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How spiritual practices help me navigate my climate grief

This post by Therese DesCamp brought me to tears . . . “Early one smoky August day, I finally reached the epilogue, which began with a portion of a short prayer from St. Francis of Assisi. ‘Our hands imbibe like roots,’ it read, ‘So I place them on what is beautiful in this world.'”

By Therese DesCamp, Broadview, March 18, 2024

https://broadview.org/spirituality-climate-grie

This is not a sound bite about how to reduce anxiety. This is not a short course in turning sadness into joy. This is not a psychotherapeutic technique to counter despair. This is not a call to action or even a prayer, as those are usually understood.

What you will find here is a practice. A practice, by definition, is the exercise of an activity, repeated to acquire or maintain a proficiency in that activity. A spiritual practice is the thing you do for 20 minutes or so a day in hopes that the sense of connection and capacity found in the experience accompanies you during the other 23 hours and 40 minutes of the day.

This is a practice using our grief and heartbreak as a path into a quiet heart and loving action. It’s also an invitation into joy.

***

As the forest fires burned a few kilometres away last summer, as around the world dams broke, wars escalated and political rhetoric sharpened, I struggled to find a quiet heart. My practice — reading, scripture, meditation, prayer — was hard to maintain. Yet I knew that if I continued to show up, practice would serve as a trail through the dark woods of despair, leading me to the space where I could remember that I am rooted in Christ. I needed that trail every day, because my serenity got blown to pieces every day.

For months, I had been working my way through Merlin Sheldrake’s masterpiece, Entangled Life, about the science of fungi. I read a few paragraphs each morning and pondered them in light of my faith. Early one smoky August day, I finally reached the epilogue, which began with a portion of a short prayer from St. Francis of Assisi. “Our hands imbibe like roots,” it read, “So I place them on what is beautiful in this world.”

My heart quickened. I looked up the footnote, tore through my bookcases, found Daniel Ladinsky’s Love Poems from God, read the last two lines of his beautiful interpretation of this prayer. “And I fold them in prayer, and they draw from the heavens light.”

I sat back, feeling like I had been given the complete contemplative manifesto for this climate of catastrophe: a template for working with grief, an outline of how to act. So I start this essay with gratitude. Thank you, Francis of Assisi. Thank you, Daniel Ladinsky. Thank you, Merlin Sheldrake.

And then I turn to the prayer, to the practice.

***

Our hands imbibe like roots.

First, I notice the words. Francis starts with the collective: “Our hands.” Like “Our Father,” the first-person plural in this short prayer reminds us of our communal experience. Francis is discussing the universal human reality that we have been created to be in relationship with each other and with the world around us. More than relationship, really: we are created to drink each other in. We are intended to knit together with each other.

It’s a lovely thing, this embrace of our incarnational selves. We aren’t the masters, above and better than all else; nor are we the parasites who deserve to die. We are simply and beautifully part of the whole.

I take that in: I am a beloved, entangled being, part of a web of beloved, entangled beings.

“Our hands imbibe like roots.” This intoxicating line evokes the way that tree roots symbiotically entwine with mycorrhizal fungi, to transport nutrients and information between trees. At times, the roots and the fungi are so tightly woven together as to be indistinguishable, with fungi actually residing within the body of the root. The health of the trees and the health of the fungi depend on this relation- ship with each other.

Then I realize that it’s not just roots that imbibe. When I breathe out, the spruce tree outside my window inhales that breath. When that spruce exhales oxygen, I breathe it in. This remarkable cycle of breath sustains both of us; the health of the tree and my health depend on this relationship. This remarkable cycle of breath sustains all living creatures.

From the ways that my breath is woven into the world, I move to pondering the rest of my body. I am host to myriad life forms, and these life forms shape my health and life. I eat plants and animals; tiny animals decompose my body when I die, and plants use that decomposed matter as food. We are woven together in life and in death.

We are also woven into the world mentally. As open-loop neural systems, every mind learns from the minds around it. My mind is restructured by reading your book or hearing your speech. But I also learn from you when you hum the baby a lullaby, when you post an angry comment, when I walk by a garden that you have tended.

There is, of course, a downside to all this connectedness. It is impossible to distance ourselves from the physical and mental world in which we are entwined. When the trees burn on the mountainside above me, I feel the flames licking at my bark. When earthquakes strike, I am searching the rubble for my toddler. When drought reduces the creek to a trickle, I lie gasping in the mud. When bombs fall, I am praying that my teenagers come safely home.

Being intertwined — imbibing like roots — means that I will take in the innocent suffering of the world. Being intertwined means that there are times when the sorrow overtakes me. It means that I cannot — I will not — stand untouched as Creation groans and writhes like a woman in labour.

As the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit says, it is possible to be “hopeful and heartbroken at the same time.” Which brings me to beauty.

***

So I place them on what is beautiful in this world

Again, I look closely at the words. Now it’s no longer a story about the collective human experience. Francis says, “I place them.” He suggests that the individual can take specific action.

The contemplative teacher Cynthia Bourgeault tells a story about a friend of hers — a jazz musician and Buddhist — who made his living tutoring kids: four hours a day, six days a week. Bourgeault once asked him if he got bored. He said sometimes, but only when “I’m not paying enough attention.”

Attention is the ingredient that lights up the world.

To “place” something requires careful and intentional movement: attention. Placing my hands on the world implies that I enter into relationship with it. It’s more than just physical contact — it’s conscious awareness. It’s reverence.

I decide to take my attention out for a walk. I place my hands on cedar trees and stay until I can feel the warmth and softness of their bark. I rub the scars made by bear claws on a mountain ash trunk. I feel the coolness and grit of the garden soil, smell the pitch on a pine. I rest my eyes on the lavender and gold of Michaelmas daisies. I squeeze a rosehip, rub its waxiness on my palm, taste its tang. I tunnel my fingers into the soft fur of the dog.

I place my hands on beauty. When I pay attention to beauty, it eases the band of anxiety and grief around my chest.

But then I start thinking. What about things that I don’t instinctively find beautiful? Francis of Assisi famously experienced conversion when he kissed a leper, writing, “What had previously nauseated me became the source of spiritual and physical consolation for me.” When Francis says, “I place them on what is beautiful in this world,” I strongly doubt that he means for us to touch only pretty things. I suspect he’s suggesting that we learn to see beauty in all things.