What the smoke reveals

How wildfire smoke cuts through the myth of separateness and reveals the true nature of grief

I just got home to my mountain abode after a few weeks away when the notification came through my phone – nearby wildfire reported. Most other years, I’m on high alert during this season. But this year, after such a snowy winter, and then a hurricane that dumped so much rain here a month ago, I’d let my guard down.

The anxiety hits me immediately. I start looking to the sky to see if there’s any presence of smoke. I refresh the Watch Duty app every few minutes, anxiously tracking every movement, my mind wandering to worst case scenarios, evacuation warnings, an announcement from Riverside Co CalFIRE, etc. As they do so often, local fire personnel manage to put it out it before it can spread much — for their labor, I am so grateful. For they tend again and again to a mess of our own making.

I moved here after the last major fire in 2018, where flames threatened the town's very edges, leaving less than an hour for evacuation. This place has always been prone to fires, exacerbated by a rapidly warming region and extreme weather patterns caused by CO2 emissions. Increasingly, many of us have been thinking about and fearing for fire-prone places like California mountain towns, and for good reason. But a new reality has started to sink in for people across the country that the danger is not just where the flames are, but also wherever the smoke may travel.

Smoke knows no borders; it travels far and wide, causing severe health issues for those exposed to it. Fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5, infiltrates our lungs, leading to illnesses, shortness of breath, and worsening heart disease and asthma. Though it’s only beginning to be studied, the mental and emotional impacts are equally harmful, from fear of safety and going outside to the fear of the end of the world. And per usual, those who are the most vulnerable, most at risk, and least provided safe shelter bear the worst impacts.

Though amidst the pain and suffering, I find a strange appreciation for what the smoke reveals. The smoke makes so clear (oooh) something that many of us have such a hard time with — that everything is interconnected.

The untamable travels of wildfire smoke remind us that there is no separateness. That borders are just ideas backed by human-scale infrastructure. That failing policies in one place yield crises in other places. That loss, all loss, is so connected. That we’re all part of each and every loss that’s happening on earth. That we are so not alone.

Grief is like the wildfire smoke – you may think you’ve shielded yourself from the flames, but the smoke will find you. It will move in thick, it will change directions, and eventually it will clear. Even after the fire is extinguished, the smoke doesn’t immediately go away. The residuals of loss linger and spread, with no guarantee of exactly where it will lead – just wherever the winds may take it. Until the land is healed, there will be more and worsening fires. Will we ignore these as merely bad news, or will we allow ourselves process the loss we keep perpetuating, and invite others to join in grief rituals for an increasingly unstable climate and process towards repair?

Like the smoke, grief keeps the elements moving. It allows for regeneration, new growth, and more light on the other side (ex. this fascinating recent research on wildfire smoke increasing overall photosynthesis). It’s not the west coasts’s fire or the east’s fire - it’s all our fire. The only way we can put it out is together.

photo by Alannah Campion, 2022

Undoing masculinity's woes with Pride

Happy Pride Month, dear ones.

This year especially, I'm finding it impossible not to think about what's standing in the way of queer liberation and LGBTQIA+ acceptance. In some sense, we've come so far. But I'd argue that to truly honor pride month (just as to really look at effective workplaces, healthy relationships, climate policy, you name it), we need to examine masculinity and call some of its functions into question.

The recent protests against the LA Dodgers' Pride Night is a glaring example. Thousands took to the streets and internet against the Dodgers for honoring (then rescinding, then apologizing and re-inviting) the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a network of community service volunteers who since the 1970s have fought for inclusion adorned in nun-like drag. LA Archbishop José Gomez used that day's Mass to fan flames of hate against the Sisters, and many on social media accused the Dodgers of “making a mockery of God and Jesus.” The reason for targeting the Sisters is not about the work they do — many ordained nuns have come out in support, or at least recognition, of the Sisters' meaningful practice. Plus plenty of organizations have similar mission-driven offerings without drawing this outsized ire.

Instead, Archbishop Gomez and others' real fear here is anything that challenges equating God and religious practices with masculinity. This mirrors the broader trend on the political right that portrays makeup, wigs, playful clothing, and femme presentation as amoral. Wielded in this way, masculinity becomes a weapon – a tool used for exclusion and avoidance, where anything that threatens power and order is cast as feminine (and thus kept narrowed and controlled).

