A Climate Cafe

 My friend, Susan, and I hosted our first official Climate Cafe over Zoom last night. We "gathered" via laptop screen to facilitate a sharing about attendees' emotions around climate change. The sharing was honest, moving, enlightening and powerful. There was often a deep silence after one attendee finished, as people processed and sat with the difficult feelings that arose, but sometimes one person's story would inspire another and the thoughts tumbled out furiously, as individuals wrestled with grief, despair, hope or a combination of multiple emotions.

Susan approached me about co-facilitating this meeting several months ago, when I was deep into high school swimming and couldn't afford to add another activity, but when I went to a training and digested the idea that people around the world are struggling with eco-anxiety, I couldn't turn down the opportunity to offer a climate cafe here in the Denver area. 

The climate cafe concept came out of Scotland in 2015 and is based on death cafes, where people gather to talk about another taboo subject. Climate cafes have taken off in the UK and were offered in person before the pandemic, though now are largely relegated to online. Working with mental health professionals in the UK, the North America Climate Psychology Alliance is now working to popularize the cafes in this country and to train facilitators to meet what they perceive to be a deep need.

Both facilitating and participating in a meeting about feelings are difficult to me, a person who prefers action to thought, to - do lists and righteous angers to the heavy weight of grief and occasional despair. I fought within myself to allow the long silences, to hear the words of people struggling and not rush in to console or counter with my own story. The ultimate take-away from last night, as I found with my training, is a sense of relief that other people feel the way that I do, that I am not alone in my eco-anxiety and that together, we can help each other to express lament as well as hope, and help increase our resiliency in difficult times.