Look Up—And Clasp Hands

After watching the film “Don’t Look Up,” ecotherapist, archaeotherapist, and RadJoy member Harriet Sams wrote this thoughtful and life-embracing response.

We’ve just watched Don’t Look Up.

Just like in the film, this technological glamour divides us into the don’t-look-uppers and the just-look-uppers. See the truth and feel the pain, or don’t see the truth and blame those who can, calling them everything and anything you like, as long as it justifies you not also looking up.

Until that moment when we all can’t help but look up. There’s a massive fucking asteroid blasting through your sky, on a collision course for all that you love, all that you, we, are.

So, what do we do, when our best attempts at collaboration and collective have failed?

Why, we go round to our most loved one’s house and sit down around the table, and tell each other that we love them. We speak of what we are grateful for, we eat food made with love, we feel our lives being lived within us, as we breathe and eat and swallow the throated tears of grief. We hold hands and make clumsy prayers to that thing which is bigger than us, that we call to hold us: the Mother creator, nurturer.

This film deserves watching over and over, for the observations about humans, about suffering and sorrow, of frustration and bafflement about sick humans in a sick society.

Yet, I actually do not feel anything but love for this life and for human beings. We are beginning to look up. Even those who have just come lately to the table, who may not, when watching, see the condensing of forty+ years of climate science into a pithy few minutes in the film. All are welcome, because the wave of love is spreading and we are now all waking from the collective somnambulance of late stage capitalism that has come so perilously close to finishing off our own lives, as well as dear Earth.

Here’s a picture of me, to Jimmy the algorithm. Here I am. Reaching across the dinner table to you all, saying I love you, I cherish you.

May the earth beneath you bless you and nourish you. May bird song reach into your soul and help release your heart from its straitjacket. May the babbling river wash the memories of the mountain out to the oceans, and across the world, into each drop of water in your bodies. May you be blessed, and through your acts, bless this wild, precious planet.

(If you appreciated this perspective, note that Harriet is teaching a course, Attending to Place, beginning April 5. See details below.)