I just completed a Wild Heart writing retreat with Mirabai Starr in Bacalar, Mexico. This piece is based on what I wrote in ten minutes in response to the prompt, “When I die…” How would you respond to that prompt?

When I die, I want to die wide. Novelist Erica Jong said that first, and I say it now: I want to die wide.

I want to die being fully alive, to lay it all down and give myself freely to the Mother who made me, no holding back.

But I do not want the Earth to die. Until the day I die, I want, I want, I want. I am the voice of wanting.

I think of the marine sanctuary called Northeast Canyons and Seamount, the first and only marine national monument in the Atlantic. This ocean landscape of underwater mountains and vast deep-sea canyons off the coast of New England is a precious, protected place where endangered whales and sea turtles and corals and fish and all kinds of wildness can thrive. This refuge of rare color and beauty is as precious as my kidney or my liver, a part of the living body of the sea, of the round Earth that is mostly made of water.

I was one of many people who fought to establish that Noah’s ark, that living oasis in the sea. But just days ago, the President tore down its borders of protection and invited commercial fishing to come in – to plunder and seize and extract what they like, news that has hardly made a ripple in the media, a drop in the bucket, nothing to see here, but I feel the attack in my own body. I feel it under my left rib, an assault on my very own body, like invading or cutting away a vital organ, and I cry out, I must cry out, the Mama’s body is being attacked, she is being pierced and desecrated, and I feel it in my body. I want to be her voice, I am her voice, I cry out NO!

How do we live with the grief of a world that is being torn apart?

How does our body relate to the body of the world?

Do we dare to feel what is moving through our bodies and the body of the world and to give it voice?

We are all grief walkers. Can we walk in love with the grief?

A Prayer

Mother of all, we feel your presence in our outrage and grief. Speak to us now, you who loved this world into being. Move through our bodies and give us strength to create a new future for your wounded earth. Amen.