Don’t Go Back to Sleep

Sep 13, 2026 12:31 pm

Dear friends,

On our way to the Sierras this summer, we stopped at a bulldozer-shaped building. Our son loves construction vehicles, so we had fun touring the office and eating lunch outside.

Pulling back onto the highway, my wife began to turn across several lanes of traffic. From the passenger seat, I saw a car speeding towards us. I shouted, "Stop, stop, STOP!" She hit the brakes. I'd been blocking her view and she hadn't seen it. We were fine—though everyone was rattled.

So much in our world feels like that to me right now—especially the climate emergency.

Perspective Matters

I've been reading a lot about climate lately—the science, the policy.

A glacier collapsed in Nepal and wildfires tore across Europe. Both made world headlines. But the deaths of at least 35,000 people during Europe's heatwaves this summer barely registered. Meanwhile new fossil fuel infrastructure is being approved, and new gas plants are being proposed to power data centers.

The science behind the climate crisis is clear and has been for decades. We have the technology to transition to clean, cheap, renewable energy. What we lack is political will—and a mass movement large enough to force the kind of rapid change we need to hit the brakes on fossil fuels.

My wife wasn't driving carelessly. She simply couldn't see. I wasn't wiser or more alert—I just had a seat with a clear view.

Two Kinds of Suffering

Dharma practice trains us to turn toward what's true, including the things we'd rather not know—impermanence, old age, sickness, death.

But there's a difference between inevitable suffering and injustice. There's a difference between an unexpected diagnosis or sudden loss, and tens of thousands dying in heatwaves intensified by global heating. Dying (or losing your home, your livelihood, your family, or your community) in a climate disaster is the result of choices that specific people, companies, and governments have made—and continue to make—to place short-term profit over the welfare of life on our planet.

The first kind of suffering asks us to accept what cannot be changed. The second kind asks something else entirely. Practice gives us the clarity to tell them apart, and the courage to do something about it.

What I find hardest isn't the grief—or fear, or anger. It's the strength of the pull to drift back to sleep. Everything around us rolls along as if we had unlimited time to figure this out. Turn on the news, walk down the street, and it's business as usual.

Staying awake doesn't mean flooding ourselves with the news. It means cultivating the capacity, together, to keep looking, to feel what's evoked, and to listen deeply for how we're called to respond.

There's a koan in my heart. A question that my children's eyes keep asking, that the trees, birds, and crickets keep asking: what is the most important thing I can do to help?

Right now, for me, that means writing and speaking about this plainly. (It also means working to protect free and fair elections here at home—the nearest lever I can reach.) Yours will probably look different.

No one knows where the tipping points are, nor how this will all go. But we know enough—enough about what is happening, what is causing it, where we're heading, and what we need to do.

Everything is asking us to step up.

In kindness and strength,
Oren

P.S.

If you'd like to explore how practice can support us during these times, join my weekly online group, Clear Dharma Sangha. This Wednesday we begin our fall series on Insight Meditation. Learn more, join, or drop in any time here.

The eight-month Immersion in NVC also starts this weekend. Learn more and apply here.

Here's some of what I've been reading:

Bill McKibben, "Our Last Best Chance to Cool the Earth."

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, "I read the new UN Climate Report so you don't have to."