These times make me feel a bit crazy...

The love cycle is a reminder of how to be amidst the overwhelm

I’ve been struggling with knowing how to be human in these times.

In the mornings, I've been reaching for my phone on autopilot. I know, it's bad.

When I'm good about it, I will at least turn on a guided mindfulness practice first so I can “prepare the soils” of my day with gratitude and intention.

Though admittedly, quite often these days, when I feel in a slump or unmotivated, when I feel overwhelmed or emotionally depleted, while still lying in bed, I'd open up and passively scroll my social media feed.

There, I might see something about the latest devastating wildfire or hurricane somewhere. Then something else about police brutality and state violence. Another about live-streamed genocide and a Palestinian child starved to bare skins and bones.

And suddenly, I might see Stories from a friend’s wedding or trip to a music festival.

Then, at a certain point, I'd feel my dog coming to lick and nudge me for breakfast. Her physical touch would bring me back into my present, lived reality — while my mind would continue to run through the many stories seeded into my morning consciousness.

And I’d feel a bit crazy.

How do I hold it all? How do people do it? How do they process the mess of everything while continuing on with their lives as they are?

At the very least, when I know that others are also attempting to process “all-of-the-above” — doing what they can to make an impact while continuing to cherish life’s beauty, joys, and magic, I feel affirmed. Because it seems that we’re in a similar creaky boat amidst choppy, disorienting waves.

But sometimes, the question that dumbfounds me is, how can so many others seem to not even have an ounce of care? Besides making some superficial remarks like, “Oh yeah, [XYZ event] sucks,” how can they continue their day-to-day lives as if nothing were wrong, while changing absolutely nothing and doing nothing differently?

Sometimes, I just want to scream: “Are you not seeing what I'm seeing? How can you not feel? Why do you not feel? Why does this not activate you enough to care? How are you not the least bit curious about this issue and what you can do? Where is your heart?”

I have been feeling really overwhelmed. It’s a perpetual state that I’ve been flowing in and out of for years. But these days, it feels ever so present.

I log online to work on Green Dreamer, to write, to produce media content about various aspects of the troubled state of the planet. And that overwhelms my heart and brain. The needs of the entangled world tell me: “Talk about this issue”; “Cover that!”; “This campaign is mobilizing now!”; “No, this is more dire and urgent”; “But no, people need to just breathe for a moment and be reminded to slow down so we don't replicate the crisis in our responses!”

Then as I connect the global to the local, I feel pulled in a million directions: “Hurry and grow more food to support your community’s food sovereignty!”; “Do more mutual aid and check in on people around you!”; “Learn to ‘village’ and be more resourceful so you are less reliant on mainstream systems of complicity.”

Then I take a break from the computer and find myself in the garden digging a hole to transplant another fruit tree. Or checking in on the native seedlings I germinated from seeds that I'd collected over the weekend in my “leisure time.”

But these acts of care that typically feel healing for me have become stressful. We've been in a prolonged drought with both the bigger climate change and bioregional changes to our local water cycle. So many of the plants who I care for have been struggling. The same “greenery” that others might find “peaceful” as a generic aesthetic overwhelms me because I feel and hear them calling to me: “Give me water!”; “I need a bit more shade!”; “I need nutrients that this soil no longer has!”; “Rainy season is approaching so plant more pioneer species with deeper tap roots so this compacted soil can become spongier and hold more moisture!”

And my body. Oh, the hardening landscape I have been neglecting for years — taken for granted, shoved into the bottom of my care list as I run around tending to everything else but the body which has enabled me to do everything.

I have a chronic injury that has been flaring up more often, where during the peaks, I would go days without being able to walk and not feel pain with every single step.

So I’ve been forcibly reminded to slow down, sit still more, and listen to my body. But I’d feel overwhelmed by all of the signs that I'd hear there as well: “This side of your back feels really tight!”; “You need a proper evening practice to stretch out your body.“; “Stop looking at the screen after 8pm, it strains your eyes!”; “Stop trying to dig holes or do heavy-lifting without warming up first, or you'll hurt yourself more!”

The funniest thing is that I finally decided to take a hot bath as a treat for myself this evening. And when the tub filled up, I realized that my propane tank had run out while the water was running. So the soak ended up being lukewarm, not very comfortable or relaxing. I took a quick dip and then hurried to dry off.

After getting dressed, I figured I could at least make some hot soup to feed that bodily craving for something warm. But then I realized I also couldn't cook on my stove without propane. Being on a modest off-grid solar system, I do not have a microwave or electric kettle. And I was too exhausted by then to prepare firewood to cook outside.

