I ever used those words — “from” and “to” — because I realized you don’t leave it behind you. From then on, it was always “despair and empowerment” because the question of how to deal with your despair is ongoing.

immediate threats with a fight or flight response, but here we are, stuck in a slow-motion catastrophe whose worst effects many of us alive now won’t feel for decades, if ever.

My definition of disaster became broader and broader, and I now see much of our everyday life—for its alienation and its destruction of souls and memory, as well as natural and social places—as a kind of disaster we escape temporarily in those golden moments of uprisings and carnivals. Or reclaiming the story.

exacerbate the inequitable distribution of suffering. There is no question that the climate is going to change, and bring with it a lot of suffering. The question is how we navigate it.