I tell stories that help us all work to be kinder to our families, communities and our broader world. I support families being more environmentally and socially sustainable through advice, resources, and encouragement based on solid social science and expertise. My science communication builds knowledge of and wonder for our natural world and appreciation for those who seek to understand it.
Wanted to sail upon your waters since I was three feet tall
You’ve seen it all, you’ve seen it all…”
The music flowed through the old wooden building, past and around me on the faded navy couch. Across from me was the singer, the leader of the climate hope and grief retreat I was attending. In his jeans and flannel shirt, strumming a dark wood acoustic guitar, the lyrics seemed very apropos for the occasion. “I wonder who this song is by,” I wondered. Such a beautiful song. With the line “I am a pirate,” I thought, “Ah, I bet that’s Jimmy Buffet.” A quick Google confirmed my suspicions.
I smiled, considering the strange and moving subtle presence Jimmy Buffet has been throughout my life.
Reaching out my hand and touching the tree’s bark, I tried to look at it with fresh eyes. I ran my hand along it, taking in its rough, bumpy nature. I spotted a small bee buzzing around the tree’s base and an ant crawling up it. I looked up into its leafy canopy through which bits of sunshine filtered through. The leaves were still green, not yet starting to shade to their fall yellow. Closing my eyes, I envisioned the vast system of fungi that links its roots to those of other trees.
Then I heard what sounded like a wolf’s howl. But it wasn’t a wolf – it was the leader of the forest therapy session I was engaging in at a Climate Grief and Hope Retreat at ThorpeWood, a center devoted to using nature to support mental health and social-emotional learning.
We were doing an exercise called “Meet a Being” – which could be a tree or any other type of being. Coming out of the activity, I felt calmer, more at peace and looking with more wonder at everything around me. As I had gone into the retreat on the verge of burnout (again), this shift was sorely needed. Later in the retreat, we participated in an exercise that linked the principles of permaculture – an approach to sustainability based on Indigenous principles that is about working with nature rather than against it – to our own mental health.
From this experience and my own life, I’ve found some ways to use nature to improve mental and emotional health. Without these, I would have suffered burnout much earlier and more severely. These days, with the stress of everything going on, we can all use some healing and relief. (I actually wrote this sentence pre-Election Day. Little did I know. Ugh.)
“Oh come on!” I yelled with genuine frustration in my voice as my mini-golf ball rolled millimeters past the hole. And yet I was smiling only a few moments later. That would have never happened even a few years ago. I credit my kids for this life lesson.
I’ve never been a particularly good loser. I hate wasting time and losing feels a whole lot like wasting time to me. In board games like Settlers of Caatan or Monopoly where you realize early on if you are going to lose badly and then just have to wait for it to happen, I get antsy and anxious. When playing word and puzzle games, I feel like I’m “supposed” to be good at them and then just feel dumb when I lose. It’s just generally unpleasant for everyone involved.
But I started to get a different perspective on losing while watching my kids play video games.
“We take the backpack during each other’s weak part,” my husband said to me as we were finishing the second half of a hike. He was referring to the fact that I carried the backpack with the water and food on the uphills, where he struggles, and he carried it on the downhills that stress out my fussy knees. I hadn’t even thought of it that way, but that’s exactly what we were doing that day. In fact, that’s what we do through so much of our lives, both for each other and those around us.
My husband and I have been married for 18 years and together for 24. We’re both neurodivergent and have executive function challenges. I joke that if you put us together, you may get one person’s worth of executive function. He has social anxiety, but is charming. I am kind of fearless, but often don’t make a good first impression socially. He’s hilarious with the kids, while I tend to be more emotional. We complement each other well.
“No no no no,” I whispered to myself as I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at my phone. It was the 2024 Election results. I stared at the map mostly covered in red. I focused on the line showing who got what electoral votes, with Donald Trump easily crossing it with 277 out of the required 270.
Once we got the kids off to school, my husband put his head down on his hands and started crying. I walked over, put my arms around him, and wept too.
All day, I felt empty and raw. A sense of despair buried itself into me and wouldn’t let go. All of the exhaustion from election stress and all of the other shit going on in my life overwhelmed me. A fog settled over my mind.
