How Do You Heal in a World That Won't Stop Dying?

The world is dying faster than my body knows how to hold it, and last evening a Fox was playing in the middle of it. This is the widest and wildest tension I can put in words today.

It is mid-August here in Burgundy, past three months now without real rain, the fifth canicule pressing down on us like a heavy hand that will not lift, and She comes across the cracked gold field anyway, at dusk, when the heat finally loosens its grip a little. Stops. Drops low. Pounces sideways on a brown leaf the dry wind is dragging past Her, a leaf that fell in August, too early, because the trees are letting go of their green and their fruits now just to stay alive.

She pounces on it for no reason. For the joy of it. The Crows are above Her in what I think is an Oak, teasing each other, dropping things on purpose, laughing in that dry Crow way that sounds a little like they know something we don’t.

Death is moving through this Forest. And this isn't the cyclical kind, the seasonal kind that comes each fall. This is the other kind, and She and I both know it. The dead animals on the roadside all summer. The wells gone dry. The trucks that come now to fill the village water towers near us because the Spring is just dry, gone. The forests around here are in fall season color (mid-August), going brown in a month that should still be deep green. And some living things, in the middle of all of it, keep playing.

Some mornings I can hardly stand to watch it. Something in me wants the whole world to stop and go still and on its knees out of respect, to grieve at the size of what is happening here.

And the Fox will not. The Crows will not. They keep playing, right through the middle of the dying, as if they have already settled something I am still trying to work out.

I keep sitting with that these past months, out on the stone step in the last cool hour before the heat builds, watching the living do what the living have always done, even now, even in this. Feeling into what the right response even is, the right feelings, the right thoughts, in the face of something this size.

Because we, up here in the dystopian human story, we are worn out with a different question. We keep asking: what should we do? Does it even make sense to heal this feeling of dread and loss that reflects our deep belonging to the living world? In this collapse...

With the drought that will not break, the numbers we try not to read: acreages burned, animal deaths, crop losses, and river levels. Species going extinct one by one, a world coming apart at a speed our nervous systems were never built to hold.

And here is the part that makes me want to put my head down on the cold table or scream depending on the day. They have named our grief, our experience of deep belonging with the dying world, a disorder. Yes a sickness of some kind.

Eco-anxiety. A condition. A thing to be managed, medicated, breathed away, four counts in and eight counts out. A symptom to be treated. There is even a “hot line” you can call (I am all for supporting people in crisis, but maybe, just maybe, lets address the cause of the crisis too).

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So no. Maybe we do not “heal” in a time like this. Not the way the marketplace or new-edge spirituality means it, the arrival, the closure, the serene barefoot version of ourselves standing in permanent light. I buried that fantasy in an essay a year ago and I have not missed it once.

But the Forest is still teaching. And She keeps showing me the same two things. Two honest animals that live inside us and refuse, absolutely refuse, to perform.

The Body that will not lie. And the Laugh that will not die.

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That is where the rest of this goes, and I want to be honest about what is waiting down here, it is the actual medicine.

Below, we tend:

• The Body as the truest instrument you own in a collapsing age. Why it clenches when your mind insists you are fine, and a plain practice for asking it what it knows instead of overriding it.

• The reckoning I had to have with my own Body the year it stopped agreeing to carry my denial. The words it actually used. I still grieve them.

• Why laughter erupts in the middle of the rawest grief circles, and why that is not a betrayal of the grief but the very thing that lets the Body survive it.

• The Sacred Clown, the Heyoka, the Trickster, and the fierce reason the old cultures kept a Fool at the center of the holiest ceremony. What He punctures. Why we need Him now more than we have in a long time.

• A kitchen-table way to hold grief and joy in the same day without one canceling the other. You can do it tonight.

• The vertical bypass, the seductive escape upward into light-codes and downloads, and how to tell whether your spirituality has feet on the ground or is just floating in denial.

• And the real answer to “Can I heal now?” which turns out to be a different question altogether.

If this work keeps you company, your paid subscription is the thing that lets me keep writing it here, outside the algorithms, both hands still in the soil, and I keep planting trees, rewilding the land for my daughter and future generation thanks to your help.

That is the whole economy of this place. You feed the fire, the fire keeps burning for the village. Merci beyond words for that.