Hello Friend,
It has been a long time since I’ve written. More on that in another episode…I’m showing my face in your inbox today with an Earth Week offering.
It was a beautiful sunny Earth Day in Wisconsin yesterday. There was an undercurrent of heartbreak as I opened to how much I truly love life on this planet. And that is the lesson—how love and loss are inseparable. The beauty of Earth Day is that it shows us we are finding our way back to reverence for this sacred home we inhabit. The heartbreak is that is reveals how lost we’ve gotten, that we had to make a holiday out of something once so inherent to our being human.
Everything feels quite alright today in my little corner of the world, and for that I am grateful, and for that I feel the injustice knowing one can be in paradise and another experiencing hell on the same shared Earth.
I come back to the work of elder Joanna Macy again and again when my heart is moving between the love and loss so present in this time of turning. One of my coaching colleagues, Jess Serrante, just released the first episode of a new podcast series of interviews with Joanna Macy about her body of work. I am so excited for this offering (and I highly recommend you have a listen!). In the bonus episode, Jess leads us in one of Joanna Macy’s practices called Open Sentences. The practice is a series of prompts to be explored in pairs, each person having three minutes to speak, or in this case journal. So I thought I’d share my reflections, hoping it may inspire you to journal on these prompts and connect to the love and loss in your heart this week. Maybe you’d even be willing to share your responses with me? You can reply to this email or post in the comments.
I find that love fortifies my spirit, and loss fortifies my love. That is why both are needed.
Love to you, my friend.
Open Sentences Prompts:
Some things I love about being alive on earth today are…
What breaks my heart about living on earth in this time is…
If I withhold my feelings about what’s happening in the world right now, I do so because…
What keeps me going when the world breaks my heart is…
My responses:
Some things I love about being alive on earth today are…sharing daffodils from my garden with friends and loved ones for no reason other than to say, “Look at what beauty exists!” and, “I love that you exist!” The feeling of awe and joy I get when I lay in the grass watching song birds flutter above me under a blue sky, how it feels too good to be true, how it feels like star gazing in the day, how I could be entertained for hours, how it makes me feel so fully a part of this thing we call life, how in these moments it all feels like a fantasy of some far away oasis, and it is all right here above me, inside me, around me. I love the sound of the two sandhill cranes that fly over my house each week, how I can hear their wings flapping between their crackly dinosaur call alerting my neighborhood to their presence, how it feels like a blessing. I love how in the summer I can stand in the tall grass prairie with thousands of dragonflies meeting, mating, feeding in their zigzag pattern of flight above and around me and laugh in wonder and need nothing else. I love finding new woodland wildflowers emerging after clearing invasive brush in the oak savanna, how it feels like a conversation, how it shows me we humans can be trusted, how it teaches me not to mind time, how it teaches the importance of waiting for the right conditions to bloom, how it takes trust that the right time will come. I love the synchronicity that happens between us, like how on Sunday I felt so exhausted from working outside that I knew not how I would make dinner, and I looked at my phone to see a text from a friend inviting me to dinner, and how I felt relief and love and acceptance knowing I could show up dirty and tired and be fed, and how good it feels to receive and how good it feels to give and how special friends are because we choose to love each other. I love that my body can be a vessel for love and I can hold a friend who is crying and say everything by saying nothing. I love that difficult conversations can deepen love. I love the first day you get to open the windows in the house after a long winter. I love seeing how many people care about our fate.
What breaks my heart about living on earth in this time is…the lakes in my city are barely swimmable and it could so easily be otherwise, that my tax dollars fund war and genocide, how noise pollution drowns the beauty, how the heat and wildfires and floods and quakes take homes and lives and dreams in places in the world that have contributed far less to this mess than my country, how difficult it is for so many of us to make enough money to live, that we have to make money to live, that the people who raise our children are not valued, that the people who grow and pick our food are not valued, that some human life is valued more than others, how massive the disparities are, how my prosperity can be traced back to the genocide of Native American people and enslavement of African people, how my country was built on these violent foundations and still we do not speak truthfully about and reconcile with this history, how the ruling elite divide us against each other for their benefit, how we’ve grown to hate those we were born to love, how we still, how we still try to solve conflict by killing.
If I withhold my feelings about what’s happening in the world right now, I do so because…it’s too overwhelming to feel, it’s not socially acceptable to be as heartbroken as I really am, other feelings override or take precedence, I’m exhausted, it doesn’t feel like it matters how I feel, that it will do anything to change anything, I’m afraid my feelings will be too much for others to handle, I believe my feelings are less significant than someone who is in immediate harm due to war or the climate crisis, I can’t tell where my feelings begin and end.
What keeps me going when the world breaks my heart is…everything I love about being alive: birdsong, giant oaks, finding a rare baby snapping turtle on the creek bank, the saints and warriors that are out there fighting for humanity against all odds, knowing my ancestors persevered so I could be here today fostering life, the sunset reflected on wispy old growth pines dancing in the evening wind, breaks and rest and touch and laughter and triumph and podcasts and phone calls and music and poetry and books and meals with friends and meals with family, and knowing I am never alone in any of it.
Yours in love,
Ryan