Over the next few weeks, real, living, breathing human beings will hold This Sweet Earth in their hands. As a flaming introvert, this is a terrifying thought. This book has been such an intimate companion these past couple years nurtured in the depths of my being.
As I look back over the days when those words poured out on the page, I sometimes wonder “how on earth did I write a book that year?” I wrote this book over the course of one of the hardest years of my life. It was amidst huge vocational shifts, big moves, unexpected stressors, and what felt like a year swirling with conflict. I was carrying so much pain in my body and heart every hour of every day.
Yet somehow, in the tiny cracks, I would scribble a few words onto the page and I don’t think it is an over exaggeration to say that writing this book saved me. Pausing now and then to study the wind in poplars and to listen to my kids marvel over the cicada grounded me back to this wild place to which I belong.
I began the writing from a place of climate dread. Too many hours of doomsday scrolling and reading climate reports articulating how much worse things are than anyone could have predicted. I was afraid for my kids.
But the more I wrote…the more stories poured out…the more I accidently stumbled upon hope. Time and again I was caught off guard by the beauty of this world.
I realized that if I let this grief and rage and anxiety metabolize in my body and rearrange my being, then there was actually a life I loved and longed for amidst the crisis.
I so often hear adults moan about how our children wont have what we have. But the more I lean into what is needed in this moment… the more I realize I don’t want them to have what we had.
I want them to know how to put seeds in the ground, to call the songbirds by name, to depend on community, to be madly in love with the land that holds them, to create local economies, to honor the dead, to work with their hands and the strength of their bodies, to know themselves as creatures, to lay down the addictions of white supremacy, capitalism, nationalism, and instead love this world with everything they’ve got. There is actually an incredibly rich and fabulous life if we lean into the transitions that are required of us in this moment.
Hope. It poured out on every page. Hope nestled in the grief of this time.
I hope that if you open these pages one day soon that you can bring your heart to these pages no matter what you are holding in this moment. And that together we can hang onto hope and beauty and let it guide us in the unknown chapters to come.
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann is the author of This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse. She is director of Kirkridge Retreat Center. She lives with her partner and two kids in the mountains of Bangor, PA.
Lydia Wylie-Kellerman 