This FEELed Note is the second post from Grace Henri, a research affiliate leading the project “Nostalgia Forecast”, which investigates the complexity of eco-grief, and more specifically, how we mourn what we have not yet lost.
There are vines slowly making their way up the side of my home – of our home. I think, even, they might be crawling inside.
On February 1st, I had the honour of hosting an eco-grief poetry event titled “In Hibernation: Naming Eco-emotions Through Art” at the Woodhaven FEELed Lab. There we gathered, a group of friends and strangers bold enough to join in grief, surrounded by the melt of the winter. How apt did it feel to reflect on love, loss, home, and the changes of time amidst the sunken mud and bitter blue wind.
The event asked participants to sift through snippets of paper reading different emotions (dread, gratitude, fury, nostalgia…) and explore these feelings through eco-poetry. The event was created so that participants could critically reflect on their own emotional experiences with climate change – doing so through the beauty of art and collaboration. After a work period, the group rejoined to discuss any thoughts or experiences.
When the group gathered again, the room felt full. Full emotionally, full of gratitude, full of love, full of contemplative silence. On one hand, it is a lot to ask people to come together and grieve in community – to let their walls down, to access that which they do not wish to acknowledge. On the other hand, spaces for communal eco-grieving are rare and profound. As one participant noted while sharing their experience “we are always told how to feel [in climate justice spaces] – angry, fearful, hopeful. I am tired of feeling hopeful” – this was a space where we were not guided in how to feel, where all emotions were embraced.
It seems overtime the vines have taken things from my home. Stones lined around a fire pit, my grandfather’s memory, the frost licking the windowsill, a baby’s crib, the olive trees in the yard. How do I grieve the things I still yearn to revive?
Hope was a theme that came up for many participants, interestingly, in different ways. While the power of hope was often mentioned, so was the refusal. In some ways the strength of rejecting hope is that you accept your grief as something real, as something that deserves to be felt. Hope is a powerful tool, but can also be viewed as a privileged method of resistance. During our conversation we asked: who gets to hope? Who does hope leave behind?
It is a difficult process to dig deeply within yourself and hold your grief in front of you. As one participant remarked, it is difficult to sit with emotions “you didn’t know you had”. To hold a space for eco-grief also allowed participants to envision the ways that these emotions were intersecting with a struggle they initially saw as unrelated. Exploring eco-grief allowed us to question how these feelings were interwoven with heritage, history, or language. It was noted by this same participant that climate change felt so unusually similarly to the social, cultural, and human destruction that she had been grieving. And after all, what is climate change if not another form of human destruction?
How will home look once the vines have completely taken over? Will there be a home at all? Can we hack and dig and still find her walls breathing underneath – her dishes still balanced on the counters inside, cardamon still steeping in the coffee pot?
A beautiful experience shared by a participant revolved around the struggle of how to mourn what we had once expected. When we mourn climate change, we simultaneously mourn our future, the lives we dreamed we would live, the land we imagined we might share. The beauty of collective grief is that finding space to mourn those futures allows them, in a way, to be real. To share our dreams cements an image of a clean tide, of a small lawn with figs ripening in the sun, of a river flowing with healthy salmon, a skyline clear from smoke.
I am faced with the panic of stopping something I cannot name. The vines are now wrapping around the cracks in the shoreline, the dry cracks of the forest floor, the cracks in what I once took for granted. There are even vines wrapping their way around my ankles. If I follow them for long enough, they lead me to my home. Or to the spot where home once was.
Thank you to all who came out to explore eco-grief in community. The experience was emotional and special – uncomfortable and reassuring.
The FEELed lab 