We are all alive.

Right now. Together.

The world feels impossibly loud right now. The news doesn’t so much cycle as it blares—alarm after alarm echoing across our days. It is easy to feel disoriented, like we are riding a tilt-a-whirl inside a tilt-a-whirl. In all that noise, where do we even plant our feet to feel steady?

I don’t have the answer. But the other morning, I caught the faintest whisper of something grounding. The light was just beginning to warm the backyard as I let our small and mighty dog Vivian into the cool spring air. She stepped onto the porch with the easy confidence of a creature free of deadlines and taxes. Nose tilted to the breeze, she read the morning like a newspaper written in scent.

I stood behind her, suddenly aware of how little I understand—the invisible trails of scent, the subtle sounds, the language of instinct she so fluently interprets. There is so much I do not know, and even more I cannot even begin to perceive.

Our quiet moment was broken by a squirrel hurling a string of high-pitched provocations toward Vivian. Not one to let an insult go unanswered, she rocketed down the yard, a blur of defiant barks and offended fury. The squirrel escalated the drama, and suddenly the whole yard came alive—songbirds darted for cover, magpies scolded from the fence line, and far above, red-tailed hawks remained watchful over their nest in the neighbor’s cottonwood. Amid it all, the elm trees, momentarily swayed by the commotion, kept quietly doing what they do—stretching into spring with new leaves so fresh they were not visible just days earlier.

As I stood there, watching the scene unfold, I felt the potent truth of my own irrelevance to it all. None of it required me. Viscerally, that felt like a huge relief. We humans are so often conditioned to believe we are the central actors in the story of Earth, perched at the top of some great and authoritative pyramid. But what if we understood—really understood—how marginal we are to most of life’s elegant and complex choreography? Would we carry ourselves with more humility?

Relaxing a bit, I then noticed Vivian’s food and water bowls. The irrigation lines running to the elm trees, the neighbor’s cottonwood—home to the hawks—growing increasingly sick from years without care. The sandy soil beneath the apple trees, once part of the creek’s floodplain, now pulling away in slow erosion.

As it turns out, we are not as peripheral as my whimsical moment suggests. We are deeply entangled with non-human lives all around us, and the momentum of the United States right now remains so willfully unaware of just how much the earth depends on our choices. Wildlife, plants, and nature’s rhythms need us to shape our built environments with care, to preserve paths to food and water, and to cultivate a culture of compassion that extends beyond our own well-being.

In this era of accelerating climate change, the stakes are no longer theoretical. The year 2024 was the hottest in recorded history. Across the globe, people are migrating across borders—not only for political refuge, but in search of safety from rising seas, relentless wildfires, unyielding storms, and the slow disappearance of habitable ground. While personal responsibility is important and matters, much more from society is required. We need climate action woven into the fabric of our collective lives—into national policy, federal priorities, economic decisions, and the daily choices made in city halls and statehouses.

It is disorienting—and deeply disheartening—to watch policies of real consequence shaped by phantom profits, presidential and political vendettas, and theatrical displays of power. When American leadership mocks climate science, fires civil servants, and maligns diverse American communities, we lose sight of something more enduring: our shared responsibility to life itself.

The future does not need more bravado. It needs care. It asks us to take responsibility for the ways American choices ripple outward—across ecosystems, across borders, across generations. It calls us to act with attention, humility, and generosity. To recognize ourselves in the people—and animals—seeking safety from rising seas and political storms. What lies ahead won’t be met by dominance, but by devotion. By reverence. And by a kind of courage that chooses care, again and again.