Collective Grief in a Dying World
The Soil is Grieving Too
There is a heaviness that drags behind us, like a wet hem soaked in the stormwater of history. A collective sorrow that never quite dries out. I see it in the collapse behind their eyes, the resignation dressed up as irony. We are grieving, whether we name it or not.
And it’s not just us. The soil is grieving too.
We often think of grief as an event. A moment marked by death or absence. But what we’re in now, this era, this epoch, is not a singular moment. It’s an unraveling. And we feel it together. We carry the weight of genocide, melting glaciers, burning forests, species going silent. Each news headline a knell. Each election cycle another ritual of desperation. We feel it in our stomachs, in our chest tightness, in our forgetting how to dream.
This is collective grief. A grief not confined to the personal. A grief that belongs to the entire web.
But because we have lost the language of the web, because capitalism taught us to speak only in I and not in we, we think our grief is a personal failure. That something is wrong with us for crying over a tree cut down, or a murdered child across the ocean, or the weight of too many decisions made by people who do not love life.
There is nothing wrong with us.
The grief is the wisdom. The grief is the mycelium inside our bones, whispering that something is out of balance. That we are not separate from the rainforest or the ocean or the child. That this pain, unbearable as it is, is proof we are still connected.
The soil is grieving because we have not listened. We scraped it raw, poisoned its microbes, planted monocrops in the shape of profit. But it still remembers. It still sings beneath our feet. The question is, are we quiet enough to hear it?
Sometimes I dream of grief as a seed. Thick-skinned. Dark. Dormant until we give it the water of attention. And when we do, it doesn’t grow into despair. It grows into knowing. Into resistance. Into that untamable force that lives under empire: love.
We are in a moment that demands we compost our illusions. The illusion that a politician will save us. The illusion that endless growth is life. The illusion that grief must be private and polite.
Instead, we gather here, underground. Rooted. Breathing through each other. Letting our grief become the mycelial network that connects and transforms. The grief that says: I feel this because I still care. I still belong. I still believe in the possibility of something more alive than this.
We are not meant to grieve alone. And we are not meant to stay in grief forever.
So dig your hands into the dirt. Feel the pulse still there. Whisper your sorrow to the wind. And let that sorrow carry you, not into despair but into motion. Into remembering. Into the deep, ancient truth:
The earth is not dead.
But it is mourning.
And it is calling us to rise, rooted in grief, blooming toward liberation.
But what do we do with all this grief?
How do we soothe ourselves when the sky is thick with smoke, when the rivers are rising, when laws are passed that strip away the humanity of our neighbors and we know they are only the beginning? How do we rock ourselves in the night when the future feels like ash and silence?
We start by remembering that grief is not the end. It’s the threshold.
It’s the place where something old dies and something true is born, not easy, not quick, not clean. Grief doesn’t promise us clarity. It doesn’t promise us safety. But it does promise us presence. It offers us the rare chance to be alive to the pain of this moment. To be cracked open enough to feel what is real. That is not weakness. That is devotion. The kind the soil knows. The kind the trees practice when they drop their leaves. The kind we’ve forgotten in a culture that trades numbing for connection.
We have to let die what was never ours to hold. The fantasy of unbroken progress. The myth of safety for some while others drown. The illusion that someone else will fix it while we refresh the feed.
A friend said to me recently, “I didn’t think I’d see the collapse in my lifetime.” But the truth is, many have been watching the collapse for generations. Indigenous peoples, Black and brown communities, queer and disabled kin, all have known the fault lines. They were not hidden; they were ignored. What’s different now is that more of us are being pulled into the crumbling. The collapse is no longer at the edge of the empire. It is at the center. And the center does not hold.
So we begin by witnessing. Without flinching. We begin by letting our tears fall into the soil and asking it what to do next. We begin by turning toward each other. Small rituals. Daily truths. Grounded gestures. Soup shared. A weed tended. A song sung through the heartbreak. Not because these things fix anything but because they make us human again. They remind us what it means to survive with our hearts intact. Not as untouched beings, but as ones scarred and sacred.
We carry the grief by living in integrity with what we know. We do not have to do it all. But we do have to be real. To stop pretending that business as usual is possible. To stop contorting ourselves to fit into systems that have already failed. To listen to the pulse beneath, the pulse of a world that wants to be reborn, but cannot until we stop clinging to the rot.
What dies in us makes room for what wants to grow. And we are allowed to mourn as we go. Allowed to be devastated and still devoted. Allowed to question everything and still offer beauty. Allowed to fall apart, because the world is, too. And if we listen closely, we might find that even in the collapse, even in the grief, there is a rhythm, a call, a possibility, something ancient whispering:
Let go. Let die. Let live.
This is the final weekly blog post here on the Grief and Liberation website.
Starting in April, I’ll be posting here just once a month, with only the most meaningful and relevant reflections.
Why?
Because something has been calling me deeper underground.
I'm now writing a sci-fi, grief-soaked, liberation-rooted narrative told from beneath the forest floor, where the mycelium murmurs and memory weaves through roots and rot. It's a fictionalized world but every word is true.
It’s called The Underground Dispatch.
🕳️✨ If you're ready to follow me below, join me for free on Substack: https://substack.com/@griefandliberation
To give you a taste, here's the first whisper from below:
/ / /
// Incoming Transmission -received via tremor at root-hour 0859//
They told me grief was a weight to carry. But down here, it’s a map. The ones above forget that the dead still speak, they just changed their frequency.
I’ve tuned in.
My job is to transcribe what the roots remember. The wars. The extinctions. The lullabies. The way liberation smells when the rain finally comes.
You’re not supposed to be reading this yet. But maybe you were meant to.
Michelle Carrera is a certified death doula and grief educator working at the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation. She helps people face death, process loss, and find grounded ways to move through grief.
Her newest project is a sci-fi-inspired story world rooted in mycelium, grief, and transformation, because sometimes, stories are how we survive. Subscribe (for free) here. Series starts on April 2nd, 2025.
If you're grieving, preparing for death, or seeking support through change, Michelle is available for one-on-one work. Learn more or get in touch here: OFFERINGS