Drafting a Workbook for Change

Normally at this time of year, I’d be repainting the booth and setting up the season’s first Climate Anxiety Counseling shifts. COVID-19 makes it unsafe to talk to multiple people face to face at close range, so I won’t be rolling out the booth this season.But our climate anxieties haven’t gone away and the systems that drive climate change and distribute its effects unequally–environmental racism, extraction, capitalism, colonization–are also worsening, and distributing unequally, the effects of COVID-19. It is a good time, I think, to adapt our minds, feelings & relationships to the kind of action that climate change and other, related crises require of us, and I’ve started developing a workbook of ways to do that.

The questions and practices in this workbook are to help us imagine and practice living in, with, and through the changes that climate change is bringing to our lives, and to become who we need to be to meet them together. The questions are to expand our sense of what’s happening, how we’re reacting, and what’s possible. The practices are to—well, practice—thinking, feeling and acting in ways that may benefit us differently than the ways we’re used to.

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting exercises that have already been tested–either by me with a group of people I’m part of, or by a group of people that doesn’t include me–as well as some explanation of how I’m putting them together and some guidelines for trying them out yourself. If you’re interested in trying an exercise with a group you’re already part of, write to me at my gmail address, publiclycomplex, or comment here with your interest, your questions, and a way to get in touch with you. I will be grateful for your help in making this workbook more usable and useful.

IMAGE: Photo of flat land with water, grass and a few trees. A white woman with glasses and long dark hair is standing in the foreground on cracked, dry mud, taking notes on a piece of paper. Photo is by Dezaraye Bagalayos.