Captain Grief

 I was just interviewed by the creator of An Inconvenient Truth, ER and NYPD Blue. Very intense and fascinating interview. He's creating a project do with our ecological age, another one I mean. 

Where we landed in the interview was thinking about grief. I have been learning a lot more how to grieve throughout 2020. And with coronavirus killing and debilitating and destroying so much, people seem ready for this gigantic life-scale emotion that you can't get on top of, that gets on top of you--which is great, and humbling. 

I'm writing a chapter about it directly in a new book, The Stuff of Life, which you'll hear about a bit more as time goes by. 

In early 2020 I started to feel a lot more directly what I talk about all the time--geotrauma, a newly recognized kind of trauma brought on by global heating and mass extinction. And I started talking about it with  my new friend Caroline Hickman, co-creator of the Climate Therapy Alliance which has worked with Extinction Rebellion Youth and Greta Thunberg. 

And I have been going through a lot of grief--joy and pain and laughing and crying--connected to finding out a whole lot about my gender. 

And my dad died and my lizard died. I've been in such a tunnel since about mid-2018, and if you've been on here for a while, you can see from the way my attending to this blog just started to plummet. 

I was thinking, one reason why Biden is truly effective is, he is Captain Grief. Grief wraps fear, like paper wraps stone. We ended up defeating T**** in part through the political power of grief. 

Comedy includes all the emotions without deleting them. Which also grief does. An interesting loop there. Grief and comedy are phenomenologically like nice healthy habitats where different species of feeling and thought aren't deleting one another. 

Being the most holistic of all emotions, grief is very very good for thinking a holistic aka socialist politics. 

Don't you think?