Purpose: To face the feelings of anger, fear, grief and despair that may come up when looking at what we have done to our planet.

Length: 2.5 hours

Opening - 10 minutes  

• One minute of silence
• Check-in
• Poem or reading, for example:

Chet Raymo, Lighting a Candle: Quotations on a Spiritual Life, 26
Wendell Berry, Earth Prayers, 102

(see Resources section below for readings)

Review of Agreements - 10 minutes
Check-in about how the agreements worked in Session One and any recommendations for improvement.

Open Questions II: Despair – 55 minutes
For this session, the open questions are written in advance by the facilitators on newsprint and placed so they are visible to everyone. The facilitator asks the group to form pairs, preferably with someone they have not worked with yet. The pairs sit facing each other and decide who is Partner A and who is Partner B. The facilitator, who, if needed, will be in one of the pairs to create an even number of participants, instructs the groups to begin with Partner A reading the first question to Partner B and listening to the answer. Partner A will continue to read the questions one by one and listen to Partner B. Then the partners thank each other and switch roles. There are two minutes for responding to each question. The listening partner may gently inform the speaking partner when two minutes have passed to make sure the speaking partner has enough time to respond to all the questions.

Alternatively, ‘A’ and ‘B’ could choose to do the same question in turn, alternating their responses as they work through all the questions. The following are the suggested sequence of questions:

• Doing my carbon footprint made me feel that. . .
• Ways I avoid and/or address these feelings are. . .
• To be alive in this time of global crisis, the feelings/emotions that are hard for me are. . .
• It feels to me as though the condition of the Earth is becoming. . .
• When I imagine the world we are leaving our children, I feel. . .

When all the pairs have finished, the facilitator invites everyone to come back into a circle to share, in a go-round, their experience with this exercise.

Break – 15 minutes

Spontaneous Writing – 40 minutes
For this process, borrowed from Joanna Macy,  the facilitator chooses a word, a theme or a phrase relevant to the despair work just completed, writes it on newsprint and posts it.  

One possible half sentence:  "Faced with this painful reality, our task is to…"

The facilitator invites everyone to get a pen or pencil and blank paper.  The participants are invited to put these tools aside for a moment and relax as they read the phrase.  After a few moments, the facilitator invites them to pick up their pen or pencil and write or draw or scribble - spilling out, pouring out whatever comes to mind, "playfully or prayerfully" letting come what comes, without any requirements about spelling, grammar, or making sense.  "Suggest that people continue moving their pen or pencil when nothing comes, just repeating the last word, drawing circles or whatever."  The facilitator tells the group that they will not be asked to share the contents of what they write.  After fifteen minutes of writing, the group is asked to come back into the circle and each person is invited to share their experience for two to three minutes – how the exercise struck them, what surprised them – either with the whole group or in smaller groups of three or four, depending on the available time.

Homework – 10 minutes
1.      As you move through your everyday environment, pay attention to particular aspects of the natural world: a plant, a landscape, a view, whatever draws your attention.  Notice when you feel drawn to one in particular.  Imagine that it has “chosen” you, inviting you to attend to it.  Take a few moments to stop and be with it each day, or as often as possible.  Allow this experience to become part of your participation in the Earth Circle. (See Resources section for Session Three Homework Assignments 1-2)

2.     Read the entire Earth Charter. An explanation of what the Earth Charter is can be found at: www.earthcharter.org. The document itself is available at http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/2000/10/the_earth_charter.html

3.    Continue to check CCC newsfeed, or www.grist.org or another climate news site daily. When reading the newsfeed, notice examples of the three levels of the great turning: holding actions, structural changes, transformation of consciousness.

4.    Have a conversation with your buddy about any of the above.

Closing Circle – 10 minutes

• Facilitator thanks everyone for participating.
• Invite participants to take a moment to focus on their experience of this session, to allow a word or short phrase to emerge that describes where they are right now.  Ask for a volunteer to write down these offerings as each person goes around and shares this word or short phrase.  Then the volunteer reads the words or phrases as an “ending poem.”

Copyright © 2009 Earth Circles Workbook.

All rights reserved.

In a dark time the eye begins to see.  And this is the paradox: that darkness is the mother of beauty, that the extinction of light is a revelation…. Perhaps it is only in the dark times that the pale light of intelligence, going out from the eye, can make its way in the world without being washed away by the fierce light of the sun. Perhaps it is only in the dark times that the eye and mind, turning to each other, can cooperate in the delicate and impassioned art of seeing.

Chet Raymo, quoted by Molly Young Brown, ed., Lighting a Candle: Quotations on a Spiritual Life (Center City, Minn.: Hazeldon, 1994), 26.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, quoted by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, eds., Earth Prayers From Around the World (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 102.


The deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans. The other-than-human modes of being are seen as having no rights. They have reality and value only through their use by the human. In this context the other than human becomes totally vulnerable to exploitation by the human, an attitude that is shared by all four of the fundamental establishments that control the human realm:  governments, corporations, universities, and religions - the political, economic, intellectual and religious establishments. All four are committed consciously or unconsciously to a radical discontinuity between the human and the nonhuman.

Thomas Berry, The Great Work (New York: Random House, 1999), 4.