One of my most intimate recent dates involved mutual….
sobbing. Bundled up in his outdoor kitchen beneath three story buildings, a distant brass band on the streets of Oakland, our salmon and kale going cold, just sobbing out our encroaching acceptance and deep grief that the earth as we’ve known her is dying.
Chopping garlic he told me about the tide pools in he grew up with in Laguna Beach, full of starfish and sea slugs, abundant abalone, hermit crabs, and occasional octopuses, and returning with his kids in recent years to the same spot at low tide, to only a few kinds of seaweed and snails, virtually lifeless.
Part of me still believes humans can awaken in time, I have to keep that hope skin in the game, imagine my kids’ future without water wars, believe my work matters, but too many clients and friends have shared their conviction in recent days: it’s too late, it’s over. The fires, tornados, hurricanes, pandemics, floods, and tsunamis will escalate, until the earth has scourged the virus that is humanity off her back.
And what a fucking beautiful planet. I grieve giving my children a more impoverished childhood than my own. I grew up with crawdads in creeks, cats eaten by coyotes, my third grade teacher like Gandolf, hiking us right out the classroom and up the redwood studded hill to find spring’s first wild iris. My girl can catch chickens and my boy races bikes under streetlights at dusk, but there is nowhere wild they can freely go.
I remember a moment when my daughter was one, a warm Central Valley night. She stuck her head out the window, warm freeway wind hitting her face. It felt like a scene in a movie, a mother/daughter teaching and sharing about the world, a first, first head out the window, and the phrase, “I give you….” bubbled up in me, but we were passing car dealerships and the backs of strip malls somewhere between Vacaville and Davis on I-80, fluorescent lights and……it’s not the world I want to give her.
I’m sobbing as I write this.
If you feel it too, and have any grief you would like to feel together in community, join us when the veil between worlds is thin, Saturday November 6th, 10am-1pm. All kinds of grief are welcome. The earth wants our tears, it’s good manners to cry.
Saturday, November 6th
10am-1pm PST
$50* suggested donation
Online
*$25 Students, activists, etc.
Those who need to come for free please come.
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Learn more and register here.
A zoom link will be emailed to you after registration.
Registration ends at 9am 11/5.