For Now, Grief… Then Gratitude

I want us to stop talking about gratitude (unless it’s that deep, in your bones, ache of a whisper saying “thank you…”) and start talking about Grief. 

About how it’s real and true that as white people we benefit from a racist system.

About how as consumers of cheap products, we benefit from child slave labor.  

About how as drivers and travelers, we benefit from fossil fuels (well, simply being alive these days shows we benefit from fossil fuels). 

About how as being living, breathing “civilized” people, we benefit from the collapse of our ecosystems. 

And what I want to talk about more than any of all of this is how we are going to wake up and move out of denial that our world isn’t facing a huge transition socially, politically, and environmentally. 

Only to the degree that people are unsettled is there any hope for them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enough of the gratitude, which is far too often a thinly veiled effort to attract more of the same deluded sense of reality that we can have whatever we want when we want it (the hallmark of consumer culture). Now we need to face grief. and rage. and terror. We don’t need a bunch of white tears, but that doesn’t mean we don’t grieve. And it doesn’t mean we don’t stand with people of color, gender diversity, sexual diversity, and every other diversity because we don’t want to do it “wrong”. 

We stand together, learn how to feel our feelings, and become the elders we wish we had. 

Stand up. Face the dark feelings. 

Feel them all. 

We need more emotionally responsible people in the world… not just financially responsible ones. 

Love, 

Kathryn