Grief as ‘worldbuilding’

We are living through an age of immense and accelerating loss.
Not only personal losses, but shared ones.
Losses shaped by empire, and cultures of extraction, domination, and disposability.

Ecological collapse.
Ongoing genocides.
The erasure of peoples, languages, lineages, and places.
The fracturing of communities through policing, war, forced migration, incarceration, and sanctioned state violence.
And the ongoing violence of poverty, pollution, surveillance, and neglect.

It can feel impossible to hold it all.
It can feel like “it is all too much.”

And yet, this is where grief becomes more than sorrow.
This is where grief is more than the hurts we carry alone.
This is where grief becomes worldbuilding.

As Zen teacher Norma Wong writes and reminds us, worldbuilding is not an escape from reality or a retreat into imagination. It is a collective practice. One that happens alongside resistance, repair, and care. It asks us to respond to harm while also tending the deeper question:
What kind of world are we trying to build together? What kind of world are we imagining and building in the midst of collapse?

From this lens, grief is not a detour from liberation.
It is one of its essential teachers.

And as Holly Truhlar reminds us,
“We feel the sorrows of the world not as a burden to carry alone,
but as a call to come together and defend what, where, and who we love.
A call to repair what we can,
to feel our way into more complex and truthful possibilities,
toward a more just and liberatory world.
Toward more generosity, creativity, diversity, and wildness.”

We grieve and we remember.
Whether a sudden disappearance
or a slow, sanctioned destruction,
we grieve and we remember.

Whether a gaping absence
or a daily reminder of the fragile, fleeting nature of existence under empire,
we grieve and we remember.

To name loss is to honor it.
To name is to resist erasure
the quiet violence that so often follows harm,
especially harm caused by human-made systems that refuse accountability.

This litany (unfinished and imperfect)
is both an active stance and an act of noticing.
We name what is slipping away,
what is being taken,
what is being made impossible.

And in the naming,
we clarify what we love.
What we are willing to defend.
What we are called to tend.

We remember where we have power
and there, we fight for the liberty, dignity,
and livelihood of all beings.

We notice where we do not.
And there, we grieve openly and remember fully,
allowing shared sorrow to deepen solidarity
rather than isolate us.

May you be invited here to name what you are grieving,
personal or collective,
near or far,
human or more-than-human,
clear or still forming.

May there be room for sorrow.
May there be room for truth.
And may there be room for the kind of love
that refuses to disappear,
even in the face of profound loss.