Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, November 8, 2026

My name is Lori Milner. I live in Chelsea, I attend UUCC, the Unitarian Universalist Community Church in Augusta, and I know Leslie Manning and Shelley Randall from our mutual affiliation with the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine, or ChIME.

My opening words are those of Chief Seattle from the book Prayers for Healing, edited by Maggie Oman.

Teach your children
what we have taught our children —
that the earth is our mother.
Whatever befalls the earth
befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
If men spit upon the ground,
they spit upon themselves.

This we know.
The earth does not belong to us;
we belong to the earth.
This we know.
All things are connected
like the blood which unites one family.
All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth
befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
We do not weave the web of life;
We are merely a strand in it.
Whatever we do to the web.
we do to ourselves.

It’s my pleasure and honor to be with you again. When I spoke
here last April, I told you how I was finding solace in nature from the
human created chaos that is the daily news cycle. At that time, I was
in the early stages of starting an outdoor gathering based on the work
of Victoria Loorz and her sister Valerie Luna Serrels, co-founders of
The Wild Church Network following the release of Victoria’s book
Church of the Wild. To my own amazement, I did it. The Kennebec
Wild Wanderers is registered on the Wild Church Network website.
We started in May and our monthly gatherings will end for the season
later this month.

Now I’ll just say that, even for all my enthusiasm about being
restored by nature, I don’t like winter. And this year I’m not looking
forward to the shorter days, the cold and dark. So I’m taking Mother
Nature’s hand and walking through it with her, because she goes
through it every season. My friends, the trees, stand there patiently
year after year, surrendering their leaves each autumn and resting in
the winter so they can joyously rebound in the spring. Like them, I
can use the quiet season for my inner work.

This fall I enrolled in a grief companion certification program, so
the topic of grief has been following me around for awhile. The texts
we’re using have us learning, among other things: 11 tenets of
companioning, 10 touchstones to seek out on the grief journey, and
five gates of grief. Grief by the numbers! I’m especially interested in
the five gates, and the gate I want to talk about today is the one
called “the sorrows of the world”.

When I first read “sorrows of the world” I was thinking about
people affected by the current wars, the people being hunted down
and deported by ICE, those whose income doesn’t stretch far enough
to cover the basic necessities. Turns out it’s all that, and more. We’re
also talking about the sorrows of the natural world, which some call
eco-grief, that sorrow we feel when we see the environment
damaged, species lost because of changes in weather patterns, and
other environmental changes. And is it possible that some of the grief
we feel is also coming from the land itself, and its creatures? We are
connected, after all.

In Church of the Wild, Victoria Loorz tells us: “You can ‘love the
earth’ by taking care of it: by getting involved with advocacy
campaigns to remove dams and protect forests, by living simply and
adding nutrients to the soil, by limiting fossil fuels and eating local
foods. 

But falling in love with Earth? That’s different. You are allured to pay
attention and enter into conversation with a particular being, a
particular place. And then, through fidelity and time and a thousand
small acts of kindness and reciprocal giving and receiving, you fall in
love.” (Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild, Broadleaf Books, 2021, p 128). And having fallen in love, we grieve.

Michele Bakacs, a natural resource professional in New Jersey,
gives us some key causes of eco-grief in her article “Eco-Grief Got
You Down? Here’s What You Can Do About It”.

• Direct loss by witnessing the disappearance of a familiar
  landscape or species, for example a migratory bird or butterfly
  that returns to your area each season.
• The adjustment experienced after an extreme weather event, for
  example a hurricane or wildfire.
• Slow, gradual changes in an environment for which you have
  strong ties, such as the sense of loss felt by a lake that used to
  freeze regularly in the winter.
• The loss of cultural identity, for example an indigenous
  community mourning the loss of hunting and fishing grounds.
• Anticipating future loss felt by youth worrying about the fate of
  the planet and how it will affect them as they learn about the
  impacts of climate change.
• Feeling that there is nothing you can do, and these
  environmental changes are out of your control.
  And to that I would add that people who work in nature
  (environmental professionals) are especially susceptible to eco-grief.

What can we do about and with our grief? As I was researching,
it seems that there are universal practices regardless of the source of
our grief. Here are a few:

• Acknowledge your grief, individually and collectively. Allow
  yourselves to feel all the feels, and to mourn.
• Embrace it for awhile, then turn to other things until you’re ready
  to engage it again. Dr. Alan Wolfelt calls this “dosing your pain.”
• Talk to one another, hold space for the stories and feelings. Talk
  to helping professionals if needed.
• Conduct a grief ritual, which can look like anything it needs to in
  order to allow people to mourn. There are suggestions on the
  internet.

Michele also recommends taking action. She says: “In addition
to talking, individuals need to be doing. This means taking steps to
improve an environmental condition. When deciding where to start,
think about what you value, what you are passionate about, and what
is within your ability to accomplish…start with your own home or your
community. Research local organizations taking on issues of
importance to you.”

I will leave us with this question from Debra Renstra in her book
Refugia Faith: “What can we give back through a pattern of
reciprocity to a planet that gives us so much? What will make the
more-than-human creation glad that we are here?”