These days feel like walking on a thin ice over a reservoir of grief so vast, it will surely swallow me and everyone else whole. When people ask me how I am doing I answer that I am okay, but everything isn’t. I do so partly not to embarrass them, partly because I am really ok. But what good is being ok in the world that is so deeply lost.

Things I am grieving or worrying about: those damn Zirkon missiles, genocide of Palestinians, the upcoming elections in the US, the end of Western civilisation, the fact that I can’t register for the courses of my choice in the university, always too much work and too little time, Anya coming soon and us not being ready, the loss of biodiversity.

Things I am grateful for: children, good books, good grades on my intercultural leadership class, songbirds, dance lessons on Tuesday night, everyone who writes to me.

I have finished The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl. I listened to it all, with acknowledgements and publisher credits – I so didn’t want it to end. The audiobook ended at the beginning of my lunchtime walk. It made me grieve a little and because I needed consolation, I turned to the Emergence magazine podcast where Jenny Odell spoke about rock formations and deep time and seeing places in their own history, rather than as containers for our history. This was fitting, as it was in Jenny Odell’s book that I first saw the reference to Margaret Renkl’s book.