When I allowed my heart to break open

When I first encountered Joanna Macy’s work, I was already walking alongside disaster-impacted communities, supporting people through loss and change, and helping to build grief literacy. I thought I understood grief.

But when I truly allowed the pain I felt for the world to come in — the deeper, collective grief beneath the stories I was hearing and had experienced myself— the tears came.
So many tears.

I remembered the drought — the hunger and thirst of so many species, gathering around what remained of a small creek that had once been full of life: eels, birds, movement, song. It lasted for years.

I remembered the fires. I cried for the bush we had lost on the land on which I live. I remembered the stillness that followed — a silence I had never experienced before. No birds. No insects. No distant hopping of wallabies, no goannas climbing trees as they heard me approach.
There was no colour. Only black earth beneath a brown, smoky sky that lingered for weeks.

The barren ground was marked with footprints shaped like trees — trees that had fallen as the fire came through, burning so fast they turned to white ash in seconds.

I remembered the floods — the destructive force washing entire ecosystems away.

I cried for the people who lost everything they owned. For communities displaced, knowing they would never be as they were before.

And alongside the sadness, anger arose — anger at the way we as humans had been living, in disregard of the earth, whilst knowing it was not sustainable. And anger at the loss of a future for our children and grandchildren, a future where they might only hear stories of species they will never see.

I let it all come — the grief, the loss, the sadness, the anger, the frustration — even when it was uncomfortable, even when every part of me wanted to turn away. I sat with it, uncomfortable at first, learning over time to stay without fixing, judging, or pushing it aside. And slowly, something began to shift deep within me.

The grief did not disappear — it softened into love, care. The anger transformed into a drive to do something, to act.

I began to recognise that my deep pain and sorrow were inseparable from my deep love for nature. That the land I feel so connected to is not something separate from me, but a part of who I am. And from that love came an invitation. I felt nature’s call to stand up. To act. To speak and live on her behalf. And it was from this place, that my Active Hope in a Changing Climate workshops were born.