How to Frolick When the World Is Melting

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LISTENING: to the leaf blower outside my window
FEELING: so many things but mostly exhaustion
SEEING: my goat plushie taunt me

I have the worst FOMO in the world after last weekend's Daisy Chain Fields Music Festival by Olivia Rodrigo. Why don't I live in California? Sigh.

The one-day event, which featured some personal favorites like Chappell Roan and Maria Zardoya, honored women and girls whose rights are being stripped at this very moment by the insidious Trump administration. Rodrigo raised $20 million for various organizations, including the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Black Mamas Matter Alliance.

I interviewed Ai-Jen Poo, co-founder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, back in 2021 for Atmos. For those of us who work in climate through an intersectional lens, we understand how vulnerable women, girls, femmes, and dolls are to the crisis unfolding before our eyes. In California, when wildfires rage, the nannies and cleaning ladies are often the ones left behind, asked to keep watch over their clients' homes. They carry the burden — because their livelihoods depend on it — but also because our society doesn't value their lives equally to the lives of the wealthy families who employ them and do evacuate.

Poo told me years ago:

If you think about our economy, our society, and the way they function, there are these two invisible undervalued resources that we’ve always taken for granted: the planet’s natural resources and the work of women when it comes to care. We’ve never valued or protected those resources and those contributions. We’ve designed our entire economic framework to be able to take those resources for granted. That has proven to be not only unsustainable but incredibly dangerous.

How inspiring for a musician (and her fans and peers) to contribute to an organization with this type of clarity. I needed the little bursts of joy I've felt from watching the festival on my phone. I probably sound like a broken record, but I've been in a deep state of grieving lately.

The summers of my girlhood seem to be gone. I feel it in my bones whenever I step out into the sticky heat. Or when the thunder crashes overhead in unfamiliar, strange drones. To make matters worse, we've lost some real icons over the last week. Feministic matriarch Gloria died the day I'm writing this. Farmer and poet Wendell Berry died Monday. They were both 92.

And I'm still reeling from the flash flood that engulfed the valley villages along the Nepal-Tibet border last week after a glacier collapsed. I still can't bring myself to dive deep into that coverage. Something about how unfair it all is breaks something in me. These people are not the ones with mega mansions and gas-guzzling trucks driving the fossil fuel pollution that's melting our planet. Nepal has contributed less than 0.1 percent of the world's historic greenhouse gas emissions.

I'm sad, and I'm angry, but I am also craving every ounce of joy. I feel starved for it — for every minute I can scream on my karaoke machine with my nieces. For every absurd laugh attack with my sister. For every sweet hug from my mom, who's been away for weeks. For Zoom catch-ups with my long-distance besties. For girlhood, the purest source of delight these days.

I imagine that all these feelings — grief, rage, glee — are exactly what Daisy Chain Fields embodied. I wanted to hear about it from the source, so I reached out to Leah Thomas, a self-described green girl and author whose book "Earth as Mother" is publishing next year. She danced her heart out in Irvine (I promise I'm not jealous) as did a few other climate girlies. She has the tea.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

YESSENIA FUNES
Firstly, so jealous that you got to go to Daisy Chain. It looked so incredible, and I was really delighted to see you and a few other climate activists there. Why was it important for climate girlies to be at a music festival like Daisy Chain, especially with its focus on women's rights?

LEAH THOMAS
I woke up at 5 a.m. to wait in the digital line. I was crashing out trying to get these tickets because I had heard about the Lilith Fair that Daisy Chain was inspired by. I didn't have a brand send me. It was so dope — the first all-women's music festival. And I knew I needed to be there.

It just feels like there's another wave of feminism that's growing and brewing, including ecofeminism. And I don't say that just because my next book is about ecofeminism, but I think it was important for climate girlies to be there because, yeah, our work is inherently intersectional. So many women are on the frontlines of the climate fight. There are so many incredible climate educators, influencers, academics, etc. I also saw the women who run the feminist account, and they often post environmental stuff. So yeah, it was important for us to be there and experience a moment of joy and just jump around to Doechii and Chappell Roan and Stevie Nicks and have that very girl moment. I felt safe.

I was like, "Oh my God, Emma Watson is right in front of me just like jumping and going crazy." And everyone's just like shaking their bodies. We just needed a moment of joy for sure.

YESSENIA
How do you hold space for joy and grief and climate anxiety all at the same time? What is it that gets you through the heaviness of the work that we do?

LEAH
There's no shortage of horrible news. And even my personal platform has completely changed in the last year. Now, I mostly post about radical imagination and solutions to problems or even just fun animal and ecology facts. Because I know the people who are following me are also probably following people who are sharing very devastating climate information every single day.

"When you feel safe enough, that's when you can imagine better systems. And that's where you can heal and learn about community resilience and build a strong community and take action."

There's this concept called thrutopia that I really like and have been sitting on lately. Instead of utopia, it's thrutopia. We're not either utopia or dystopia. It's about how you get from point A to B. Maybe that's what we're experiencing right now. We're just in this weird liminal space. And what do you do in that liminal space between when things need to change and when they actually change? And a lot of that is actually just creating the conditions for safety. And when you feel safe enough, that's when you can imagine better systems. And that's where you can heal and learn about community resilience and build a strong community and take action.

That's my theory of change right now. Is it right? I have no idea. But I think that's just what I have to do to stay sane, to be completely honest.

YESSENIA
That's so cool. I've never heard of that! For my final question, with all that in mind: Music helps me process my emotions. It helps me re-energize when I'm feeling low. What song is on repeat for you since the festival?

LEAH
There's a song called "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind" by Chet Atkins and Dolly Parton.

YESSENIA
Right on. Any final thoughts to share with readers?

LEAH
I just want people to not feel guilty about finding joy in a world like this. Things are really awful, and some forms of activism believe we have to suffer through it to prove yourself to the cause. And it's just not healthy or sustainable. If the world's on fire, we still have to find moments of joy when we can. 🌀

Currently Reading

In response to the tragedy in Nepal-Tibet, Emily Atkins brings back one of my favorite pieces she's written. What can you do? The answer is still anything.

More on this news, Azman Usmani writes about the call for climate reparations in Nepal after the devastating floods. Plus some eye-opening charts. For Bloomberg: "Nepal must hold its head high internationally and turn this into a matter of justice."

Jenae Barnes writes about power returning to the predominantly Black city of Gary, Indiana, for The Atlantic.

The talented Alejandra Borunda just launched an impressive package at NPR about how the U.S. is seriously undercounting extreme heat deaths. Read the first story here. She's got a deep dive into one Arizona family's loss here.

Lyric Aquino writes for Underscore Native News about how Twilight fans have raised funds to help the Quileute Tribe in Washington move to higher ground amid sea level rise and coastal erosion. I am obsessed with this story. Time to binge Twilight again.

Poetry

HOW TO FROLICK WHEN THE WORLD IS MELTING
a glacier collapsed
and a river roared, deadly
graves of rock and ice

so I cry, I must
and I dance — I must, I must
I feel it all, here

in my heart and soul
in my quivering fingers
that seek a safe hand

what about the ones
buried beneath mud and blood
fingers outstretched, still

the world is melting
and I am haunted by ghosts
I have never met

how do I free them?
how do I escape the grief?
I run and frolic

through the daisy fields
where everything is good and
the sun is still mild

I kiss my nephew
for love is the antidote
to endless despair

I can conjure joy
all I need are the trees and
the fruits that they bear

-ylf-

- Yessenia x