My 8-year-old came downstairs with tears in his eyes after learning the news today.
“What will happen to the turtles?” he cried. He has been haunted by Trump’s words at the Republican National Convention, as he shouted “Drill, baby, drill!”
I held my son in my arms and told him he didn’t have to go to school today. Today was a day to rest, play, be loved, and laugh, to feel grief and anger.
But also, I couldn’t imagine putting him on the bus this morning. Our queer family suddenly feels a lot less safe in this town that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. I wrapped my arms around my son never wanting to let him go.
My heart echoes his. I fell asleep last night crying into my pillow thinking about climate change and Trump’s forthcoming policies.
If there was a sliver of a chance that we could still make dramatic shifts in stopping this climate destruction machine, it feels like it has disappeared.
A year ago, I finished writing This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse. I closed with these words:
“Where are we headed with climate change?
“One possibility is that we get this right. We let our imaginations carry us and our love of this world drive us. And we shift … We transition death-dealing profit systems to life-giving generous systems. We learn to live in new ways and it’s marvelous.
“Another possibility is that we don’t get it right. Weather gets more volatile. Politics get more deadly. Systems crumble. And we face into the worst.
“I don’t know. I can oscillate between both and a million possibilities in the middle.
“What I do know is that either way doesn’t change how I want to live. I want to fight like hell and grow tomatoes. I want to worship with the praying mantis and learn how to build composting toilets. I want to play with my kids and sing in the wind. I want to honor the dead and feed the birds.
“Either way doesn’t change that there can be joy and laughter, awe and wonder, love and community. Either way sharpens my gaze on what matters and what just doesn’t. Either way I want to live humanly and invite our kids into deeper knowing of what it means to be alive on this sweet earth. That is not a bad life and one for which, as a parent, I can give thanks.”
I still mean that, but I thought we had a little more time of uncertainty before knowing which way we would fall.
Eighteen miles down the Kittatinny Ridge from where I am at Kirkridge Retreat Center, there is a forest fire. It has spread over 600 acres and is traveling through the root systems. They say it will take weeks before it burns out. It hasn’t rained in eastern Pennsylvania in two months. There is an extreme burn ban in place. And as I write, it is 80 degrees out in November.
We are about to face the worst, dear friends.
Today I weep. Today I wrap my arms around my kids.
And tomorrow I’ll plant garlic and dream about what work is to come.
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann is the author of The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World and This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse. She lives in Pennsylvania.
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