The Story That Shadows the Sun

On learning to listen again

The feeling arrives first in my chest—a quickening. Then hope: somewhere, in some remote pocket of earth, such migrations might still happen. If I'm lucky, or still enough, I might witness one.

I heard this story third-hand: skies that would darken with birds. So many bodies in flight they cast shadows over entire villages. When I imagine it, something ancient stirs in my ribs. Not metaphor—actual cellular recognition. The way you might feel standing before the ocean for the first time, or holding your newborn, confronted by a vastness that makes you smaller and more human at once.

Then the third feeling: grief.

I've watched wild places shrink in my lifetime. Rabbits and foxes that wandered my childhood evenings—gone. The woods where I learned to be quiet, to listen—subdivided. Clear waters in my home state of Florida now bloom toxic green. Manatees wash ashore, their bodies heavy with the runoff of distant fields.

This grief has a name now: solastalgia. The distress of watching your home environment degrade. Glenn Albrecht gave us this word, and with it, permission to feel what many of us carry—the particular ache of loving a world that's disappearing.

Climate change isn't just melting ice. It's the signal of everything we're losing—not just species, but the knowledge of how to live here. Most of us no longer know the land we stand on. We can't read weather in our bones or navigate by stars. This isn't accident. It's inheritance—the residue of centuries spent severing peoples from their places, replacing indigenous wisdom with extraction.

I think about what we lost when we stopped marking time by moon phases, when satellites replaced constellations, when algorithms began mining our attention. We turned from sky to screen. Our bodies forgot how to orient by wind direction, how to smell water, how to feel shifts in barometric pressure before storms.

Here in Vermont, where I write this on Abenaki land, I look out at hills clothed in second-growth forest. The old-growth is mostly gone. But I try to imagine what this place held before the clear-cuts—what signals it offered to those who lived in daily relationship with its moods and seasons.

Sometimes I walk these woods trying to reclaim some fragment of that literacy. I pay attention to bird calls, to which plants lean toward light, to how soil feels different after rain. Not because I can become indigenous to this place—I can't—but because some part of my nervous system remembers what it means to be animal, to be earthly.

Plants have become my most patient teachers in this work.

They are what they appear to be—no metaphor required. Roots finding water. Leaves turning toward sun. Chemical conversations happening in networks we're only beginning to understand. Every medicine in your cabinet, every meal on your table, begins with their bodies. Yet we've made our relationship with them industrial, extractive. We grow them in sterile labs now, strip their compounds, patent their wisdom.

But plants persist in their particular intelligence. They respond to touch, communicate through scent, share resources through underground networks. They do what bodies do—adapt, connect, survive.

The word nature comes from the Latin natura—essential qualities, innate character. What if we remembered that we are not separate from but expressions of these same forces?

When eco-anxiety rises in me—that familiar panic at the scale of what's breaking—I remember I'm not alone in this feeling. Others are also learning to tend small patches of earth, to listen to what's still speaking, to do what they can with muddy hands and uncertain hearts.

Margaret Mead said it: small groups of committed people change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.

I offer these stories not as solutions but as field notes. Traces left by someone learning to pay attention again. For those of us who are still listening—to plants, to land, to the intelligence that flows through both our bodies and the earth we're part of.

What I'm learning to ask: What wants to grow here? What wants to decay? What is asking for my attention?

May we remember our animal selves.

May we tend what we can reach.

May we trust what we cannot see.

~Blair Butterfield