Selections from the quotes and poems below are read as part of GGC Circles.

GRIEF

We suffer from what I’ve come to call “grief illiteracy.” We have no language for what really happens, no ability to be a faithful witness, to do justice to how it feels to be dying in our time and place.
– Stephen Jenkinson

A civilization that denies death ends up denying life.
– Octavio Paz

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sit, be still, and listen,
For you are drunk,
And we are at the edge of the roof.
– Rumi

Grieve, so that you can be free to feel something else.
– Nayyirah Waheed

Grief is our common bond. Opening to our sorrow connects us with everyone, everywhere. It is sacred work.
– Francis Weller

Plumb your own mysteries, what is secret and hidden, even from yourself. Find what lives there in shadow and silence, waiting patiently or impatiently to be revealed, noticed, honored. Be unashamed and unafraid of your darkness, for it has much to teach you.
– Molly Baskette

Our entire civilization was built on disconnection, hierarchies, othering peoples and species, oppression, not caring for what happens to other humans or other cultures–looking away and not showing up when the worst was happening to “others”.
– Silvia diBlasio

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.
– Neil Gaiman

Should you fear that with this pain your heart might break, remember that the heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe. Your heart is that large. Trust it. Keep breathing.
– Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
– Mary Oliver, Poem “In Blackwater Woods”
from American Primitive, Back Bay Books, 1983.

Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.
– Martín Prechtel

What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?
– Dougald Hine

What if grief is a skill, in the same way that love is a skill, something that must be cultivated and taught? What if grief is the natural order of things, a way of loving life anyway? Grief and the love of life are twins, natural human skills that can be learned … In a time like ours, grieving is a subversive act.
– Stephen Jenkinson

Hey grief,
Let’s dance.

I’ve been keeping you at arm’s length.
Sometimes it requires a whole bag of cookies…
Hours of TV dramas.

Must I wake up in the wee hours
so you can have your way with me.
Would you just make an appointment?

It seems you’re contagious,
You pop out
in the middle of ordinary conversations.
And so I am shunned.

Grief,
I am not afraid of you.
I am afraid of not showing up
When I’m needed.
I am tired of fighting you.

So,
I’ll write you in my calendar, grief, and
I’ll dance with you.
– Terry LePage

The gifts of death are the atoms within our bodies, created in the hearts of dying stars.
The gifts of death are our food; all food must die to give us life.
The gifts of death are space for new creations: space for for a new generation, space for a new species, space for a new world.
The gifts of death are compassion and tenderness in the face of loss and limits.
The gifts of death are learning and acceptance of the limits of our own power.
The gifts of death are awareness: savoring the mystery and beauty and preciousness of life.
The gifts of death are joy and sorrow, laughter and tears.
The gifts of death are lives that are fully and exuberantly lived, then graciously and gratefully given up.
– Connie Barlow, via Michael Dowd, Pro-Future Faith video

THROUGH GRIEF TO GRATITUDE

Gratitude is a revolutionary act.
– Joanna Macy

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give.
– Francis Weller

Although the wind blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
– Izumi Shikibu

The depth of our grief is the measure of our love; its flip side is praise for all we hold sacred, bathed in the moonlight. Every night before dinner, each one at our table says one thing they are thankful for and one way they have served the Earth that day. We never fail to drop into the world of what is most precious to us. Indeed, in the course of loss, what we cherish most becomes most vivid.
– Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil (referencing Shibuki)

What would we do if the stars only came out once every thousand years? No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch our screens.
– Tara Brach (crediting Ralph Waldo Emerson)

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
—Rachel Carson

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if you’re told the world is ending and the Messiah has arrived, first plant a tree… then see if the story is true.
– Paul Hawken, via Michael Dowd, Pro-Future Faith video.

Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life's breath, the ocean of air that envelops the earth.
― David Suzuki

So that I stopped there astonished
by the great everywhere
calling to me
like an invisible
unspoken invitation
radiating from where I stood,
everything given
and everything taken from me
everything wanting
and everything already given,
the way I have come so far and
the way I am still promised to go,
within and without,
something I was, and something I am now
and will be forever,
the sheer generosity of being loved
through loving:
the miracle reflection of a twice blessed life.
– David Whyte, poem “Twice Blessed”
from Crossing the Flood 2014

