Love, Courage, and a Changing Climate

Recently, in conversations about this world’s changing climate, I’ve had people ask “where is your hope?” Here is the honest truth. Hope is a question for me right now. The only answer to this question is courage, and is love. Even if in 50 years, in 20 years, in 2 years everything is not ok, I can love. Even if water becomes, like hope, a question, even if apple trees go extinct and summer is smoke and I become a refugee on this land, I can love.

And what other response in the face of climate catastrophe than to have the courage to love? To love deeper, love wider. To call up my family in BC and chat with them more regularly. To tell that boy I keep daydreaming about how I feel. To text my friends to meet up and then when they get to the bar, put my phone away, be present with them, and love. This capitalist world wants me to be an island, wants to divide me and conquer me. It will not.

So have the audacity to love, especially yourself. Look in the mirror and love the cellulite. Love the tummy that is a part of who you are. Your life on this earth is short. Since we must be talking quality of life now, not quantity, you may as well love yourself. Be content with the way you are. Say out loud, “there is no need for me to be any different. No need to find myself in Thailand, I am here. No need to reinvent myself at H&M or at my local Ford dealership, I am here.”

Have the courage to fight for love, and let it be a love that does not see the boundaries of color, gender, social status, or sexuality. Love those in your community who are marginalized so deeply that you end up searching for ways to bring them out of the margins and into the middle of the page. Love the billionaire so deeply that you fight for him not to be alone in his castle (because he is probably a white man and maybe he is lonely and confused, too, I don’t know). Fight to bring him off his yacht, off his private jet and into the world.

This is nothing new. Uncertainty and instability has always been a factor in life, now we are simply being faced with more of it. But we can rise up, be joyful, and dance in the face of suffering and uncertainty. For in courage is hope. In love is hope. Not hope in this world, but my Christian upbringing tells me it was doomed from the start. Not in corporate assholes or Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. Hope in the day-to-day - in the people that surround me, in the children at the daycare and the students in my class, in my friends and family. Hope in my ability to love what and who is around me, regardless of the future.