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.)
“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.
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.
As I held the furry gray and white body against my chest, a sense of warmth moved through me. This rabbit had been abandoned in the streets of Washington DC, sitting in her cage for God knows how long before being rescued. And yet she let me pick her up. She could have scratched or bitten me, but she just wanted to be held closely, with love. The fact that she felt safe around me was an honor.
While most of us have never been abandoned as completely as she was, we’ve all be hurt by people in some way or another. Yet like her, we need to rely on others.
The computer screen showed a line drawing of the classic philosophical thought experiment called The Trolley Problem. Except instead of stick figure people tied to the railroad tracks like in the original version – which asks you to decide whether to redirect the trolley and save the 5 people on the tracks but kill a single person on the alternate track – it was a choice between you and five identical clones of you.
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting twist,” I commented to my older son, who was both laughing and seriously contemplating the moral implications of this ridiculous choice. It was one of a series of increasingly silly versions of the problem that he was futzing around with. I pointed out, “You know, a lot of people think the original version is silly too because it only offers those two awful choices. Which is true. I guess the thing is that it makes us think about who gets hurt in the decisions we make.”
While the trolley problem itself is ridiculous, there are plenty of versions of it in our society, like people who posit that we have to trade off between environmental protection and the economy. Or posit that to have a good life, we have to screw over Amazon workers so we can have overnight delivery. (In fact, one of the versions says “A trolley is heading towards one guy. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your Amazon package will be late. What do you do?”) Or that we don’t have an obligation to pay school taxes over a certain age because well, that’s not *our* responsibility. At that point, society is not even presenting us with an impossible choice – it’s saying that we don’t have to care at all. After all, it’s not our responsibility if the trolley is going to run someone over.
My younger son’s bike, complete with a monster companion
Feet pushing confidently on his pedals, riding his bike in loops around the park, I see the stress melt away from my older son. I’ve described it as moving meditation for him. He’s an emotionally intense kid, but other forms of meditation just didn’t meet his needs. They were often too quiet or too still. Biking fulfilled that need to move, his body in sync with his mind and everything else.
I know my kid isn’t the only neurodivergent kid for whom biking helps. (For those not familiar, neurodivergent refers to any person whose brain doesn’t match the “typical” brain. It includes autistic people, people with ADHD, people with depression, anxiety, dyslexia, and more.) In fact, there are many environmentally friendly activities that can help kids (and adults) with some of the challenges that come with being neurodivergent. Even if you and your kids are neurotypical, these activities have many of the same benefits. This is actually what much of my book is about!
The map on the wall at the Museum of Natural HIstory seemed small, dull even, compared to the wealth of excitement around it – dinosaur bones, wall-sized video displays, models of giant sloths! But what it showed was jaw-dropping.
It was a map of what would be underwater in the U.S. from sea level rise if climate change continues unabated.
