Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.
Martha Postlewaite
I really do try not to judge anyone’s choices, much less their coping strategies. After all, I have done my bit to contribute to this situation, I am far from blameless. We are facing epic disaster, extinction in all probability, and although I have not always done my best for this planet and its inhabitants, it feels incumbent upon me to do so now. The truth is that these are desperate and utterly unusual times; no one really knows how to navigate them, there are no experts at walking gracefully into annihilation. We are making it up as we go and have only our own vast, and often ignored, inner resources to guide us.
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry
For the sake of our children, our jobs and even our sanity. I like to think of it as, selective self-delusion. It’s natural, it’s necessary and it can be lifesaving. Even as the Mongol hoards sweep in from the north, the Black Plague invades from the south, music must be played and poems need to be written, children and dogs need to be loved the sunrise is still beautiful. AND. We have each other.
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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
Climate change is the great practical and moral question of every generation now alive, and will be for decades.
Alex Steffen
The depression we’re all trying to avoid could very well be a prolonged chronic reaction to what we’ve been doing to the world… We may be depressed partly because this is the soul’s reaction to the mourning and grieving that we’re not consciously doing.
James Hillman