Re-Seeding Imaginations Spring Book Club Check-in
"Earth Emotions Book Club: Join Our Spring Discussion with Author Glenn Albrecht"
Hello Re-Seeding Imaginations Community!
I wanted to drop in and do a quick Book Club check-in. As you may recall, our Spring Book Club Selection is “Earth Emotions” by Glenn Albrecht.
We will begin our two-part Zoom call book discussions in May ( May 31st at 1pmPST) , and we will also host the author himself for an interactive live Q&A in June. Both will be recorded for those who cannot make the live discussion.
In the spirit of reciprocity, I offer a Book Club, featuring monthly live discussions and a private chat, to those who generously support my creative writing efforts here. Reciprocity is a core value for me, culturally.
In the spirit of inclusion, I made the decision not to paywall any of my posts. Inclusion and equity are core values for me, culturally.
I am deeply grateful for the support from so many who genuinely want to nourish my creative writing endeavors, who recognize that their gift supports the cultural work needed to birth new worlds. Those who want to uplift an Indigenous woman's voice in these turbulent and transformative times.
I feel your support as a relational and authentic embodiment of a little vestige of the gift economy. I love practicing reciprocity in a world steeped in transactionality. It's a radical act.
The primary purpose of a gift economy is to strengthen social relationships and build community, where people care for and support one another, which is at the heart of what I strive to cultivate through my rhizomatic sharing in "Re-seeding Imaginations" and also with the world I'm dreaming of and seeding for future generations.
To join the book club discussions, become a paid subscriber here:
In the tender space where human hearts meet the breathing Earth, Glenn Albrecht's "Earth Emotions" takes root and unfurls. Like ancient seeds awakening after long dormancy, this book remembers the intimate language that once flowed between people and place, while planting new linguistic seedlings for our changing times.
Albrecht, an Elder-listener to the Australian landscape, gifts us terms like "solastalgia; ” that soul-ache we feel when the home-places we love transform before our eyes. His words map the journey from our deep ancestral belonging through the severed relationships of the Anthropocene, where human hands have reshaped Earth's body without honoring her wisdom or cycles.
What makes this book a medicine bundle for our times is Albrecht's refusal to linger only in grief. Like the first green shoots after wildfire, he cultivates hope through his vision of the "Symbiocene" - a future time of reciprocity where humans remember ourselves as relatives to all living things. Through storytelling, philosophical exploration, and clear-eyed witnessing, Albrecht invites us to tend the soil of our emotions, recognizing that our feelings about the Earth determine how we care for it.
This book is an invitation to remember our place in the family of things, to cultivate emotional intelligence that honors both the grief and joy of being human in relationship with our only home. In reading it together, may we strengthen the mycelial networks of understanding between us, and between our hearts and the heart of the world.
Albrecht introduces several new terms like "solastalgia," "symbiocene," and "terrafuture." Which of these concepts resonated with you most strongly, and why?
How is the reading coming along, for those of you who are already on the Book Club pathway? Feel free to check in down in the comments on where you are in the book, and what is coming up for you. I am reading this book for the second time as I host this Book Club, and I am savoring all the many layers of depth in this book, and how it’s engaging a curiosity for new neologisms ( new words) that can emerge as we work to midwife a new world.
Looking forward to hearing from you, drop a line and let me know how your reading is coming along, and what is already emerging for you as you learn from Glenn’s thought-provoking tome.
After finishing chapter two, Albrecht's lexicon for psychoterratic emotions and feelings and the lived examples he shares from the Upper Hunter Valley plays the role of a therapist unlocking stored memories and blocked feelings of solastalgia. Professionally, I'm transitioning out of working as a landscaper for a company that does not share my ecologically centered values to stewarding a piece of land to grow food, medicine, and native nursery plants. It feels liberating to grapple with the four years of emotional repression I've undergone in order to keep my family afloat, and so far this book has helped me a great deal to put these complex feelings into words. I'm looking forward to the chapters conveying a hopeful future of more in tact people and places.
I am about halfway through chapter 2. I'm reading this book a bit slower than I usually do to let this new lexicon sink in and marinate a bit, feeling it and living it rather than just trying to understand it intellectually. Thanks for introducing me to this book. I just recently reread Braiding Sweetgrass and this is a nice complement of that!
I am also grateful to my library system! I live in rural Colorado but we have a marvelous library system that allows us to borrow books from libraries throughout the state. I live in Fraser, and the book came from Adams State in Alamosa, a 4 hour journey across our beautiful landscape.