In Laura Schmidt, Aimee Lewis Reau and Chelsie Rivera’s book How to Live in a Chaotic Climate. There are ten steps to work through climate anxiety, grief and connect with meaningful purpose and action. I used this book as the textbook for a seminar on ecological grief and radical hope in the Spring term of 2024. The steps are:

1. Accept the Severity of the Predicament
2. Be with Uncertainty
3. Honor My Mortality and the Mortality of All
4. Do Inner Work
5. Develop Awareness of Biases and Perception
6. Practice Gratitude, Seek Beauty, and Create Connections
7. Take Breaks and Rest
8. Grieve the Harm I Have Caused
9. Show Up
10. Reinvest in Meaningful Efforts

The book is a wonderful framework for working with difficult feelings. And the course went well. At the end of the course as I thought about how I would rap it up, the Irish spiritual teacher John O’Donohue came to mind. John loved to write blessings, which in a word are not overtly religious though they often are. They come from the Latin Bene, to will the good for someone. We need more blessings in our lives. What a powerful way to express our goodwill for family, friends and loved ones. So here are ten Blessings related to the ten steps of the book:

1. May your acceptance of the severity of the predicament deepen your care for the preciousness of life.
2. May your encounter with uncertainty solidify your certainty that life is worth fighting for.
3. When you honor your mortality, remember the softness of it too.
4. When you do inner work, remember that it is not just work, but exploration.
5. As you compost the messiness of biases, prejudices and perceptions may it also germinate seeds of self-compassion.
6. May you be grateful for something every hour, seek beauty every day, and create connections that last a lifetime.
7. May your radicalization include taking breaks and deep rest.
8. When you grieve the harm you have caused, let that grief point you toward that which is still resisting destruction by the dominant system.
9. When you show up, show up with everything you’ve got: love, fear, excitement, despair, joy, anger, optimism, rage, and active hope.
10. And, lastly, whenever you harvest a bounty of blessings from your life, reinvest it into meaningful efforts so that at the end of your life you can say that you fought hard for all we can save.