This Sweet Earth

Praise for This Sweet Earth

“This Sweet Earth is a much-needed book for this moment. This book comes alongside anyone with children in their lives who wants to face our current climate challenges with clear eyes and engaged hands, while also resting in the magic and wonder of this astoundingly beautiful earth.”

—Daneen Akers, author of Holy Troublemakers and Unconventional Saints and Dear Mama God

“When I first held my daughter all those years ago, pressing her tender pink skin against my tear-soaked face, I promised her that I would make a home for her. In retrospect, I lied: today, ‘home’ is no longer at home, and belonging is in crisis. The earth burns with the fires of its exhaustion, burdened by the weight of ‘the human.’

With this precious pollination song, this wind-swept map-book, Lydia Wylie-Kellermann invites us to the fugitive vocation of wandering with our children—reminding us that it is in radical accompaniment that we might catch a glimpse of what they’ve always known, what my daughter seems to know now: that endings are strewn with stranger worlds, and the gift of our journeys lies not in arriving, but in the traveling together.

Read this book. And take your earthly leave for the awe tucked in the ordinary.”

—Báyò Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home

“Reading This Sweet Earth made me hold my breath, then release it in a slow sigh of relief as my fears for the future were named openly. In this truthful and intimate meditation, Wylie-Kellerman leads us through grief and lament into a space of imagining how—whatever comes—we might choose to nurture communities of reciprocity where we, are and learn to thrive with less. This book left me feeling both calmer and braver, conscious that there is an alternative to the terrifying prospect of hunkering down behind walls and hoarding possessions. I am grateful for this different kind of hope.”

—Rose Marie Berger, author of Bending the Arch: Poems and senior editor at Sojourners magazine

“Lydia Wylie-Kellermann invites us to pilgrimage and prayer walk, toddler walk and tween race, to stand in silent reverence and thunder like the holy prophets as we work to protect a world that is fragile, fractured, and still so fecund! Read this book aloud with friends and build community; share it with the kids in your life to start to see nature as they see her; read quietly to yourself, and your tears will cleanse, challenge, and change you. There is rich wisdom here,

and wild reverence, and solemn joy. You will want to embroider these words onto fine linen, draw them in mandalas, ink them on your flesh, and magic-marker them onto big signs for the next protest!”

—Frida Berrigan, author of It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood

“This is no ordinary run-of-the-mill book on the environment. It is rather the wise, personal, up-close pondering by a woman of courage and honesty. Lydia Wylie-Kellerman says she writes as ‘an ordinary mom.’ Her kids are all over this book, asking, noticing, wondering. She takes time as a mom to consider both the majesty of creation and the reality of death. But she is at the same time a poet. The book teems with her poetry whereby she goes beneath our common clichés to new ways of truth-telling. She does not flinch from the hard stuff. She has been an activist all her life. It is her family legacy, and she lives it out with wisdom and patience.

This book is just right for community sharing, reflection, and worship—and eventually action. We may be grateful to this mom who has mobilized her life’s work for this moment.”

—Walter Brueggemann, author of many books including The Prophetic Imagination and William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary

“Reading Lydia Wylie-Kellermann’s writing often makes me weep. I feel a familiar longing for a world of tenderness, sacredness, and belonging that tugs at my heart and reminds me of my deep kinship with the world. While I joyfully welcome new nieces, nephews, and young friends into my life in these increasingly uncertain times, I am so grateful to have Lydia’s questions, stories, and grounded example of how to walk forward with intention, curiosity, and hope.”

—Olly Costello, artist

“When it comes to climate change, we’re often reminded of the awful burden human life puts on our planet, and with that can come a real misanthropy. But This Sweet Earth offers stories and examples of how, even in moments of catastrophe, we can continue living together honestly and lovingly as part of creation. In a moment of catastrophe and a barrage of bad news, writing like Lydia’s is an act of resistance, reminding us that, yes, another world is possible.”

—Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico, hosts of The Magnificast

“This Sweet Earth is a gentle love letter to future generations. Lydia Wylie-Kellerman takes a clear-eyed look at the current and coming impacts of global climate change and finds hope in the ordinary: neighborhood-scale mutuality, the fierce example of communities of color that have survived apocalypse already, and the sweet love and wonder of sweaty-headed boys for pet rabbits, bones found in the forest, and garden tomatoes.”

