Focus on Arts and Ecology

The United Nations says that a million species could go extinct in the coming decades. What will that look like coming across our news feed? Imagine that the extinctions are announced one by one as they occur: How many alerts per day will that be?

We’re entering a time of unimaginable losses, including the possible end of human life on Earth. If we hope to change this, we have to reckon with the fact that whatever we’re doing now isn’t working, since we’re still headed for the cliff, and something is preventing most people from engaging with the emergency, despite all the warnings. It’s possible that an important part of that something is a fear, conscious or unconscious, of the sorrow to come. How will we bear this grief? And won’t grieving make it harder for us to act? But I’m wondering if it is not grief that weakens us, but all we do to avoid it. Perhaps we need, instead, to include it. Grieving won’t keep us from acting, but it will change how we do so, in ways that make a great difference.

Grief has strengths that are different from anger’s, as water is different from fire. Many contemporary cultures tend to valorize what some consider masculine traits over what some consider feminine ones, which means fiery virtues over watery: outrage over sorrow, assertiveness over receptivity. Is grief seen as feminine? Does it feminize us to feel it, and is that one of the reasons some are afraid of it? Anger tends to feel for (I don’t like what is happening to you and I want to change it), while sorrow tends to feel with (Your pain is my pain, and I care about it). Feeling for and feeling with complement each other. If we valued both, we’d be able to employ fire or water according to need. They could temper each other and combine in as-yet-unimagined and powerful ways. Each of us would be able to draw on more of ourselves in response to the crisis; each of us would have more with which to strengthen and console ourselves. We see the results of fiery action all around us, for good and for ill. I’m wondering if at least some of the burning rage so characteristic of our time is actually a defense against grief. I’m wondering if free-floating, unacknowledged sorrow is a larger influence in our communal life than we give it credit for. If that’s true, perhaps we should spend some time with sorrow and grief and mourning, here at the end of the world.

Grief is a buddha. Not something to learn lessons from but the way it is sometimes, the spirit and body of a season in the world, a season of the heart–mind. Grief is a buddha, joy is a buddha, anger is a buddha, peace is a buddha. In the koans, we’re meant to become intimate with all the buddhas—to climb into them, let them climb into us, burn them for warmth, make love with them, kill them, find one sitting in the center of the house. You’re not meant to cure the grief buddha, nor it you. You’re meant to find out what it is to be part of a season of your heart–mind, a season in the world, that has been stained and dyed by grief, made holy by grief.

A long time ago, a young woman is lost in mourning after the death of her husband. She leaves everything behind and goes to a monastery to ask for help. “What is Zen?” A teacher replies that the heart of the one who asks is Zen: her broken heart is the buddha of that time and place. She decides to stay and find out what that means. Sitting in the dark, the woman runs her fingers over the face of the buddha of grief, learning its contours. Over time, she discovers a kind of grace in that dark, with grief as her companion: a deep humility, a deep stillness, a deep listening.

In its Latin roots, grieving is related to being pregnant.