Bearing Witness to a Burning World
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
As a society, we have forgotten the sacred rituals of mourning, the practice of bearing witness. Across cultures, grief has always had a place, communal wailing, ceremonial fires, water blessings. There were traditions for moving through sorrow, not around it. Yet modern life has stripped these practices from us. We are told to be strong, to keep going, to push forward. In that rush, we not only abandon grief but also abandon parts of ourselves. This disconnection from our grief extends beyond our personal losses to our relationship with the natural world. The pain we refuse to feel in our bodies mirrors the suffering we ignore in our ecosystems. Both demand our attention, our presence, our willingness to bear witness.
The truth is, we cannot intimately know joy without first embracing its companion: pain. The heart’s capacity to break wide open shattering under the weight of lost hopes, missed moments, and the crushing reality of oppressive systems—is also its capacity to hold profound joy. But joy is not a passive state; it is an active reclamation, a force born from deep engagement with grief, from acknowledging the world as it is and daring to imagine something new.
Grief does not exist in isolation; it echoes through the landscapes around us, reflected in the shifting climate and losses too vast to fully comprehend. Wildfires are raging across the U.S., from Southern California to the Carolinas, as well as in other parts of the world. These fires are more than natural disasters; they are omens of what is to come.
Chris Hedges writes in Fire Weather, “Welcome to the age of the Pyrocene, where cities burn and water does not come out of the hydrants.” This era of unrelenting fire is no accident; it is the inevitable consequence of a world built on extraction, consumption, and a reckless disregard for balance. The fires we are witnessing are not just wildfires but firestorms—cyclonic infernos fueled by petrochemical-laden homes and landscapes drained of water. “We have harnessed the concentrated energy of 300 million years and set it alight,” Hedges warns. “We are addicted to fossil fuels. But it is a suicide pact.”
These wildfires are not simply the result of bad policy or climate inaction—they are the “harbingers of an apocalypse” we have long refused to acknowledge. Hedges describes infernos that do not merely burn forests but incinerate entire neighborhoods, consuming them down to their foundations beneath massive pyrocumulus clouds, the kind usually found over erupting volcanoes. These fires create their own weather systems, generating hurricane-force winds, lightning, and miles-long ember storms.
This is not just nature responding to climate shifts; this is a consequence of our addiction to extraction and excess. Our homes, packed with petrochemicals, are more flammable than the log cabins of the past. Our reliance on fossil fuels has rendered every part of our lives combustible. As Hedges warns, “We ignore the freakish weather patterns and disintegration of the planet, retreating into our electronic hallucinations, pretending the inevitable is not inevitable. This vast cognitive dissonance, fed to us by mass culture, makes us the most self-deluded population in human history. The cost of this self-delusion will be mass death.”
Mourning as a Pathway to Healing
How do we respond to this grief? How do we hold the unbearable truth that we are living in an era of destruction, one that is not approaching but is already here?
The first step is to slow down, to see clearly, to allow ourselves to feel the impact of what is being lost. Mourning is an act of deep engagement with reality. It is a refusal to turn away, a commitment to bearing witness. The grief we carry is not separate from the burning forests, the rising waters, or the polluted air—it is woven into the fabric of our existence. When we allow ourselves to mourn, we begin the process of transformation.
This is an invitation to honor grief. Pain, so often buried, ignored, or turned away from, does not disappear. Instead, it accumulates. It calcifies. It weighs us down. But when we tend to our grief, we create space for release, for transformation. Through my own healing journey, acupuncture has been a lifeline, teaching me the wisdom of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). In TCM, the heart is connected to the fire element, and fire, like grief, must be tended. Left unchecked, fire consumes and destroys. But when nurtured, fire warms, illuminates, and renews. It is a force of creation as much as it is a force of destruction.
Even the fiercest fire has its equalizer: water. Water softens, cools, and soothes. It tempers the blaze and nourishes the ground for new growth. The heart, too, needs this balance. Pain armors the heart, but it is through allowing ourselves to feel that the armor cracks. The heart must break open to breathe, to grieve, to release. Tears, like water, are medicine. They quench the blaze, cool the embers, and prepare the soil for something new. Fire and water. Joy and pain. They are inseparable companions, each holding the other in balance.
In a world that seeks to numb us, to keep us detached and distracted, grief is an act of resistance. To feel deeply is to refuse erasure. To mourn is to acknowledge what has been lost. This act of bearing witness transforms grief into something else, something that allows us to move, to act, to awaken our hearts. When we honor our grief, we re-enter the stream of life. We remember our belonging, our connection to the intricate balance of existence, our shared pain, resilience, and capacity for renewal.
Grief is not meant to be carried alone. Our ancestors knew this. They understood that personal grief and ecological grief are not separate, they are tributaries of the same river. The tears we shed for a loved one and for a burning forest come from the same wellspring of care. They keened together, sang together, wept together. We must find our way back to each other in these moments of rupture. So I ask: How often do you tend to your own fire? When was the last time you let your tears flow freely, offering them as medicine to your aching heart? What would it mean to create space in your life for regular grieving? How might your capacity for joy expand if you welcomed your pain as a teacher?"
Tending the Sacred Fire: An Invitation to Honor Grief
"The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe." — Joanna Macy
If you feel called, take a moment to tend to your grief today:
Light a candle. Breathe deeply. Feel what your body is holding.
Slow down and honor the loss your heart is carrying.
Create a moment of stillness and remembrance.
Write, create art, or craft poetry to express what words alone cannot contain.
Build a grief altar as an act of remembrance. Let it hold symbols of what has been lost—photos, stones, leaves, or offerings that honor the Earth and those who have been impacted by climate catastrophe and loss in the world. Use it as a space to mourn the destruction of the planet, to process eco-grief, and to cultivate a vision of renewal.
Gather in community, share stories, and hold space for one another.
Grief is a portal. When we allow ourselves to step through it, we find that joy is waiting on the other side not in spite of our sorrow, but because of it. This world is on fire. But fire is not only destruction; it is also transformation. If we tend to our grief with care through ritual, remembrance, and collective healing, we create space for renewal. Just as fire clears the old to make way for new growth, grieving allows us to shed what has been lost while honoring what remains. This tending of grief is what leads us back to ourselves, to one another, and to the work of building a more just and loving world. That is the fire that walks us home.