How Do We Do This?

Loving a vanishing world

Journal: 27 July, 2025, morning.

This is from Orion Magazine, a favorite of mine. In this essay, writer Pam Houston asks “What does it mean to love another person in a dying world?” To this I add “What does it mean to love this vanishing world I’ve known all my life, even as it vanishes? What does it mean to love our children and grandchildren, knowing with utter sadness what we are leaving them? How can we love to the very end?”

How can we not?

The essay, excerpted:

Sometimes, when I lie in bed at the ranch, the Milky Way bright outside the bedroom window, my head on Mike’s chest, listening to his heartbeat, I think, okay, let it end now . . . now . . . now . . . I am where I belong and I am ready. But not one of us is going to get out of here that easy; none of us is going to get out without bearing witness to suffering on a scale that this decade’s fires and floods are only beginning to reveal.

Who will be the last humans on Earth? How many will survive the climate-driven wars, the drought, storms, fires and floods, death of the bees, and the end of agriculture? What will those people have learned about love? What will they have learned about greed and cooperation?

One thing I do know is that as our suffering gets greater, so must our love. Not just me and Mike, not just one for another,

but all of us, for all of us, and for Earth in distress. What is left for us is to walk into the devastation awake and full of compassion.

We are going to have to love fiercely, and fervently, all the way to the end, with nothing to protect us but our empathy, our sensitivity, our mercy, and our courage. Love at the end of the world must not be a diminished love, but one of endless expansion.

Outside the bedroom window, the stars sparkle their near infinity and in that too is respite.

“What’s the name of that one again?” comes Mike’s sleepy voice in my ear.

“That’s the Pleiades,” I said, “the seven sisters. Orion was in love with all of them. See how he’s chasing them across the sky?”

“I don’t need seven sisters,” Mike says, and I tell him I am glad to hear it.

“I need you,” he says, “for exactly as many days as we have left.”

#journalingalife