PHOTO BY AERAN SQUIRES
First published in Through Trails—you can learn more about this project from Loam Editor Kate on the interstices of emergence and emergency here—we wanted to reshare this short reflection today as an invitation to consider what devotion to a project or place or people can look like during collapse.
Devotion has been (and will continue to be) a North Star for us at Loam. (See Kate and Kailea’s most recent essay on sustaining attention as well as our interview with Lucía Oliva Hennelly on building solidarity for more). As our study of focus continues to evolve, we hope to stay in conversation about how to better meet this moment as a collective. Thank you for being here.
As our sociopolitical crises continue to escalate, it can be hard to ground. We might know that the strategic move in this moment is to stay focused, but for myself, at least, it’s a daily struggle. So I was grateful for this wisdom from Barry Lopez by way of Sabrina Imbler.
Writes Imbler in a recent Creatures NYC missive:
“The last two weeks, my mental state has continuously ricocheted between fear, fury, and grief. [...] I’m sure this is true for many of us, and I have no new insight to share about how bad it’s feeling now and how much worse it’s going to get.
To help steel myself for many more of these emotional troughs, I’ve been listening to Barry Lopez audiobooks and, unsurprisingly, found so much heart in his words. As Lopez writes in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, ‘if we are to manage the havoc—ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war—we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter…”
My understanding of what it means to live a life that matters is very much emergent. I used to think I knew, but now, I’m not so sure. Although this uncertainty can be destabilizing, it also feels like a gift. Like I get to decide anew what integrity, success, community, love, wealth mean in this moment.
As I reflect on how to reimagine a life that matters, I find myself returning again and again to wisdom that an elder shared with my brother to do your present well. It’s a simple directive, but it hits hard. Maybe because when I think about presence, I think about devotion.
More so than most any other practice, devotion honors the conditions and constraints of the moment. Devotion asks you to commit to a person or place or project regardless of outcome.
Devotion is generative, but the very fact of it requires choice. In giving our full presence to someone or something, we almost always close a door just as we are opening another. What I mean is: devotion is the sweet ritual of watering the garden and the daily joy of practicing scales. But it is also compromising ideals and canceling plans just so you can show up steadily for whatever sacred pact you have made. It is brave, and difficult, work.
For most of my career, I tried to do everything. I sometimes worked thirty freelance jobs in any given year so that I could volunteer for the causes I cared about. Although this fragmentation meant I was a part of many projects, I couldn’t say I was really devoted to anything. Much as I longed to experience the kind of love that commitment conjures, I was afraid of what I would risk—or truthfully, how I would be perceived—if I chose just a project or two to focus on. I didn’t know how to do less, and I didn’t trust that would be enough.
But I’m older now, and like many cultures workers I know, my understanding of ‘showing up’ is shifting. After years of feeling like every shock sent me scrambling or struggling or sinking into overwhelm, I no longer want to embody an activism that is so reflexive. I am interested instead in the deeply rooted practice of devotion: of what it means to make hard choices so that I can do my present well.
Devotion is a tool of divination. There are so many projects already in process that deserve our sustaining attention. What would happen if we continued to build what we are building? If we didn’t search for something else or “new” to do?
A few days ago, Kailea and I handed in the first full draft of our book on disaster preparedness slated for release in Spring 2026. “Compassion in Crisis” (CIC) has been a throughline in our creative lives since 2018 (!) and as we map out our timeline for the coming year, I’ve been thinking about what it would truly take to devote myself to this project.
Devotion to CIC doesn’t necessarily require a clean slate: there are several other projects calling for my care that I am excited and energized to commit to. But it does mean choosing CIC over some others. It means deciding in advance that I am going to make this project a cornerstone of my focus for the next year and a half. It means continuing to come home to this work in the face of ongoing collapse.
For whatever reason, claiming devotion is edgy for me, uncomfortable, even. Committing to staying the course when the road ahead is, and will continue to be, precarious and pockmarked by pitfalls goes against my conditioning.
But splintering myself did not make me more useful to the ongoing movements for justice and liberation. It’s only ever been through present, steady, daily devotion that I’ve even come close to doing right by the people and places I care for and am cared by.
Do your present well is a practice and prayer I am still puzzling through. But it’s one I am grateful to explore in community with you. Let me know your thoughts on how you are answering this call.
With care,
Kate
"Devotion has been (and will continue to be) a North Star for us at Loam."
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