Story Info

Fairless
Caroline Fairless
Wilmot, NH
2016

Story & Experience

The site is not totally bleak, and the grief is around an old oak that was sick and needed to be cut down. It broke my heart, really, as I have sat in its branches many early mornings listening to the woodthrush(es) deeper in the woods. I invited several friends to build a shrine using beautiful materials found within a few feet of where the tree used to be. We laid our offerings, stood for a few minutes, grateful for trees, woods, and each other.

I imagine I will keep adding to this altar, as I walk here every day.

The site is not totally bleak, and the grief is around an old oak that was sick and needed to be cut down. It broke my heart, really, as I have sat in its branches many early mornings listening to the woodthrush(es) deeper in the woods. I invited several friends to build a shrine using beautiful materials found within a few feet of where the tree used to be. We laid our offerings, stood for a few minutes, grateful for trees, woods, and each other.

I imagine I will keep adding to this altar, as I walk here every day.

Wilmot, NH

RECENT STORIES

  • Beck 2010

For the Gulf Coast

Our beaches are being bombarded almost daily since the end of the first week of the sinking of the Deep Water Horizon with gatherings of people or all stripes: protests, prayer groups, volunteers, rallies for [...]

  • 2023 Kadonneiden Lajien Muistopäivä Helsinki

Remembrance Day for Lost Species in Helsinki 2023

On November 30th, there was first a session organized by the Finnish social and health sector project about eco-anxiety and eco-emotions (www.ymparistoahdistus.fi). This “morning coffee roundtable”, a hybrid event, focused this time on ecological grief [...]

  • 9442542D 86F2 44DB B000 C8EBDAB10152

Ashdown Forest

Ashdown Forest is an area of natural beauty in West Sussex, England. It is also one of the very few remaining areas of extensive lowland heath left in Europe. This rare and threatened landscape is [...]

JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER

Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places.