Category: parenting and climate crisis

  • The Day the Sun Didn’t Rise

    Soft hair on my face tickles me awake A small voice Mom there is something wrong with my body I’m wide awake, but it is still night time   The clock, the only light teases us with its numbered face, 7:15 No sweetie I reply it is morning time it’s just dark outside today  …

  • Trauma Anniversaries in a Changing World

    Originally published in the Climate Psychology Alliance-North America blog Spring has sprung early again this year in Northern California. And with temperatures at a record setting 90 degrees last week, it appears to be ending early too. It took my New York body a long time to adjust to California’s Mediterranean climate when I first…

  • Teaching the Love of Plants: Nature Therapy with Children

    Originally published in the Climate Psychology Alliance-North America blog By Jenni Silverstein, LCSW, Santa Rosa, California My  new “office” is a garden hidden behind a berm at a therapeutic farm. The farm rescues animals and brings children from foster and group homes to tend them. Each creature comes with its own story of being saved from…

  • A Mother’s Love, 2021

    You master crawling a spark of rushing energy I shut doors in your path as you crumble beneath me “My job is to keep you safe, my love” I whisper, and turn you back “I must keep you safe” I explain as I pull your small body down from the heights of the couch hold…

  • Love and Grief in the Redwoods

    A very wise midwife once told me, “you cannot vibrate in love and fear at the same time.”* I pondered this for a long time, believing it made sense, but not embodying it. Until one evening years later, when I had a profound experience in my first garden. I had been practicing a form of…

  • Mothering In the Age of Climate Crisis

    For my entire life, I have been an environmentalist. As a child eager to save the whales and pick up litter from the park, as a teen lobbying for the end of garbage incineration and boycotting aerosol hairsprays, as a young adult awed by the EarthFirst! rallies I attended to save the precious old growth…