked at not-before-experienced levels of damage in the mountains of North Carolina where my client had been. When my client and I meet last October, it was for a regularly scheduled coaching session, not on specifically on climate, but career. This client showed up feeling paralyzed, overwhelmed, and isolated in that grief.

All completely understandable responses to destruction for this client’s experience, sadly, isn’t rare. Climate grief, especially in the wake of disaster, carries emotional and mental contradictions that are hard to make sense of immediately. Climate grief can hold an odd confluence of betrayal yet deep empathy, connection yet fear from destruction, love yet anger, blame over degradation due to human actions yet the complexity of your own choices. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, on top of climate grief is climate collapse all together is not regularly acknowledged and if so, is completely gaslit and politicized.

That client session reminded me how essential it is that all of us feel prepared to support each other through these moments. As that client knew my resilience work includes climate, we were able to hold space for the raw grief and work with it, as an intentional invitation over the next couple sessions.

Who do you know is equipped to hold space? Are you comfortable holding that space when need arises? Because I’m fearful that the alternative is we hide this pain if we don’t know who and where to express it within our communities. That’s the reason I shared that story - to demonstrate the necessity of each of us being able to hold space for climate grief and conversations for those in our communities. As climate collapse is increasingly on all of our doorsteps now, we need to be prepared, and by prepared I mean, emotionally, cognitively, and somatically (is that a word, I’ll make it one).

Here are some key parts I’ve learned from climate grief conversations on how to hold space with each other:

Acknowledge climate grief as real and valid

Pause and share,“You are not alone in this.” Much of the time in these conversations, folks want to feel seen and held. Because climate grief is disenfranchised grief, which is just a fancy way of saying it’s dismissed and invalidated in society, the workplace, and amongst our own people. This makes it extra hard for folks to express and process, which then causes it to be stuck and stuffed down. Your ability to truly acknowledge it - name it - hold it, is huge.

Hold the space for processing

One reason grief is dismissed it that for many folks it’s challenging to sit with the discomfort without rushing to shut it down or try to flip it to something positive. That though only takes practice, to sit and hold it, similar to sitting with silence. Grief is communal and therefore needs opportunities to be shared. Holding space also means allowing for the somatic, cognitive, and emotional processing.

Connect the body back to the brain

Climate grief is physical, rather than purely intellectual, that’s why you can’t rationalize or rush through any grief process. The process I shared in the coaching article* starts with the somatic connection because we, too, are Nature beings who first have felt sensations before the mind puts the emotions and stories to those sensations. Somatic grounding practices and, especially, returning back to Nature in time, to reconnect and regulate the nervous system with navigating the emotions.

Shift from individualization into communal

It’s really common to expect or tell people, even in gentle ways, to deal with their grief in isolation. As said already, many of us in this western world have been trained to keep grief private as not to burden others. One lesson I learned as a child at the altar of Sister Merlene’s evangelical church was the power of sharing collective pain through singing and being together (a little bit of hands in the air waving). We need to create community conversations and mutual support networks to shift out of the individual burden model and into a shared space.

And so, as I continue to learn through this climate grief work, I am grateful for a refreshed return to that moment on the mountain. The honor of being one of many in this world to carry the quiet devotion of grief. A climate minister is not of answers or lectures, but of witnessing and holding.

We hold grief together so that we can transform it - alchemize it. Every time we can sit with someone’s climate grief, every time we help them reconnect to their body and the land, every time we say “you’re not alone in this,” we are offering our devoted love. Through grief we can reconnect.

* Beyond the Page podcast is a series connected with Choice: The Magazine of Professional Coaching, who published my article, Coaching with Certainty through Climate’s Uncertainty: A Four-Step Process to Build Climate Resilience, that released this week. The host, Garry, and I explored how climate-conscious coaching approaches can help anyone, not just professional coaches, feel more equipped at navigating climate grief conversations. (I’ll share the podcast once it’s released).

