Countdown to Earth Day 2016: #2 Take Care of Yourself

So you’ve already signed A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment, and you don’t want Earth Day (April 22) to go by unobserved. What can you do? Over the next 21 days, I will be offering practical and productive suggestions for how you can honor the Earth this Earth Day.

Caring for the Earth can be overwhelming sometimes.

If you’re just getting started, don’t try to do it all at once. Find a place to start. Find your focus. Not every cause must be your cause. Find a cause you are passionate about, something that fuels your spirit. Here’s a Pagan Activist Starter Kit to get you going.

Build on your strengths. Not all activism happens in the streets. Making real change needs all kinds of citizens: investigators, communicators, builders, resisters, nurturers, networkers. Find out what kind of changemaker you are. Take the quiz at “The Story of Stuff”.

Take care of yourself. Don’t forget to breathe. Take time for your self. Beware of burnout. Drink lots of water. Pray. Keep coming back to that which sustains you, whether you call it “the Gods”, “God”, “the Goddess”, “the Ancestors”, “the Spirits of the Land”, or just “Spirit”.

Walk by yourself at night under the dark sky. Recognize that you only have one life, that you have more power than you realize, and that there is a grace and a joy that comes from using that power for something bigger than yourself. But also recognize that the climate crisis is complicated — no one person is going to solve it by themselves.

Know that you don’t have to have all the answers, you don’t have to do everything, and you don’t have to be perfect.