Thoughts on climate grief, planetary grief, and finding meaning anyway
Some mornings I want the world to end.
Not just metaphorically. Not as some poetic turn of phrase. I mean it. Let it burn. Let the oceans swell and swallow the banks and boulevards. Let the towers fall. Let the empire eat itself. Let the noise quiet. Let the animals take it back.
There are days I wake up and pray for the failure of our species. Not out of malice. Not out of hatred. Out of grief. Out of awe. Out of a deep and wretched reverence for everything we’ve tried so hard to silence. The koalas we shot, the rivers we shat in, the forests we felled for shopping malls and war machines and fucking McDonald’s.
This is climate grief. But not the kind that clutches a Keep Cup and recycles religiously and clings to the illusion that we can fix it. No. This is the kind of grief that aches for erasure. That dreams of the dirt reclaiming the roads. That finds comfort in the thought that long after we’re gone, the coral will grow again. The whales will sing undisturbed. The earth will breathe.
Some people call that nihilism. I call it clarity.
Because let’s be honest. We had our chance. Hundreds of them. We were warned, and warned again. Scientists screamed. Elders pleaded. Greta Thunberg marched in the streets with cardboard signs and teenage warnings. And what did we do? We doubled down. Drilled deeper. Bought bigger cars. Made billionaires out of sociopaths.
And still we dare to call it hope when we mean harm.
We want to believe we’re worth saving. That we can change. But what if we can’t? What if the best thing we could do is stop? Stop building. Stop burning. Stop breeding. Stop believing that human life is the only life that matters.
There is no dignity in endless growth. No salvation in space travel. No mercy in the markets.
And yet.
And yet.
I still plant herbs in pots on the windowsill. I still cry when I see bees. I fucking love bees. I still feel something like holiness when a bird lands close enough to hear its breath. I still feed pigeons on my balcony in the hope of achieving that. I still hold hands with the people I love and talk about the future, even though I don’t believe in it.
Because I am not just grief. I am contradiction. I am human. And that means I carry ruin and reverence in the same chest.
It means I scream at the news and still sort the recycling. It means I write elegies and still fall in love. It means I want the world to end, and also, impossibly, want to stay.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe meaning lives in the contradiction. In the fact that we are the virus and the vessel. The wound and the witness. The firestarter and the first responder.
I used to think hope meant believing things would get better. Now I think it means finding beauty inside the broken. Holding space for the sacred, even as it slips through our hands.
I don’t want to be part of a movement that only knows how to march. I want to be part of a mourning. A remembering. A reckoning.
I want queer rituals in abandoned churches. I want songs sung to the sea. I want to lie down with the dying things and say sorry. Not performatively. Not to soothe my guilt. But because the apology is owed.
I want to imagine endings that are not just destruction, but return. Surrender. A letting-go of our delusions of dominion.
Let the forests take back the freeways. Let the termites chew through the archives. Let the skyscrapers sink. Let the silence grow thick again.
And if, by some miracle or mess, we survive, let us be smaller. Let us be slower. Let us be listeners this time. Not rulers. Not gods. Just one animal among many.
I do not trust our species to do better. But I trust the soil. I trust the seed. I trust that after us, the world will recover. Not in our image, but in its own.
That’s enough, some days.
Other days, I still fight. Still write. Still rage. Still ritualise. Still hold the line between despair and devotion. Still choose to care, even when it costs.
Because love is not contingent on outcomes. It is an act of alignment. A choice to stand beside what we cannot save, simply because it is worthy.
Even if we are not.
The truth is, I don’t know how this ends.
But I know I want the whales to win. I know I want the insects to inherit the earth. I know I want the wind to write the last chapter.
And maybe, just maybe, I want us to be humbled enough to earn a different ending.
An ending, otherwise.