In the meantime, here are some self-coaching reflection questions I share in the article.

While that article was focused on professional coaches, I do believe that coaching is a framework that any of us can use to more deeply engage with our own personal development as well as another way to support those around us. If you find that helpful, I’m offering free access to the article compliments of Choice.:

Choice V23n1 Feature Yakaboski 1

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Last Sunday, I cycled just under 40 miles with an old friend. She needed a casual training ride for her upcoming IronMan - she’s a badass. Whereas I wanted to see if my physical therapy work solved my newer right knee strain when long distance cycling. Ahhh, the joys of aging in a woman’s body even though a recent IG post yelled out encouragement that women peak later in their athletic abilities, even by the age of 50. While I feel strong, that doesn’t feel like me.

In catching up, she asks, ‘what’s menopause been like for you?’ Ooafff. Not good, I admit. I give it a 1/10- don’t recommend. And here we are anyway.

She shares about a podcast on how amazing evolution is that human women live well past their reproductive years. The host deduced that women must then have some sort of evolutionary purpose beyond reproduction. I don’t find any solace in this. What’s the purpose of a significantly reduced quality of life paired with a higher cost to chasing that wellbeing? That’s a very unusually pessimistic perspective for me. Hear me out on this though.

We live in a culture obsessed with youth and reversibility.

From anti-aging products, carbon offsets, and a desire to return to past times by just bouncing back. But what if loss is just loss? What if some things don’t come back? What if there isn’t great deeper meaning or purpose in loss other than grief and witnessing? What if menopause, like climate collapse, demands a different kind of acceptance and reckoning?

On that ride, I wondered a reoccurring thought, where are the older women cycling and is their absence because of menopause? I see the middle aged to older dudes being cycled around by the zooming 20 year old spandexers. Of course, cycling, like every other thing in the US, is gendered, classed, and raced. Cycling rates for women in their 20s have increased with 60% of bicycle owners ages 17-28 years old are women. After that, cycling for women mainly continues if they’re cycling with children or commuting to run household errands. Although that’s League of American Bicyclists data from 2013, hardly reflective of 2025. What role does the long journey of menopause play in there being less middle aged women on the trails and roads?

As if aging isn’t already disorienting enough, then there was a drive-by reminder that women are never supposed to slow down, take up space, enjoy themselves, or struggle. I took a stretch break on the return ride after the coffee shop. We stopped on the side of the trail next to the road. I’m doing a figure 4 stretch when a car of young BroDudes speed by and the one in the backseat yells out the window, “EMBARRASSING!” Easy to shrug off BroDudes who find it easy to yell at women from their moving vehicles.

My crime isn’t cycling and aging - it’s being visible while doing those two things in woman’s body.

When I admit the constant exhausting loss and painful discomfort from being menopaused, I feel pressure to reframe it, to find empowerment in it to share with you. This feels entirely US culture bullshitery, by the way. If I’m going to talk about it, then I better reframe it. Because if not, then it is ‘embarrassing’ and a burden on other people’s ease and comfort. Similarly, if I’m going to talk about climate crisis, I better reframe it hopefully and label it as sustainablity. Because if not, then I’m burdening your sense of comfort and complacency.

I feel the body positivity movement and faux-feminist social media influencers smush together to tell me to celebrate menopause as a gift not a collapse. That’s just bootstraps bullshitery. At the same time, I do struggle to connect the notion of collapse to women’s bodies and Earth’s, honestly. There’s something about it that feels so patriarchal to not be able to hold the beauty and amazement of both. I mean there is. These bodies are so life giving through ideas, creativity, beauty, and, often, literally other living beings. And also I hate the reductionism to reproduction that comes with our current situation of political and social exploitation of bodies and planet for profitable reproduction of humans to make more material shit.