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

While I assume you, reader, reject such harmful rhetoric, it’s worth us all looking at what masculinity means to us, and how do we use it. After all, those who target the Dodgers, Bud Light, and Pride merchandise are hardly the only contributors to a masculinity that excludes, avoids, and subordinates. Masculinity shows up this way even within the LGBTQ+ community. Personally, I often struggle in gay male spaces and on dating apps, where appearing and performing masculine can still reign supreme. On Netflix’s lesbian dating debacle The Ultimatum: Queer Love, several cast members hide behind masculinity to avoid addressing trauma or allow it to justify their explosive anger.

Ciara Cremin explores this topic extensively in her academic book The Future is Feminine, highlighting that “when tenderness, empathy, sensuality, and caring for others are considered feminine and therefore unmanly, it is not only men who are in trouble – it is all of us.” Research proves that nothing about emotional intelligence and nurturance is innately "feminine" aka non-masculine. It only gets ascribed this way by a weaponized masculinity that sees empathy and care as threats to power and dominance.

When we unbox this all-too-pervasive idea of masculinity within ourselves, we can learn to embody our own dynamic sense of "masculinity and femininity" that draws in others, stimulates, and helps us dive into our self with curiosity and courage. I've seen first hand the massive impact of helping people, especially men of all identities, untangle the grips of weaponized masculinity. Imagine if we all navigated conflict with more ease, exuded a more holistic confidence, celebrated others' expressions of self without feeling threatened, and found more genuine, lasting (and less conditional, fleeting) joy. That, to me, is what Pride deserves to look like. And it's worth the fight to get there.

Check out my offerings specifically for men & masculine people.

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Having a Summer for Success amidst it all

If you know me, you know I love a theme, always have. I planned parties and noteworthy weekends in high school, college, and beyond, adorned with well-crafted names, concepts, and wardrobe directions. Each calendar year, I like to work with an annual mantra (reach out and I'll tell you this year's). Even different seasons get special recognition (a reminder that we’re half-way to the next Reckless December), and summers are no exception. Therefore, I welcome you to this summer's theme coined by a few friends and me  – welcome to *Summer for Success*.

Being well over a month into (mostly unofficially) summer, I see examples galore of the two-sided nature of success. On the one hand: Truly all of my coaching clients are kicking ass — transforming limiting beliefs into fruitful action, quitting jobs with gusto (cue “Break My Soul”), landing big opportunities, and discovering the power of collective grief practice (to name a few). Some amazing candidates prevailed over the status quo in LA and worldwide. So many seeds I’ve planted over the past year now feel ripe, yielding lots of abundance. After a few years of contraction, my circles of humans are expanding again (hi all you peeps new to this newsletter!), and I see people in my orbit growing and glowing in such gorgeous ways.

Then there’s the other side of success. We are witnessing the sheer magnitude of the political right-wing's “success” in eviscerating our ability to live in healthy bodies and lead healthy lives, ever-widening the gap of who gains access and those who are denied it. There’s “success” being achieved by a select few raking in unimaginably larger-than-ever profits, as nearly everyone else grows more pained by inflation and price gauging. We're more prone than ever to a virus whose latest mutation makes it much more "successful" at spreading through us. Need I say more.

All of this suggests to me that success holds a lot of power. And that success need not be a zero-sum game. In fact, I say if our success rests upon others not succeeding, it’s time to hit the breaks and consider what kind of definition of success we’re clinging to. And better yet, who’s definition of success we’re allowing to run our script. I’m thus teaching and preaching a summer for success – with my coaching clients, in my workshops, to my loved ones, and for myself – where success is about cultivating what sustains us.

This definition invites us to sit with and inquire into what is that which sustains us — and as a result, what’s not enough for us, what’s actually too much, and where we can shed toxic notions of success we’ve bought into along the way. This reminds me of Roshi Joan Halifax’s book Standing On the Edge. In the book, she describes several qualities that are “key to a compassionate and courageous life,” such as altruism, empathy, and engagement. But when we take any of these too far, she writes, we can “fall over the edge” into states of clinging, distress, and burnout. Aka, when “success” becomes over-conditional. When nothing lands as good enough. Or when we feel others have to be denied something or we have to rig an entire system in order to achieve success (cough SCOTUS cough).

“We have a responsibility to model receiving and giving in ways that will truly sustain us, all of us – not less than what’s sustaining, and also not much more than what’s sustainable.”

I’ve long wrestled with coaching (and the coaching industry) because of this. I often see coaches who promote the idea that there are no limits to how much money and influence clients can incur, and lead practices where there’s no such thing as too much. I get why this excites people (it’s called internalized capitalism!), and for the record I am so here to help people make big bold moves and get that money  you deserve. But I also believe as practitioners we have a responsibility to our clients and the whole world to model receiving and giving in ways that will truly sustain us, all of us – not less than what's sustaining, and also not much more than what's sustainable.