This was my thought pattern – variations on a theme: “We did everything we could, but it wasn’t enough. I did everything I could, but it wasn’t enough. So what’s the point? Why bother? Why did I spend all of that time phone banking and having people hang up on me? Writing postcards? Why the hell bother with climate action now anyway? What difference does it make when he’s back in office and wants to destroy it all anyway? What the hell is all of my life’s work for anyway?!”
“Seriously, they walked seven miles in one day when we were in New York City,” I insisted to my friend, who we were traveling with. She gave me a skeptical look.
Four hours later, my older kid was pulling and my younger kid was pushing a cart that had two of the other kids traveling with us in it, one of them sound asleep. My kids ran / walked the entire length of the boardwalk back to our condo, pushing the cart for most of it.
That was just one example of many conflicting expectations that arose on our recent trip to Ocean City with two other families. With six adults and six kids, there were differences in terms of what to eat, when to eat, bedtime, and screen time. Every family does things differently, but you don’t realize how differently until you live with them for several days. Fortunately, through communication and collaboration, all three families were able to make it work together. It gave us a taste of what it would be like to live more communally.
From the packed field below to the people in the tippy-top nose-bleed seats (like us), the crowd buzzed with energy. Most sung loudly along with the lyrics from the band: “I wanna be the minority / I don’t need your authority / Down with the moral majority / ‘Cause I wanna be the minority!”
When I glanced over at my kids, they didn’t know the lyrics, but were definitely engaged. My older kid had his “I’m not smiling because I’m so intensely paying attention to what’s going on” look on his face and my younger son was bouncing on his seat and clapping. They don’t know Green Day songs well, but between Weird Al parodies of them (my older kid went through a big Weird Al phase) and hearing them on the “classic alternative” iTunes station, they recognized a good number of the songs.
“Why did you do this?” Reading the email from my coworker with those words about a mistake I had made, I was taken aback. I stared at the screen in shame and confusion. I replied out loud to myself, “I don’t know! It was a mistake, not on purpose.”
I don’t remember how I replied to her, but that feeling stuck with me. That voice in the back of my head arose just before I would send her an email.
In some ways, that accusatory tone was effective at getting me to avoid making mistakes. I was much more likely to double-check my emails before sending them to her. But it made every exchange with her tinged with stress, knowing she felt that way about me.
Over time, I realized that when we have that passive aggressive “Why did you do *that*?” attitude towards our kids, we end up with the same response from them.
Shivering with my feet hurting, my mouth nevertheless formed a wide smile as I watched the screen. My own hands grasping the sleeves of my coat, I watched Barack Obama hold his hand up as part of his swearing-in as the President of the United States of America. I blinked away tears against the cold wind, knowing that my own work had helped bring our country to this point. I had knocked on doors, talked to potential voters, and built relationships with other volunteers. After witnessing Bush’s legacy through my college years, I had fully bought into Hope and Change. As a new federal employee, I was proud that I helped choose my next boss and the leader of our government. Standing in the dead January grass on the National Mall at the Presidential inauguration – yet still too far away to see what was going on – was the proudest I ever felt as an American.
A little less than eight years later, I sat on my bed weeping. I had gone to bed before the election results had come in, frustrated but still hoping against hope. Upon waking, I learned that Donald Trump had been elected president. I feared for my job, my friends in less privileged positions, and my children’s futures. My younger son was only six months old at the time. I wrote a letter to my children apologizing for our generation failing to stop it and promising them to fight as hard as I could for better things. And I did. But it constantly felt like a failing fight, two steps backward for every half-step forward. It was exhausting and unsustainable.
Digging a tiny hole to transplant my peppers, I smiled as the soil crumbled in my hands. It was dark, moist soil, the result of years of adding organic matter (straw, compost, and leaves) to the heavy clay in our yard. While I care for my plants by watering and weeding them, the soil is probably the most important part of my garden’s success. There’s nothing you can do to force a plant to grow, but there are lots of ways we can create an environment that nurtures them. The same goes for people and situations as well.