There are real tangible losses here with major impacts that get hope-gaslit. Some women and bodies with uteruses have a hard AF time - 1 in 4 will experience debilitating symptoms and 3 in 4 will experience symptoms. That’s only 25% with few issues through menopause. Yet a Mayo Clinic article’s advice is go to therapy because “Menopause shouldn’t stop you from doing your best work or living your best life.” A private Female Founders Fund study, linked to pharma or what’s labeled as ‘femtech’ where menopause investment only accounting for 5% of that, 78% of respondents indicated that menopause interferes with their lives, and 23% of respondents indicated that menopause impacted their lives either “a great deal” or was “completely debilitating.” It is embarrassing - embarrassing that there isn’t broader knowledge and support paired with loss acceptance given we’re talking about 70-80% of women and bodies with uteruses suffer. It’s like in climate conversations where we’re focused on the deniers who make up a max of 10% - what about the 90% who believe and need different conversations that normalize the suffering.

The faux-positivity and individualized menopause conversations sound eerily familiar. Both menopause and climate collapse are treated as things to ‘manage,’ rather than reckon with. But managing isn’t the same as facing reality. I hear folks wanting me to offer them ‘hope’ and personal action items - it’s that same fake positivity and individuality issue. Like menopause, we want to know that we can reverse the damage and loss. That feels better and easier. Just as we want menopause to be something we can ‘fix,’ we want climate collapse to be something we can reverse with the ‘right’ technology or perfect recycling action. But both require a different reckoning, not false hope or gaslighting focus on the no symptom people or deniers.

“Surely it’s not decline or loss, it’s natural.” We’ve all heard versions for both conversations. What if some things, like ice caps, biodiversity, and estrogen levels, don’t fully recover, even with adaption and mitigation of technology or hormone replacement therapies? What if the way forward isn’t about bounce back bullshitery, but about adapting and transforming how we are living through the wreckage and loss? What if we accepted menopause and climate crisis as unavoidable collapses so that we could find new ways to live with the changes rather than pretending they don’t exist and suck? Ways of building new on top of or around the ruins of loss?

I haven’t always held space for the aging and collapse. I thought there’d just be relief from the monthly cycles and fear of pregnancy, followed by joyful aging gracefully. Similarly, I thought we could save the world, too. Both of these feel naive and toxically positive in ways that ignore the realities of irreversible change, grief, and loss. Now living in both, I feel the societal discomfort of loss, decay, and decline; both in women’s bodies and the Earth’s. I see how we shame those who struggle in order to reinforce silence and erasure of full feelings of experiences because we don’t want more discomfort and inconvenience.

Falsely positive spins on menopause and climate are forms of denial of loss.

Acceptance of irreversible loss doesn’t mean not doing anything either. That’s not the alternative because that is a form of denial, too. Menopause and climate collapse are both invitations, just like grief, to greater intentional living and transformation. It just doesn’t mean youthful easy living either. The shaming and denial of both are 100% inconvenient to the unsustainable pace that late-stage capitalism demands and screams at you and me. Because both, menopause and climate collapse, require a slow down and spaciousness to find a resilient version of living through these times. Different, though, than the myth we’ve been sold of perpetual youth and limitless natural resources. It requires a slower cycling pace with a coffee shop midway and stretch breaks. We still have to show up. I have to lift heavy weights, go on long bike rides, have an amazing PT for my knee, take my HRT*, go slower, and on and on. I have to make my climate shifts of more local, more bike commuting, more teaching about gardening and climate resilience, more community building and on and on.

Loss is here. The question isn’t how to reverse it but how we prepare in the reckoning so that we can build something on top of ruins.

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*I’ve read enough online spaces to know that menopause and hormones are one of those topics where everyone comes out of the wood work with their opinions. That said, here’s my caveat and statement of the obvious, this isn’t medical advice, I’m not a medical doctor, and everyone’s body is different and experiences menopause differently. This article is not an invitation for your advice on my body. I’m sharing because we do need to talk more and we need to stop shaming older women for experiencing loss. Full stop.