In making this summer all about success, a.k.a. all about that which sustains us, I’m drawn to something Claire Willis (author of Opening to Grief: Finding Your Way from Loss to Peace) recently wrote to Rachael Freed (Life Legacies): “We cannot turn away from what sustains us or we will implode in sorrow.”

In times like these, where sorrow implosion is all too tempting, may we offer and receive the kinds of sustenance that move us to dance in rhythm with our own healthy definitions of success.

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Make grief work to keep up good work

In my second year of college, my roommate and dear friend Sandy suddenly died. The year was already challenging enough – turning 20, still so young and new to the surreal Southern California setting, navigating big life changes. But Sandy's death drastically altered the social and emotional landscape of my community and my college experience. I was so absorbed in the shock, so deep in logistics mode, caring for our friend healing from the same car accident, and trying to make the best of a terrible year, that I hardly noticed at the time how the university we attended was responding to our crisis.

Yet in hindsight, the messages delivered to my peers and I were loud and clear: try to stay focused, keep up the good work, and make it to graduation. My professors that semester were merely sent a notification of the loss I had faced, and no one the following semester was told anything. I was mandated to attend their counseling center, but the counselor cried during our session and I felt responsible to console them (woof). The housing staff offered to bring us food once, but then smelled weed on premise and issued us a citation instead. They were willing to host a memorial service (as long as I'd help organize it), but provided no help in packing up Sandy's belongings or navigating the future of my living situation. The list goes on.

I imagine if I had better advocated for myself (or if someone had on my behalf), the university would have likely responded better. But this put all the responsibility on me and my peers – grieving 20-year-olds in a state of reevaluating the meaning of life – to champion our dire needs for flexibility, space, and nurturing support.

The loss of Sandy has had a lasting impact on my life, and alongside it, so has my experience of how little was offered in proactive outreach, consensual support, or space for grief. This was my first experience with how ill-equipped most institutions are for genuinely supporting their staff, students, and constituents through experiences of grief and loss, and the myriad of assumptions made around who's grieving, for how long, what success looks like, etc. I began to recognize how without proper institutional training and practices, those impacted by loss are left to do double the work: attend to their grief AND push against the system that's preventing them from healthily grieving.

In professional roles over the next decade, I've continued to notice how in the face of any kind of loss – not just deaths, but also in the more everyday ones like a project going badly or relationship woes – there can be such aversion to pausing, reflecting, and integrating insights gleaned from the experience. It’s part of what led me towards a career of grief and loss-focused facilitation and coaching: wanting to hold space for others to welcome what’s really happening, offer nurturing care and support, and spark transformation.

The more I do this work, the clearer it has become that workplaces are a critical battleground in the fight for treating all people with humanity, empathy, and dignity. Learning how we as individuals and as part of institutions support each other in our most challenging moments is a critical step in creating cultures that are equitable, inclusive, and resilient.

How to make transformation inevitable

I’ve just completed a training course on transforming climate trauma. Knowing I’d have to show up week after week to grapple with climate emergencies and presence people’s trauma, I wondered if taking this on would be overwhelming and make me more distressed, especially while processing some grief of my own. My reaction, however, surprised me. As the course began, I experienced primary feelings of excitement and hope. How, I asked myself, could something so heavy and daunting as traumatic impacts of inevitable climate catastrophes caused by our own human doing (and not doing) possibly elicit positive feelings?

A topic I explored recently in a Zen practice group offers one answer. As a group, we spent weeks coming back to something the late Rep. John Lewis said in a noteworthy episode of the podcast On Being. While sharing about his experiences of racial violence and finding beloved community to fight against injustice, Rep. Lewis shared:

“I wanted to believe, and I did believe, that things would get better. But later I discovered that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened. And you live that you’re already there, that you’re already in that community. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there.”

“It’s already there” is such a powerful belief to embody when used as a way to summon us rather than pacify us. But this belief requires a sense of trust to see it, presence with what it takes to be it, and a determination to bring what’s “already there” out to the world. That’s why I believe grief — the wide container of sensations, emotions, and experiences that result from processing and navigating loss — is a critical part of this process.

