We Need a Movement Toward Grief and Solidarity

Every day, we are witnessing the intensifying collapse of systems—natural systems that can’t sustain the harms we’ve caused, and man-made systems that were never built to sustain life, only to dominate and exploit it. 

The climate emergency is no longer a distant threat but a daily reality. The polycrisis—this tangled web of environmental, economic, political, and social unraveling—is accelerating and exposing the hollowness of the overculture. Fascism has fully taken hold in the so-called United States (and other places around the world) while most people are deeply disassociated and traumatized.

And here’s what I know: It will get harder before it gets better. A lot harder.

In the face of this, we must ask: How do we want to meet this time? Will we turn away, isolate, or scramble for our own survival at the expense of others? Or will we build something different, an underculture rooted in care, honesty, reciprocity, and repair?

If we want to co-create something sustainable, we need a movement toward grief and village, toward sorrow and solidarity. A movement that understands collapse is not just an external event but a reckoning of the soul. 

So many have already lost so much in horrific and violent ways, particularly Indigenous people and Black people. The deep uncertainty, staggering loss, and unnecessary death is going to impact us all and increase exponentially. We’ll continue to lose lands, species, safety, illusions of progress, and each other. And with every loss comes grief. If we don’t tend to that grief, it curdles into terror, blame, resentment, and violence. Unmetabolized sorrow becomes the fuel for fascism.

This is why grief work is justice work. It teaches us how to hold the unbearable without turning it against ourselves and each other. It helps us practice humility and repair. It reminds us that death is not failure, it’s part of the cycle of life. And we must tap into aliveness right now—what is alive, what feels alive in our bodies, and who is still sustaining us. 

We must build mutual aid networks that don’t just share resources but know how to hold a deathbed vigil and facilitate community grief rituals. We need communities that can survive the storm and mourn what’s lost together around the fire. We need relational skills that teach us how to navigate rupture and repair, so we don’t keep breaking apart when we most need to hold together.

The work ahead isn’t only about resistance, it’s about remembrance. It’s about becoming the kinds of ancestors the future will thank, even if they only inherit a mere shadow of what was.

The time for isolated grief is over. The time for collective, courageous grieving and radical solidarity is now.

We’re hosting a free call for Grief and Solidarity Days this evening, May 12th, with Desiree Adaway, Kai Cheng Thom, Alexandra Blakely, Francis Weller, and me. I hope many of you will join us. I’ll be sharing more resources for Grief & Solidarity Days in the next couple weeks. Whether you can join the preparation call or not, please consider hosting a small grief gathering on May 31st or June 1st.