Content warning: A couple of good days.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their energy and attention.
A virtual event on Tuesday and a live one on Saturday
Two good days of air purifiers, friendship, collaboration, and sandwiches
A practice for connecting to the living world
TUESDAY, MARCH 11, at 8pm Eastern online, I’ll be co-presenting with my co-editor Carolyn McGrath on how to use the Educator’s Guide to Climate Emotions. This is a free virtual presentation, and although climate distress was our starting point, I think this guide is useful for anyone who’s accompanying children and teenagers through large-scale stresses and threats. Register here.
SATURDAY, MARCH 15, at 6pm Eastern, Riffraff Bookstore, Providence, RI: Jamieson Webster’s On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe is such a brilliant addition to the web of understanding and feeling that I believe we need in order to live in these times. I’m talking with Jamieson about this book on Saturday and if you’re in Providence that evening, I hope you’ll come hang out.
Now I want to tell you about a couple of good days I had.
Thursday, February 26, 2025: About a week earlier, one of the organizing group chats I’m in shared a social media post that the Harvard Recycling and Surplus Center (in Allston, MA) had “hundreds” of HEPA air purifiers. One of the other chatters had destinations for about 25 of them, and I also thought I knew a few people who could use one.
I don’t always have to work on Thursdays, and my friend N also had the day free. I picked up some coffee for her (large iced with sugar and cream) and tea for me (London Fog with oat milk) and we drove up to Boston with plans to load up the car. Other people had clearly seen the post: every third anarchist in the greater Boston area was there with the same plan. But it was a Harvard Recycling and Surplus miracle: there really were enough for everybody. I assembled the various components of the big and little ones, and N plugged them in to make sure they worked. We filled two rolly-carts by closing time and lugged them out to the car: 3 big, 18 little. Then we ate hamentaschen and delicious, fresh pumpernickel bagels with veggie cream cheese, cucumber, lettuce, and capers. (I recommend this sandwich.)
We hit traffic on the way back and spent a long time strategizing about how best to support N’s dear friends, a disabled trans couple who are trying to move out of the South. After dropping N off at her apartment, I met my group-chat buddy to hand off a bunch of purifiers and texted my friend from the People’s Port Authority to see if she knew anyone else who might like the remaining ones. I’m waiting to hear back, which gives me time to order a few replacement filters.
Saturday, March 1, 2025. My friend C had texted me the previous evening to see if I could pick her up at the sleep lab at the ass-crack of dawn. I could! The sleep lab was in a grim industrial park and my friend had not had a restful night, but we agreed that we were hungry and would like to get breakfast.
It was too early (we thought) for anyplace we wanted to go to be open, so we drove to the closest body of water, where the Providence River estuaries out into Narragansett Bay. The tide was in: a brand-new stairway of pressure-treated wood took us down to a thin strip of sand. We saw two dead Canada geese and a big flock of brants, a winter migrant here, alive and sitting on the water. They moved away from us as we walked along: gray water, gray sky, gray sand. We talked about poetry (C’s a poet) and city policy, and I mentioned that I’d made a flyer asking people to call on their city councilors for a fair budget that would help to protect residents against the worst effects of Trumpian fascism. At the breakfast place, we got egg sandwiches and looked at the flyer together; she said she’d help me hand them out at the farmer’s market.
After we bought our vegetables, I still hadn’t handed out very many flyers: I don’t like to buttonhole people. C said she’d go back through with me and we could both give them to people we knew. This genuinely doubled the number of people we could give flyers to: our circles overlap, but the people we saw were from the parts that don’t. C introduced me to her friend who’s a singer, about housing organizing options—she wanted one thing to work on, she said—and the city civics workshop (for kids and teens) that I’m planning with a librarian in her town. She said her son might be interested. We exchanged contact info, and hugged when we parted. Back at home, I put my groceries away and emailed her, following up on what we’d talked about.
I’ve written before, probably multiple times, about the practice of noticing the note or the flavor of the world we want when it appears in the world we have, like a soul motif underpinning a lyric, like a finger of steam beckoning a tramp to a pie in a window. These days were like that to me. That said, most of my days aren’t like this. Most days, I have to go to work. A lot of the plans in the group text fizzle out, or involve things that I can’t or don’t want to do. Sometimes I have to do the errand alone or can’t do the favor at all, or the schedule doesn’t allow for Sandwich Time. There are other relationships that would be perfect for this kind of sharing if I hadn’t fucked them up or let them trail off. It’s possible that some of the air purifiers will languish in someone’s shed, or that no new people will write to their councilors. The pieces don’t always come together. But when they do, they sing.
When the thaw came on after a few weeks of bitter cold, I texted my mom and sisters that the birds were going apeshit. One of my sisters texted back a photo of a tagged wall—CALL ME! with a heart for the dot in the exclamation point—captioned, “What the birds are saying.”
The birds are looking for a specific kind of love (similar to the frogs) and I am looking for another, more distributed kind. Call me. We’re alive. Let’s make something good happen.
QUESTION: When, this past week, did you feel connected to the rest of the living world, or some part of it, even for a moment?
PRACTICE: Find a moment of quiet in which to stand, sit, or lie still, and reconstruct that connection with your mind’s senses, starting with touch. What did it feel like, smell like, sound like, look like?
Make a plan to repeat or strengthen that connection sometime before the end of March. If you need to extend an invitation, line up a ride, schedule childcare, cancel another plan, do that this week.
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I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.