Without grieving, we can get trapped:
- in a state of perpetual denial (ignorance is bliss, la la la, I don’t wanna know!)
- in a place of seeking suffering, where we redirect our desires for transformation towards thinking we or others should suffer for not having learned our/their lessons, and/or
- in debilitating despair, feeling too overwhelmed by the terribleness of everything to do much of anything

(If these sound familiar, it’s because they’re essentially the primary responses to trauma: flight, fight, or freeze)

Allowing ourselves to grieve (aka healthily process loss) in whatever forms it takes helps get us un-stuck from these places. Grieving helps us restore our sense of faith and come to see transformation as inevitable, as proven by our own experience of changing and progressing out of loss. And that’s part of why I felt, dare I say, good amidst my climate trauma course: because a hundred of us showed up believing that we are teachable in how to transform climate trauma. Because we recognize that us humans have spent millenniums living in relatively healthy relationship with this planet. Because I’m surrounding myself with examples of how we're able to heal each other, in heartbreak or sickness or violence or climate disasters. If we believe there are people who know how to do this, we therefore can know how to do this. And thus, in that sense, it’s already within us. It is already there.

What might our actions look like when they from this place of knowing transformation is already there?

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Here’s a practice you can use to put it into embodied action:

Take a few deep breaths. Use your breath to connect with your intuition and/or third eye. Visualize your aspiration — something you want or want to see in the world. Spend a moment there. Then bring your breath down to your gut (you can place hands on your abdomen/lower belly to help bring awareness there). Say to your gut, “What I visualize is already there. I am willing to become it, and able to be it.” See what your gut says. Repeat this phrase whenever it’s helpful.

Who would you be without your stuff?

Two days before New Years, I was with a friend in Palm Springs. He knew what a hard year it had been for me, plus he wanted a ride from Palm Springs Airport, so he treated us to a hotel stay in the desert. We had some laughs, a hot tub soak, and a nice dinner in town. As we left the restaurant, I realized I'd left my bag at my seat, so I turned around to get it. It was only a few moments later, but nevertheless, the bag was gone. There went my wallet, AirPods, gloves, some important mail, but worst of all my notebook — a vessel that feels like an extension of myself where I archive my life and had processed so much of the past year.

I lost a lot of things in 2021. A primary relationship in my life ended, and with it, so too ended having a place I live in LA. My childhood home was sold as my parents embarked on a new chapter, losing a sense of “back home” in New Jersey. Work projects ended. There were job contracts I’d gone after and didn’t get (though thankfully a few I did get). And I definitely lost some sanity over the year. By this measure, losing a bag of stuff might sound frivolous. And yet, when my possessions were gone, it landed like an epic grand finale of loss. It felt insane, the timing so specific to come right at 2021’s end.

In a recent talk by Rev. angel kyodo Williams, she says in her grounded, impassioned voice, “Who would you be without your stuff? I don’t know, but I beg you to find out.” Repeating this mantra to myself as New Years Eve unfolded helped me surrender in a way I hadn’t all year. Sighhhhhh. Okay. Things come and go. Notebooks come and go. Money, houses, even loving relationships and people come and go. The inquiry from the universe became clear to me: If many of the things in my life before were not coming with me into 2022, then what is?

We are psychologically conditioned to experience loss of all kinds — whether it be a death, a relationship ending, moving homes, losing a job, having an illness, etc. — as if we’ve lost a part of ourselves. Said another way, unprocessed (or in-process) loss can leave us feeling incomplete. In cultures like ours where loss is often swept under the rug (after all, systems of oppression rely on forcing loss upon people to propel others' gain), we tend to grasp for stuff to fill the void rather than to just be with the void. The ecological crises we are causing this planet directly stem from this insatiable need we have for more and more stuff to fill our individualistic sense of lack.

My friend Julia said to me a few months ago, “All desire, any desire, is the desire to feel whole. And the practice is realizing we already are.” As I guide people and myself through the magical practice of grieving, an oft-surprising stage along the way is relief — an acceptance of impermanence; that loss itself can be proof of our aliveness. It’s what I felt this New Years. Without much of my cherished stuff, I experienced solace in coming into 2022 with me. Not just me, of course, but also in a way, just me. Just this sense of being me, being in this body, a living thing amongst all living things.

When we cultivate a capacity for processing the complexity of loss, it helps us attach less and make room for realizing we are whole. We are here, we are alive, and we are enough. This doesn’t negate the sadness and pain of loss, but it does create more space for something else too. This emptiness, as it’s described in Zen Buddhism, or spaciousness, is where we most intimately encounter ourselves and the oneness of all things. From this place, we are more equipped to spark reorientation and reconnection that fuels our lives and brings us fulfillment.

Recognizing that loss is unavoidable and that pain is inevitable, might we do the daring act of being without our stuff? If we are willing, we may recognize just how whole we are, no matter what we’ve lost.