Listen ...
the universe is singing.
 Silver whispers from star to star,
the roar of the golden sun,
the blue Earth’s dance in the darkness.
Listen ...
the great drum, the solemn sea pulsing under the moon, 
the heartbeat of the sleeping land, the crackle and snap of air.
Listen ...
the living creatures are singing:
 each little life lifts its voice, 
sings, swells and stutters to a stop, passes its song to children’s children.
Listen ...
we who have ears to hear, and the gift of speech, love the song, gather it up and sing it.
 Bring words of worship and wonder,
 sing for the sun and stars,
 sing for the earth and all its creatures. 
Tell out, shout – the beauty and the bounty of it!
Sing creation’s song to the Creator!
– Marnie Barrell, poem “Silver Whispers”

The dewdrops become jeweled with the morning’s sun-fire
and I give thanks.
You can see forever when the vision is clear.
In this moment each moment
I give thanks.
– Harriet Kofalk

FINALLY, COURAGE

We may need to prepare ourselves to be both hospice workers for a world that is dying and doulas for an uncertain future that may emerge.
– Silvia DeBlasio

Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.
– Kate Marvel

The times are urgent; let us slow down.
– Bayo Akomolafe

Once I dropped from my shoulders the self-imposed burden of having to “save the world”, I could breathe a sigh of relief and ask myself, “What can I still do?”
- Deb Ozarko

In the end we’re all just walking each other home.
- Ram Dass via Anne Lamott

Even in a world of dying there are new loves being born.
– Paul Franzen

… don’t run around and panic. Don’t light your hair on fire. Don’t go out and see what other 10 more things you can do, or how many articles you can forward … just stop and get really, really quiet and touch down into the Earth and really listen and see what comes up into your heart.
– Dahr Jamail

I built my house by the sea.
Not on the sands, mind you;
not on the shifting sand.
And I built it of rock.
A strong house
by a strong sea.
And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.
Good neighbors.
Not that we spoke much.
We met in silences.
Respectful, keeping our distance,
but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.
Always, the fence of sand our barrier,
always, the sand between.
And then one day,
– and I still don’t know how it happened –
the sea came.
Without warning.
Without welcome, even
Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine,
less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.
Slow, but coming.
Slow, but flowing like an open wound.
And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death.
And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door.
And I knew, then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning.
That when the sea comes calling, you stop being neighbors,
Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance neighbors,
And you give your house for a coral castle,
And you learn to breathe underwater.
– Carol Bialock, poem “Breathing Under Water”

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
from Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

If you are angry, let your anger be fire
So it can warm someone chilly.
If you are grieving, let your grief be a river
So someone thirsty can drink.
If you are numb, let your numbness give you capacity

To walk in hard places and not feel hurt.

If you are broken, let your brokenness

Be what makes space for a new thing to enter.

If you are fearful, let your fear be a warning signal

That others may look up.

If you are lost, let your being lost

Make a new place and call it home.

However you are,

Keep going.

However you are,

Keep going.
– Laura Martin

…what kind of stuff is worth working on, if you start from climate change as an unfolding tragedy, rather than as a problem that can be fixed and made to go away?
– Jem Bendell

Climate fear can paralyze every time if we let it. Don't let it. There are still gardens to tend, detainees to visit, babies to love, regenerative farmers to support, parties to throw, and trees to meet and thank and love.
– Terry LePage

Whatever hope is worth having, it lies on the far side of despair, where the maps run out, at the margins or hidden in plain sight.
– Richard Rohr, Simplicity

Caring for myself is not a self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
– Audre Lorde

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.
– Isaac Asimov

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
– Rumi

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
— James Baldwin

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.
– Vaclav Havel

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
– Albert Einstein

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– R. Buckminster Fuller

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
– Alan Watts

When I am afraid, I am miserable. I play it safe. I restrict myself. I hide the talent of me in the ground. I am not deeply alive—the depths of me are not being expressed… When I am afraid, I am a house divided against itself. So more than anything else I want to be delivered from fear, for fear is alien to my own best interest or, to put it positively, I want to give myself generously, magnanimously, freely—out of love. I want to be able to take risks—to express myself, to welcome and embrace the future.”
– Gordon Cosby

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

– Mary Oliver, poem “When Death Comes”

In facing our climate predicament, I have learned that there is no way to escape despair. But there seems to be a way through despair. It is to love love more than we fear death. That love is why we experience loss and grief. After loss and grief there is still that love. So as things get really difficult in the years to come, I hope I will keep asking myself – what does love invite of me now?
– Jem Bendell

We don’t have a right to ask whether we a going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do.
– Wendell Berry

When your ship, long moored in harbor, gives you the illusion of being a house…
Put out to sea! Save your boat’s journeying soul, and your own pilgrim soul,
cost what it may.
– Helder Camara

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
– Anais Nin