Preventing climate change is impossible. The forces our folly has unleashed can no longer be called back. Our tasks now are to slow climate change, eventually to reverse it, and to save what can be saved—including our souls.

Turn my head from suffering and I miss life, too.
Crack me open
bring me back alive, and
show me truth.

Fire is “too much with us; late and soon….”
Of late, terrorists made spectacle of massacre, setting ablaze a living man, in a cage.
Of late, 9/11, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dachau and Auschwitz,
Fiery crosses and lynching trees—hate’s infernos.
….

What may strike most of us as a frightening proposition is the fact that we mere mortals have the capacity now to decide not only our own life paths, but also the fate of the earth replete with all its luscious complex ecosystems of which we are a part.

Dear ones,

Today begins our week-long journey into grieving and reckoning with the losses we are facing as an Earth Community. We are reminded not only of our own mortality, but also of the mortality of the planet. We are asked to face boldly into the knowledge of what humankind has brought to pass in very short time as measured on a geological scale. 

Long ago, the Great Spirit looked for a home for people, the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe), and for all they would ever need. Out of nothing, that All Loving Spirit created the universe and solar system, including Mother Earth. When She was a cold, lifeless rock, the All Loving Spirit blew life into Her, causing Her to spin and support life.

I live in the woods on a pond with my husband and young son and two dogs and dozens of other species above and below and all around us.

We breathe the common wind of the earth
no matter where we live, who we love,
what language we speak.

April, just around the corner, is planting month in my backyard garden—time to transplant the kale and broccoli seedlings that sprouted indoors, back when the snow outside reached almost to the top of the fence. (I live near Boston!) This is both a spiritual and an ecological practice, a time to remind myself of how deeply symbiotic I am, not only with the kale and broccoli but also with the earthworms that bring air into the soil, the bacteria that fix nitrogen in it, and the birds that will share the garden’s bounty throughout the year ahead. Gardening is also a reminder of my own power, as Rebecca Parker puts it, to bless or to curse the world.

I read somewhere that at least half of all the poems that have appeared in The New Yorker contain some image related to water. It’s true of the most recent issue I’m looking at: two poems are published in it, one of which is entitled “An Essay on Clouds.”