Grief reaps the harvest sown by love. It arrives unbidden, carving deep furrows into our hearts and lives. “Grief is a cruel kind of education”, writes Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, “You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language”.
In an era defined by ecological unravelling and its attendant meaning crisis, what wisdom can be drawn from the grief we feel over the destruction of the more-than-human world?
Philosopher David Abram has spoken of how our meaning crisis and separation from the web of life are interwoven. The development of alphabetic literacy alienated us from the living land, erasing its “manifold meanings”.
We gained the power to think and create in the abstract, but this obscured our ability to commune with Earth’s rhythms and stories.
In modernity, where nature has been reified as ‘Other’ and we live as if cognitively severed from the web of life, ecological grief acts as a profound disruption. It dismantles the lens of abstraction through which we habitually see the world. In the void of sorrow, words falter and fall away.
What remains is a silence, both empty and alive, a meeting point with Earth itself.
Ecological grief, for all its harshness, invites us into an embodied dialogue with the world, teaching us to flow and converse in ways less abstracted, more rooted. Piercing through grief’s murkiness, we recognise that our sense of loss stems from our kinship to the more-than-human world. By doing so, it reorients us back into the relational nature of existence. After all, “reality is not primarily things in relation. It’s primarily relations from which things emerge”, explained philosopher John Vervaeke.
Leaning into the grief of the Anthropocene - the heartbreak of extinction, climate chaos, and ecological unravelling - stirs a bone-deep knowing that the sorrow we feel is not separate from the planet’s own mourning. As Susan Murphy Roshi suggests, “becoming able to think along with the Earth; the Earth becoming able to think along with us” is not a distant aspiration but an ancient and urgent practice.
If this seamless relationship to the world enfolds us in Earth-as-poem, what might we make of Earth’s unfolding?
Unravelling ancient and intricately woven ecosystems is not simply a tragedy but a profound lesson in entanglement. The tears shed over this loss are the saltwater threads stitching us back into the fabric of life, an elemental reminder that we belong to Earth. And within these furrows etched by grief, tender and insistent, love takes root.
In this way, grief is not merely a teacher - it is a wayfinder. It shows us how to return home to a world where meaning is manifold, reality is relational, and life itself is an emergent, sacred rhythm.
