Finding what's sacred

Plus: personalized climate action guides courtesy of Kim Nicholas

When I took my first trip to France, it was part of a backpacking grand tour with my childhood best friend. In an era when people still got most tourist guidance from an actual paper guidebook, we picked spots that seemed important (noted with a star) or appealing as we bounced to a new city every two to four days. (The prospect of this constantly disorienting churn now makes me feel the need to lie down.) We went to a fair number of churches, because Europe is lousy with them and it just seemed like the cultured thing to do. Though I was assigned Catholic at birth and went to Catholic school, most of the churches left me cold. But then we went to Sacré-Coeur, in Paris, and something about that church touched me. But what I realized quite suddenly was that despite all those years of indoctrination I had no faith, and that made me cry. My dear friend Colette noticed and held my hand as we strolled around the rest of the church. (This moment of tenderness is one that has stayed with me my whole life.) I felt the sadness of having lost something, or perhaps of having missed it altogether.

I was back in France recently, a decade and a half later, and due to the wisdom of my age and a very comfortable atheism, I mostly avoided the churches, focusing instead on the things I actually like. And I was while staying at a little cottage in the Loire Valley, my hosts recommended a nearby chateau with gardens that were open to the public. So I popped on my borrowed bicycle, pedalled down some empty country roads, and arrived at a truly breathtaking garden straight out of a BBC travel special. It was the full Monty (Monty Don, that is).

After about 45 minutes of walking, the grounds all to myself except for a couple gardeners, I came to a massive purple beech, over 150 years old, her lowest branches arcing down to the ground, beckoning me inside. And inside the tent of her branches, listening to the birdsong and the susurration of her leaves, I sobbed. I felt the wonder of her age, of all she’d seen and survived, of all the life she’d sustained from the moss in the crevices of her bark to the oxygen she releases from her leaves. I felt her roots reaching down deep into the earth beneath me all the way out to the crystal clear water of the river, feeding mycorrhizal fungi and a menagerie of soil microorganisms. I felt held, and as I lay down and looked up at the leaves above me, I knew this tree could hold on to some of the heaviness I’d been carrying.

This is all to say: I found my church, my sanctuary, my connection, my faith. I realized the absence I’d felt when I was 25 had been filled by a new presence, one that performs miracles on the daily, including a true transubstantiation — water, sunshine, and carbon dioxide into wood, leaves, and oxygen. Because of her and the rest of the symphony of more-than-human life, we can survive on this blue marble.

The moment hit me so deeply I was about ready to leave everything and start a nature cult, though I don’t know that the owners of the chateau would have approved.

Of course you don’t have to go to France to connect with the more-than-human world. I can hear the wind blowing through the leaves of the linden tree outside our downtown apartment right now. But we do have to make space for that connection and be intentional about it, which is an essential part of our climate retreat.

A little bit of ritual can also help. One thing we do on retreat is forage an object from the area that represents some of our climate feelings: an acorn or a leaf or a milkweed pod, for example. So far, I’ve used that as a conversation starter, but at the next retreat, when we go on our silent forest walk, I’ll encourage everyone to take that object with them, to lay it down like an offering in a place that resonates with them.

Because all our climate feelings — our love, our rage, our worry, even our despair — they are our offerings. They’re the sign of our devotion. And we don’t need to carry them all on our own. We have each other (that’s one point of the workshop), but we also have the rivers and the flowers and the mountains and the oceans, which can be both source of support and object of devotion. Even if you’re an atheist like me, any place has the potential to be sacred, to ground you, comfort you, inspire wonder and absorb pain. I found my cathedral not in Montmartre, but beneath the branches of a beech. And while I may never see this beloved tree again, I took in a little oxygen she’d released, pumped it through my body to nourish my cells. Some microbes from her soil probably joined my microbiome. I carry her with me. And even better, I know there’s a world of other spaces just waiting to be recognized as sacred.

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Kim Nicholas’s Personalized Climate Action Guide

I’ve read a lot of climate books, and sustainability researcher Dr. Kimberly Nicholas’s Under the Sky We Make is perhaps my top reco, especially if you’re only going to read one book. It gives you a great overview of the situation, helps you deal with your feelings, and then offers both individual and systemic science-supported ways forward. She guides you towards the most effective actions, which has always been important to me, and what I’ve tried to do in this very newsletter. (I also endorse her newsletter,

We Can Fix It

.)

She has a new personalized climate action guide currently in beta. It gives you quick, scientifically sound advice on how to take meaningful action on various fronts in less than 10 minutes. Absolutely worth trying as way of checking in where you’re at with your own climate action.

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Parting Wisdom

“For our lives to satisfy us — however long and however safe they are — we need to both feel like our actions have a purpose, and be right about that. So far, I’ve avoided using the word values . . . I don’t like its implications of property and worth that seem to put a price tag on what matters. Maybe it’s mattering that I can ask you to notice: the moments, within this profoundly disrupted and disturbing time, where it feels like your attention and effort are where they belong, on the things that matter to you and not only to you.” — Kate Schapira, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth

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You may know I had to cancel this spring climate retreat due to some very poorly timed COVID, which was a difficult thing to do, though participants were incredibly gracious. To cope with the disappointment, I zoomed out, told myself it’s just one little setback in what I hope is a very long story of successful retreats. If you’d like to be a part of that story, you can join the specific mailing list here, watch this space for updates, or follow me on Instagram, where I post a lot of pictures of my garden and some eco things.

In the meantime, I’ll be here. Say hello by dropping a comment or clicking reply to share your thoughts and experiences.

Be well and take care,

Jen

P.S. If you too get a little emotional about trees, I cannot recommend Richard Powers’s The Overstory enough. It isn’t a light novel, but if you keep the faith that things will coalesce and pay off, it will bring trees to life for you in new ways.

Five Minutes for Planet is written by me, Jen Knoch, and edited by Crissy Boylan. All photos and videos by Jen Knoch.