A Story of Two Commitments, and a Conclusion About Tenderness

I hated backpacking the first time I did it. It hurt and I didn't understand how anyone considered it fun. I was 13, at a summer camp in Michigan. The next year, I ended up on another trip, was lauded as The Experienced One, and definitely experienced fun. I plunged in completely by 15, spending the whole summer on backpacking or canoe trips with a rustic, no-frills camp in New England.

In the White Mountains, New Hampshire, 1977

So much of what I experienced that particular summer felt unparalleled to me, and pivotal: there was nothing like skimming light-footed across an uneven field of toaster-sized boulders, or the brush of super-quieted humidity on my forearms moments before a thunderclap, or cuddling too hot cocoa while watching the sunset from a cliffside lean-to.

I loved the deep, humanizing bonds of community that formed each trip, yet mountains became more indelibly imprinted as what belonging felt like to me. Wilderness, undisturbed by human interest. I spent more teenage summers in more and bigger mountain terrain, pushing west to the Rockies in Wyoming, and Canada. In my college entrance essay, I emphasized that my keen interest was Environmental Everything.

Summers I still spent backpacking, by then as a trip leader for camps. School years I studied geology in Death Valley, ornithology in Alaska, island biology on Maui, and meteorology everywhere. I cultivated a lifestyle that minimized my own impact on the planet: sweaters on instead of turning heat up, thrift stores not new stores, homemade instead of processed, cross-country skiing not downhill. These habits, values, and practices are still a driving part of how I live. And I still think of myself as an environmentalist.

Yet even in my early 20s, I could tell that knowing the local flora and fauna wasn't going to help old growth forests from being logged. And buying from the bulk food bins with reused containers wouldn't slow oil drilling permits or Appalachian strip mining. At 21, nauseous with nervousness, I walked in the doors of an intimidating year-long upper level college program called Unmasking the Social World. It transformed me. Forty years later, I remain transfixed by the world of us humans: what we see and what we choose not to, how we learn and what we don't learn, how we leverage our perceptions, our joys, our fears, on and against ourselves and each other.

So here I am decades later, educating about oppression and liberation in ways that counter oppression and demonstrate liberation. You've heard what captivates me these days: how we are socially organized by some people mattering, and others mattering less. This commitment fuels what feels like bottomless creativity and a pulsing motivation.

In the Cascade Mountains, Washington, 2024

But what about my environmental commitment? Do I actually have one? It feels...lost. Insubstantial. Fraudulent. Not really a commitment. A promise I didn't keep. It feels reduced to conscious consumerism, like recycling: important to do but in no way effective as substantive, transformative action leading to change. 

Do you see what's happening here? I'm beginning to feel bad about myself. I believe I know why; it's something I learned from my anti-racism work—it's easier to feel bad about myself, to infuse my nervous system with the familiarity of guilt, fear, shame, and doubt, than it is to feel grief. Grief about this planet I love. Grief about the palpable impact of climate change on people's lives (especially people deemed to 'matter less'). Writing this has me in tears...they are new, urgent, puddling. I've allowed myself to grow strong musculature around my grief for the ravages of oppression, but I feel weak and unformed facing my feelings about the natural world.

Why one commitment, and not the other? I have some thoughts about this. For now though, it feels important for me to stay in this tender moment. To honor the first steps I'm taking in this quad-wrenching uphill climb. The other day I went to a Climate Café, designed as an opportunity to acknowledge, settle into, and witness feelings—not actions, not solutions. I feel...a little transformed. I mean, here I am unearthing this other commitment I don't even know if my friends, or any of you, know I have. 

So I'm going to keep offering workshops about liberatory structures, and caucuses about racial identity reflections, and coaching about our role in it all. And I'm going to gently, tenderly, present my heart with opportunities to not just be in mountains, but to feel into their vulnerability, their scars, their diminishment, their resilience, as well as that of their cousins the rivers, deserts, oceans and plains. I can commit to that.

December 2024 Back to Notebook Home

I’m available to facilitate race-based caucuses or affinity groups, white leadership groups, or multi-identity working sessions. Reach out.