Eco-Grief: Listening to a Burning Forest

I have long felt attuned to and aligned with the natural world. This awareness has lived in me for as long as I can remember.

Little me enjoying Summertime in the forest

As a child, I carried a quiet but persistent grief, a kind of premature eco-grief - a deep and unnameable knowing. On drives to my family’s cabin, I would look out the window at the towering trees with tears in my eyes. I didn’t yet have the language for it, but I knew something wasn’t right. I sensed that the way we were living was not in harmony with the natural world, and that these forests, so vast, so alive, were not safe.

I remember feeling so small in their presence. I loved them, and I wanted to protect them. But what could I do?

That forest has now been devastated by wildfires. In places, it looks as though bombs have gone off. The hills where I grew up sledding, where I snowshoed nine months pregnant with my first son, where I now take my own children to play in the snow, once abundant with redwoods, are now scattered with charred, skeletal trunks. Tall, blackened remnants of what once was.

My son and the skeletal remains of the forest.

The last time we drove through those mountains, my children sat quietly in the backseat. They spoke about how sad they felt that they never knew the forest as it had been, that they may never see it restored in their lifetime - if it returns at all.

This is eco-grief.

And I felt it come full circle in that moment. The surreal weight of witnessing the very devastation I had somehow anticipated as a child, now reflected back through the eyes of my own children.

This thread of care for the Earth has woven itself through my life in many forms. As a college freshman, I was deeply troubled by the rise of SUVs, especially Hummers, which were popular at the time. It almost feels quaint now, but the concern was real. When assigned a group persuasive essay in an English class, I convinced my group to write about the environmental impact of SUVs even though many of them drove one.

Over the years, this care has taken shape in different expressions. I organized a large-scale community clothing swap and series of workshops called Swap-O-Rama-Rama in San Luis Obispo, focused on upcycling and reducing textile waste back in the early 2000s. For a year, I committed to buying only secondhand clothing, transforming discarded materials into something meaningful through creativity.

I worked for a solar company. I attempted to build a business centered on reducing waste in the event industry through reusable and upcycled decor. I taught environmentally aligned crafts like natural dyeing. Even my time as a Spanish teacher connects back to this thread - my love for this planet is inseparable from my desire to connect with other cultures, lands, and ways of being.

And then there is tea.

When tea entered my life, I didn’t yet understand that it would become the deepest expression of this same calling. I didn’t consciously realize how profoundly it is rooted in relationship with the natural world. But tea has had a way of weaving together all the threads I'd been quietly carrying.

Tea is, of course, a plant - an ecological being. But beyond that, its spiritual roots are intertwined with one of the world’s oldest eco-philosophies: Taoism. When I began studying it, something in me recognized it immediately. It felt like coming home to something I had always known but never been taught how to articulate.

Through tea, I have come to understand that the ancient Taoists saw the natural world not as separate from us, but as the very expression of the Tao itself. Tea was not just a beverage, but a portal, a way of entering into right relationship with the rhythms of life. A practice of listening, of aligning, of remembering.

And this is where I find myself now. Standing at the intersection of grief and devotion. Carrying both the sorrow of what is being lost and the deep love that insists on tending to what remains. I feel called to become a kind of caregiver, not only for the earth, but for the human hearts that are struggling to stay open in the face of its unraveling. To sit with eco-grief, not as something to fix or bypass, but as something sacred. Something that reveals the depth of our belonging.

Through tea, I want to create spaces where people can slow down enough to feel again. To reconnect with the natural world - not as an abstract idea, but as something alive within and around them. To remember that we are not separate from what is hurting. And from that place of reconnection, to begin asking:

What is mine to tend? What is my right relationship to this moment? What small, real actions can I take from a place of love rather than fear?

My intention is to continue deepening this path. I want to become an eco-chaplain in practice and in presence. To hold space for grief, yes, but also for reverence, for beauty, for reciprocity. Because this planet is not only dying - it is also still living, still speaking, still offering itself to us. And I want to listen. And help others listen, too.

But I don’t want to stop there. Tea has taught me that listening is only the beginning. That healing ourselves in isolation is incomplete, perhaps even futile, if we are not also tending to the world that holds us. We cannot separate our own well-being from the well-being of the earth. So alongside listening, I feel a call to act. To translate reverence into responsibility.To let grief become a catalyst rather than a weight. To ask not only how we feel, but what we are willing to do.

My hope is to continue creating spaces where this connection becomes undeniable, where people can both feel deeply and be moved into right action, however small, however local, however imperfect. Because the tea is always showing us: nothing exists in isolation. Everything is in relationship. And if we are to heal, it must be together -

with the earth, not apart from it.