Climate and the Heart: Toward a Practice of Creative Appreciation

Or staying alive in the good fight

Note to Readers: I wrote this essay as an exploration. The climate debate can be harsh, and I am thinking a lot about how we can bring more heart and more spirit to the efforts. Here is a first installment.

The urgency of the climate fight draws many of us into a warlike footing. The soldiers in Ukraine certainly understand what this is like — fighting for survival and in the face of so much destruction and death, the heart hardens because it must. There is no other way to survive.

Many of us working in the climate fight face a similar reality — our hearts are hardening as we watch in helpless despair as the world does not act fast enough. Every year it gets harder — another uptick in temperature, more fires, or a killer heat wave. A few die, hundreds die, thousands die. Maybe tens of thousands. Now, they are just numbers to us. We go numb. We lose heart.

Heart is missing because it is so hard to bring. Climate anxiety is like a blockade against the heart. With anxiety, we can’t fear, we can’t love, and we can’t grieve. Happiness is nowhere to be found. Anxiety freezes us and all the unknowns about climate change leave us with nothing but anxiety-filled shadow-boxing. What will be the impact? Where will it hit? We have no idea where the opponent is or how it will strike. We only know that it will strike. Our anxiety creates a kind of dead alertness — everything is suspicious and nothing feels alive.

It is possible that appreciation is a prerequisite to a heart-based response. Appreciation opens the heart. It connects to the object of appreciation — the place, the creature, the work. One of the tragedies of modern life is how market capitalism objectifies place into a value measured by dollars. We have even corrupted the word. “Appreciation” in the modern world is an increase in price. “That property appreciated nicely,” we say. But that is not the appreciation I am talking about. I’m talking about appreciation for what a thing is — its essence, its beauty, its reality. Appreciation is the root behind love. It connects people to their place deep in their own hearts.

Appreciation, however, is risky because it magnifies loss. The more we love and appreciate, the deeper the pain when we lose the object of our appreciation. Love, appreciation, adoration… all these emotions risk loss and therefore grief. We open our hearts so we can appreciate, and when we do, we become vulnerable to the pain of loss.

So we try to stay objective. If I lose this place, I’ll just move to a new one, we say to ourselves. We pretend they are the same, yet we know they are not. People learn this through climate change. I think of the people in Paradise, CA whose town burned in 2018, those flooded in Pakistan last year, or those who loved the five Solomon Islands that have disappeared already. We pretend we can just go somewhere else — we pretend because we don’t want to grieve. We defend our hearts because we don’t want to hurt. We fear our tears, which is to fear our love of this place. We stay out of the mess of deep appreciation.

Appreciation and love, however, are central to the climate fight. We can’t do it on statistics alone and science isn’t enough.

How might we practice appreciation? How might we recover our sense of heart in the face of the climate challenge and all the things climate change is causing?

In a word: Creativity.

Creativity is an appreciation. For me, it is poems. For you, it might be songs, stories, or paintings. Perhaps it is a garden. But we can create to see — to see the reality, to see the inner glow, to see the full spirit of the world. Yes, this cultivates appreciation and therefore risks grief. We know grief will come. But grief doesn’t kill, and appreciation opens joy. It means we can love this world, and like with loving a man or a woman, we’d do almost anything to celebrate it.

Here is an excerpt from one of my poems of appreciation for our world. Let’s open our hearts.

Repairing the World

1

The few remaining leaves drift down,
the breeze freeing them from the tree,
from their source of life, to return
to Earth and find some new fashion
that fits their now fulfilled life.
Is it like this with us? Are we, too,
being released on a breeze to drift
endlessly down in a new autumn
of humanity? Do we just accept our lot
as the inevitable outcome, the price
to pay for the thousand preceding generations?
I don’t know.
There’s peace in such acceptance —
but that’s a privilege of age.
I can drift down from the top of the tree,
but my children? They are the leaves
that barely budded, or the buds
that never appeared at all.
What peace will they find
in a breeze like this? No bud,
no leaf. Shit, not even a tree.
Their forest is gone.
Their grassland is gone.
While I write this poem in peace.

The creativity in writing these lines both opened my heart and drew me deeper into our human predicament. It helped me connect fatalism with acceptance, even as spiritual teachers promote radical acceptance as the way to inner peace. But how can there be peace with the world dying?

Creative contemplation also leads deeper into the generational differences on climate change. Peaceful acceptance emerges as a real privilege of age mostly because I will likely never see the inferno of climate Armageddon, but my children will. I can accept the world as it is because I still perceive that I will avoid the worst suffering because, by that time, I’ll be dead. But my children and theirs will face the worst we can imagine.

I know that plenty of people understand this reality — that it will be worse for future generations. But understanding it with the mind versus feeling it in the heart — those are different experiences. Both can lead to angst and despair as we see the situation continue to worsen. For some, it becomes a determined adherence to a political or ideological stance. Most activists go here. Others respond with creativity as a way of mending the heart and thawing the frozen inscape of the psyche. Artists go here.

The poem helps me see that we must find a balance in this tension between action and appreciation because balance is essential to sustaining life and to continuing the action. Empathy is critical, otherwise, we cannot see from the other side — that of animals, that of Earth, that of our neighbors, and even that of those we view as opponents. Rigid stridency, that ugly character of committed activism, ends our ability to listen, and therefore our ability to craft solutions to which people will adhere.

Later, in the fourth of five sections of the poem, I come into both a desire and the reality of our situation in the world. Now, the breeze doesn’t blow, it speaks, and it takes me to an understanding that is honest and, at the same time, full of appreciation. Here are those lines.

4

I want to repair the world.
Yet this peaceful breeze says,
“I don’t need you.”
I suppose at some point
we are all irrelevant, our legacy
hardly mattering for, at best,
we were a mere mouthpiece of the angels.
They arrive from the stars
on the sun’s rays,
and they brush our hair with the breeze.
Indeed, all the world is holy
and we are its mere beneficiaries.

For me, the sense of holiness in the natural world soothes the challenging work so many of us are doing on climate change. Creativity offers a moment of inner reflection and joy without the pollyannish ignorance so many people engage. Creative practice seems to operate like a psychic alchemy that transforms, at least for a moment, the mud and lead of our inner state into a gold we can use to fuel our ongoing work. Let not the mind control everything. Be creative. Open the heart. It will give us a better chance at continuing the work we all need to be doing.

Anthony Signorelli