The Thread of All Sorrows
What happens when we journal our eco-grief?
For the next five weeks I’m participating in Janisse’s Ray’s course called Journaling Earth over at
. I have loved her writing for years and if you are a nature lover you will love her work, too. The Rhizosphere is tailored for writers, but she also writes her own nature and environmental essays over at . Yesterday was our first journaling session and this was the first prompt we had, The Thread of All Sorrows, from the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye. It’s funny how the words written in my journal seem to take up so much more space than they do here, but this is what came out of me as I wrote.
Watching Fairfield Lake State Park unravel one bulldozer at a time. The pushing and moving of dirt, the scraping bare of the plants, animals, and microbial life that thrived in place. Only for what? Money? Greed.
Wiping away decades of preservation on the whim of one person’s desires, no thoughts or care in the world but for himself.
And this isn’t the only thing to weep for. It never ends. More news, more change. The footprint of destruction will march forward for yet another gas station, housing development, car wash, or storage unit.
Meanwhile, where does everything else go?
It’s gone—forever.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
Oh, Misti, my heart breaks that we have to witness the disintegration of places we love. My heart goes out to you. Thank you for writing this--surely the other beings hear you pleading for them.
Once a haven, open space
Of wood and air, leaf and water,
With miracles of scale and feather;
Now a hive, with row upon row of sameness,
Choking day and twilight night,
With machine companions, slave and master.