I don't have a poetic lesson to offer here, as this is just a reflection of my layers of having a hard time keeping up with everything. But I'd like to just acknowledge that if you also struggle with feeling too much from practicing deep listening, and trying to find that balance between slowing down while still meeting the demands and needs of the world, I see you. And you are not alone.

In a world of so much dissociation and delusions of separation, I think it is a real gift to lean into our sensitivities, to re-weave webs of attunement that might have been previously severed so that we can relearn to feel the subtle pulls and vibrations from each other even more.

This brings me to my most recent two interviews.

My conversation with Dr. Melinda Adams, a cultural fire practitioner and scholar who belongs to the N’dee, San Carlos Apache Tribe, explored the longings of the land for cultural fire rooted in right relations, and what it means to move from ecological grief towards an empowerment to actively participate in biocultural revitalization. It touched on both the themes of listening more to the land and of transmuting our grief and “solastalgia.”

You can tune into this episode here (Green Dreamer EP458).

And my discussion with Dr. Stacy Alaimo of The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life, explored the impacts of deep sea mining and industrial-scale fishing, as well as our entanglement with something that may feel more distant and foreign.

You can tune into this episode here (Green Dreamer EP459).

I want to come full “spiral” with this current of thought that I shared with Stacy.

There is often this saying that people are incapable of caring for what they do not know. And therefore, people should learn and experience more, so that they can expand their circles of love.

There is another counter philosophical take that “people” actually destroy things in their attempts to know. I put people in quotes because I think that is true really only for people operating from capitalist, corporatist worldviews and value systems — where institutional research funding is often tethered to the profit motive. Laurie Palmer, for example, talks about the gift of lichen worlds being more difficult to understand through the lens of science. In the context of an extractive economy, the lack of definitive, replicable knowledge on lichen means that they have, so far, at least, largely escaped interests of exploitation.

But I want to open up another way of approaching this question of whether it is better to know or to not know — which is that it is neither.

As I brought up in our discussion, there are Indigenous communities in the Amazon Rainforest (and elsewhere) who are uncontacted and do not have access to the internet, but who live with utmost respect and sensitivity to their pockets of the earth:

“So I presume a lot of them might not know much about the deep seas, what they look like, or the latest findings about their threats to extinction.

One could say that because they don’t know, they don’t have personal care or direct care for these deep-sea creatures. But I feel like the ways that [these land-based communities] are living, and loving, and in good relation with their own forest communities, means that even without their knowing, they’re also loving and caring for the deep seas. […]

So maybe it’s not really about whether we know or not. And maybe loving isn’t necessarily tied to knowing, but just like, are we in good and intimate relation with our own webs of life, human and more-than-human, given that everything is entangled?”

Having an embodied sense of our collective entanglement and “intra-dependence” feels key here. And this brings us back to our struggles with trying to hold everything at once in regards to the state of the planet, near and far.

For all that we might feel overwhelmed by, our entanglement reminds us that as much as there are water cycles, carbon cycles, and nutrient cycles that percolate from our local webs of life to the global ecology, I believe that there are also cycles of care and love that ripple back and forth at every level.

Perhaps this can be a gravitational reminder to keep us grounded amidst all of the unsettling mess and concurrent mushrooming of catastrophes.

Love, to our bodies.

Love, to our lands and waters.

Love, to our rooted communities.

Love, across the interwebs.

Love, to the earth.

And love, to all else who we may not ever come to know.

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Episode art for Stacy Alaimo by gretchen blegen; song feature by Oropendola

Melinda Adams on the interconnectedness of the water cycle and fire cycle:

“Every fire practitioner that I work with forewords how lower temperature, lower severity, responsible fire is also going to rebuild the microbial communities, the ones that are decomposing those organic materials in the soil profiles that are then going to build better porosity within the soil ecosystem, recruit and retain water.”

Stacy Alaimo on the entanglement of life on land and in the waters:

“If the ocean ecosystems are decimated to the point where we just have a massive die-off of plankton and other things, it’s going to be very difficult to have oxygen on land because the air is global and the oceans are global, and it’s all interconnected.”

Invitations into reflection & action:

• With so many themes touched on here, I would like to invite you into a self-directed reflection and action. What is stirring in you from this newsletter, or from my interviews with Melinda Adams and Stacy Alaimo? What do you feel called to learn more about, to take action on, or to shift or expand within you?

What’s next?

I’m honored to be sharing with you very soon, my conversation with Tiokasin Ghosthorse. Side note on this: Tiokasin has been facing severe medical challenges over the last months, and is asking for financial support for his treatment. You can find his communal medical fund here.

More soon ~