—Laurel Dykstra, climate justice activist and author of Wildlife Congregations: A Priest’s Year of Gaggles, Colonies and Murders by the Salish Sea

“This Sweet Earth is a banquet of hope and delight served on weighty platters of truth. With humor and poignancy, in poetry and prayer, through the voices of her children and her ancestors, Lydia Wylie-Kellermann graciously invites us all to the table. I highly recommend

taking a seat and savoring her eloquent observations, her exquisite celebrations of simplicity and creativity, and her compelling honesty about parenting in an age of climate collapse.”

—Joyce Hollyday, author of Pillar of Fire

“This Sweet Earth is exactly the book we need in this time of frightening changes in the world around us. Anchored in hope rather than despair, it heartens and inspires while remaining rooted in honesty and practicality. In elegant prose, Lydia Wylie-Kellerman turns her family’s experiences into valuable lessons in nurturing community, exploring and preserving the natural world, and letting children lead as much as follow as we journey toward an uncertain future.”

—Michael N. McGregor, author of Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax

“The deep tension between environmental despair and joy in the still-lovely-if-tattered creation we inhabit needs to be a source of energy for our efforts on its behalf. This account summons our best angels to the fore!”

—Bill McKibben, author of The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation

“Weaving poetry, prose, and prayer, Lydia Wylie-Kellermann inspires us by recounting stories of her childhood and that of her two sons, refusing to turn away from the pain of our world. Lydia’s upbringing in a community of faith and resistance provides the foundation for her children to grow up knowing that they are not separate from all of creation. Grounded in gratitude, she dares to tell the truth as she grieves with her sons the losses brought by the environmental crisis and helps them face even the possibility of near human extinction. In This Sweet Earth, Wylie-Kellermann invites us to open to our grief and outrage as we raise our children in the time of collapse, knowing that as we suffer with a suffering world, we find the strength and resilience to act on behalf of Earth.”

—Anne Symens-Bucher, co-founder, Canticle Farm, Oakland, California

“Beautifully written and with poetry sprinkled throughout, This Sweet Earth weaves family stories, social analysis, and practical suggestions to all interested in preparing ourselves and our young people for this time of climate change. Much appreciation to author Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, who brings her humor, honesty, integrity, history, and earnestness, and calls all into hope, community, and the possibility for wholeness and repair in trying times.”

—Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and editor of We Cry Justice

“Kids deserve the truth. Kids deserve the power to shape the way we live. Lydia Wylie-Kellermann helps us parents—who want more than anything to tell our kids, ‘Everything is going to be okay,’ when we know it won’t—learn how to steer our kids toward light and life and the helpers, while resisting the systems built on greed. All while regulating our anxieties so they don’t exacerbate our children’s. Go get this important book.”

—Cindy Wang Brandt, author of Parenting Forward and You Are Revolutionary

“Parenting through this climate crisis at times feels like a hopeless proposition. The grief, anger, and uncertainty can be overwhelming. What This Sweet Earth offers is permission to feel all of those emotions while giving a glimpse at what parenting can look like through the eyes of

someone longing for a more just world. The moving reflections and prayers come through the much-needed voice of a poet, reminding us that the beauty of this world is worth fighting for.”

—Derrick Weston, theological education and training coordinator for Creation Justice Ministries, and coauthor of The Just Kitchen: Invitations to Sustainability, Cooking, Connection, and Celebration

“Lydia Wylie-Kellerman loves children—hers, mine, and yours. How else could such a loving and wisdom-filled book be written with such compassion and skill? This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse is so desperately needed right now. Read it. Gift it to parents and grandparents and everyone who needs hope during this time of despair. This book is hope for our world and for the next seven generations!”

—Randy Woodley, author of Becoming Rooted and co-sustainer Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice

“How do we honor the lives and the words of our children? That is one graceful effort of This Sweet Earth. And in a strange likewise, it is the effort of this endorsement. Here is a beautiful book, a conversation between generations in a moment of earthly crisis. I am repeatedly astonished by the wise voices of my own grandchildren, never mind their mothers. I find myself herein (as I pray you might also). Even more, I see the parenting gifts of Lydia’s mother, Jeanie Wylie, a writer whose clean and vivid prose have also been passed down. This Sweet Earth is an act of love. Collected like heirloom seed, scattered in reckless hope, rooted in warmed earth, and now harvested, fruit for the sharing. Taste and see.”

—Bill Wylie-Kellermann, author of Celebrant’s Flame: Daniel Berrigan in Memory and Reflection and Principalities in Particular: A Practical Theology of the Powers That Be