Your Heart is Always Breaking and Mending

Let’s talk about hope.

(Well, folks. I was actually going to talk about a novella focused on the intersections of imperialism and ecocide. But then I read the room and thought we all needed a little pick-me -up this week.)

There was a recent post on my LinkedIn from an environmental professional about the role of hope in environmental progress. The comments enraged me. Summary: we don’t need hope, apparently! After years of working in environmental NGOs, I know I shouldn’t be surprised when privilege becomes hyper-visble. It’s the rot consuming white American environmentalism from the inside out. But as someone living in a Sacrifice Zone and fighting for my home, I know that hope is far from luxury.

“Power makes you lazy...while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, don't have to know about, and don't have to do.”

- David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

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Warring with despair is merely my everyday existence. Every instant I must navigate the complicated, long-term health impacts from the toxic mold exposure in my under-resourced elementary school and all the other compounding impacts from living in a Sacrifice Zone. My community must fight our own local officials to not have the water stolen right from under our feet by the future-largest water bottling facility in the world. We have to fight to save homes in the way of electrical transmission lines running from re-opened coal plants to AI data centers making wealthy municipalities and Silicon Valley billions. And my local climate lobbying group is lobbying for a permitting reform bill that will make projects like this easier to push down communities’ throats. And this week in particular, the tension in the country is at a breaking point - we wait to hear if we can continue to have basic societal structures like democracy and bodily autonomy and racial equity.

If you are despairing right now, you are probably paying attention.

But, when everything is a battle, when you must war with the very people who are supposed to represent you, when you must contend with narratives that dispose of your entire region and label you epithets by association, by Zeus, you need a little hope to get you through the day.

Where do I get my hope? Community. I make fire cider with family and friends. I learn to grow oyster mushrooms (I call my fungal spore colony Fred. Say hi, Fred!). I learn about migrating saw-whets. I send in public comments and attend a community meeting to help fight a water bottling facility. I plant native trees and imagine one day lying beneath their shade.

I also get hope from imagining the beautiful futures that we could have in my community, if folks believed in our tremendous imaginative capacity. A future where clean air and ample water aren’t a radical idea but are protected in their own right as legal persons. A future where the health of every person and creature is enshrined in how we farm and care for our ecosystems. A future where science and folklore go hand-in-hand.

This is the radical hope that keeps me going - that a better world is possible. It’s right here already. In how we treat our neighbors. In how we eat. In how we heal and clean our communities. An imaginative belief in my own community is an antidote to the insanity of our times. And community is the very practice of radical hope that will build the worlds we want to live in.

There is such beautiful possibility in this world. Can you feel it? It’s right here, just a heartbeat away from now. And it is worth fighting for.

Stay safe this week, y’all. See you on the other side.

Something hidden

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAll the old trees in the park are dying.
They cut up the trunks and use them
For benches or bowls or some other useful thing,
But there’s a hole where they should be.
A too-brightness,
A cavity.

I know
I know
I know you don’t want to keep going.
I know you want the pain to go away.
Your mind is whirling.
Your joints ache.
Your heart is always breaking
And mended in such ways that the pain never goes away.

And yet
And yet
The sky is a jeweled radiance
That envelops you in the hope of other horizons.
The leaves cry out in wonder,
A menagerie rustling and glimmering
Like emblazoned ocean waves.
The crickets sing in the tall grasses
swaying to the tune of another summer.

In the hedge forest at the edge of the park
An old tree still stands,
Natural, I think,
Not planted by human hands.
Half of it -
A third maybe -
Has broken off
and fallen over.

And yet
And yet
Part of the tree stands encircled
By a rapt audience of golden-haired saplings.
The too-hot October sun sets
And gilds all the forest
In a golden fae haze,
And you can believe
For just a moment,
Just a terribly short moment
That there is a better world hidden
In the eaves of a dying one,
And the un-making and making of it
Might just save us
You, most of all.

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from Nichole Amber Moss filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.