Love with Nowhere Left to Land: Witnessing Climate Grief

scorched leaves of purple cone flower are found everywhere in my area from the unrelenting heat and humidity

Fellow Seekers-

Every fallen leaf says the same thing, and every year I have to learn it again: death is not an ending. It is a turning.

We are living inside the death of the climate that cradled us — the steady seasons our ancestors planted by, prayed by, told time by. That is a hard sentence to write and a harder one to live with. But Nature has been teaching this lesson since long before we had words for it, and they are teaching it still, to anyone willing to walk out the door and pay attention.

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Kneel beside any fallen log and you will find the whole curriculum. Fungi lacing through softened wood. Saplings rooted in the body of a nurse log, drinking from what came before. The sweet rot of leaf litter turning into the soil that will feed next spring. Nowhere in the forest is death treated as failure. This is the mechanism of renewal — the way an ecosystem makes room for what has not yet imagined. Even fire, devastating as it is, wakes seeds that cannot open without heat. The Land does not resist their own dying. And the longer I sit with that, the more I suspect our resistance to death causes us more suffering than the transformation itself.

This isn’t something we can learn only with our minds. It has to move through the body. A death walk in the woods — pausing at what is decomposing with curiosity instead of revulsion. Autumn kept as ritual, Earth’s own masterclass in letting go. Hands in the compost bin, watching yesterday’s abundance become tomorrow’s soil, and understanding that this is not metaphor. Now in Earth’s micro-seasons, this is simply how life works, and we are not exempt from it.

The grief asks for tending too. Climate grief is not a disorder to be managed or a mood to be talked out of — it is love with nowhere left to land. We grieve because we belong: to the species leaving us now, to the wetlands and glaciers and old familiar winters, to relatives, not statistics. So we can make ceremony for them. Say their names aloud. Light a candle for the passenger pigeon, the sea ice, the snowpack that used to come in November. Grief spoken in community does not grow smaller, but it does become bearable — passed hand to hand like something warm.

Here is the practice at the center of it: witnessing without collapsing. Anyone who has sat vigil with a dying loved one knows this posture — you do not fix, you do not flee, you stay. Doom, it turns out, is its own way of leaving the room. It writes the last chapter in advance and calls that honesty, when really it excuses us from presence. Witnessing asks something harder and gentler: to let the grief move through in waves rather than take up permanent residence. To feel the loss fully, then return — to breath, to the body, to the Land under our feet, to the work of the day. Not because the losses aren’t grave, but because grief was never meant to be a place we live. It is a place we visit, faithfully, so that love keeps circulating.

I have come to believe that accepting the death of the world as we’ve known it may be the most radical act of hope available to us. Not because the losses aren’t real — every extinction, every drowned shoreline, every displaced family is genuine grief, and I will not pretty it up. But when we stop spending ourselves trying to keep everything exactly as it was, an enormous energy comes free. Energy for hospicing what is ending. Energy for midwifing what wants to be born.

Nature’s cycles offer no promise that this will be easy. They offer something better: the assurance that death is not the final word, that transformation is the oldest story there is, and that we were never asked to prevent all dying — only to participate in it consciously, with grief in one hand and wild hope in the other.

The world we have known is composting. Something is already rooting in it.

Stay wild and True

~Emily

Keep up to date on MN’s endangered list: https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/ets/index.html

Disclaimer:

**Climate aware work is challenging. If you feel like you need more support please text the crisis line at 741741.

The purpose of this information is for educational purposes only. Always seek the advice of your own Medical Provider and/or Mental Health Provider regarding any questions or concerns you have about your specific health. As always, please use common sense.

Services provided by Emily Grendahl Risinger and Still Wild Healing LLC are for educational purposes only. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies herbs as dietary supplements/food products, not medicines. Consult your healthcare provider before using any herbal supplements, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, have a medical condition, or take medications.

I reside on Native Lands of Očhéthi Šakówiŋ and Wahpekute people.