Announcing Notes from the Inflection Point
A Space for Expressing Climate Emotions
Hi friends,
From the very first post, Light Hive has explored applying mindful practice to the polycrisis—the interconnectedness of our environmental, social, political, and technological crises. We've explored how practices like intentionality, compassion, and play can support us in navigating these challenging times.
I am happy to announce a new venture, one that I am co-creating with Dr.
, an aerospace engineer and organizer, called Notes from the Inflection Point (NIP).NIP is a companion space to Light Hive, offering a more expressive exploration of the polycrisis, particularly climate grief. To use Lou’s language, while Light Hive offers “concrete” practical tools and teachings, NIP leans toward shorter reflections and creative processing.
If you're already content with Light Hive's offerings, you're welcome to stay put. I will cross-post selectively, turning Light Hive into a hub. However, for a dedicated space to explore climate grief and receive every NIP post, we invite you to subscribe.
NIP’s first post, Lou’s beautiful, atmospheric writing, is featured below.
Light Hive uses dharma-inspired frameworks, performance research, and play to explore identity and the polycrisis. Subscribe for a newsletter every other Monday.
Hello!
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the interconnected nature of complex climate challenges, you are welcome here. This newsletter explores ways to process and express climate-related emotions like love and fear together.
With a voice dedicated to seeing things afresh, again, and with agency, we offer readers grounded reflection alongside a bittersweet documentation of a home that still, for now, exists.
Through bi-weekly posts, Drs. Lou Baker and Logan Juliano will share reflections on action, adaption, and climate grief, such as Lou’s “Inversion” piece below this intro. We aspire to bring in other voices working on these themes and welcome your input and contributions.
Though many of us feel isolated in our grief, we are far from being alone, and our communities are a source of strength.
We hope you join us.
Inversion
By Lou Baker
Don’t ever forget the way the snow blanketed the ground shin-deep, knee-deep sometimes (when you were small, anyway), even within the urban bubble. It fell in November or October, the first snowfall soft and gentle, white flakes brushing the frost-coated husks of grass when they fell. They stuck on the hard frozen ground and transformed the earth from brown to white in an hour.
Don’t ever forget the layers of snow that accumulated, each successive snowfall compacting the layer below. Each layer’s texture was determined by the temperature and humidity profiles of the atmosphere when it fell, and sifting below the surface was like paging backwards through the earth’s diary. Sometimes it was glittering powder, stirring with each breath of wind. Sometimes it was wet and dense and moldable, and you could roll snowballs until they were too heavy to push. Sometimes it was capped with an icy shell, like bright white crème brulee.
Don’t ever forget the way it caught the light: how it was soft and textureless when the sky was overcast, how the brightness of it hurt your eyes on sunny days, how it sparkled at night in the yellow glow of the sodium streetlights.
Don’t ever forget the sound of the snow as you walked over it, your boots crunching or squeaking or maybe making no sound at all. The snowplows left a thin layer of compacted snow to cover up the ice, and you could hear it groan under tires when a car rolled by. The wind sliced through your skin, every single day for months, and your toes were like numb rocks in your boots and your fingers ached from the cold, hurt so much that you couldn’t think of anything else until you got inside again. You would work up a sweat shoveling snow, and your ankles would be bright red and numb, wet with meltwater when you took off your boots.
Don’t ever forget that you could ice skate and cross-country ski until you got bored of it.
Don’t ever forget the way the snow stuck around for so long that you got tired of it in February, got angry at it in March, asked God why your parents chose to live in this place in April. It finally melted in May, only to come back again the next week, once, twice, again. You could never quite trust that the snow was gone until the downy white puffs from the cottonwood trees took its place in June.
Never forget how June felt like an impossible fiction until it arrived, when one day you looked around and saw that the earth was green and warm and sunny. You could let out your breath and unhunch your shoulders, until September when you felt a chill in the air and wished you had worn a jacket.
Don’t ever forget how the cold air sounded as you waited for the bus in the morning, before the sun rose, when only the bright and silent stars of Orion kept you company. You could hear the highway, distant but sharp and clear across the frozen marsh.
You didn’t know it at the time, but there was a reason the sound carried farther over the frozen ground. The temperature gradient in the air refracted the sound waves down, towards you, instead of letting them radiate away in all directions equally. This temperature gradient—when the air was colder near the ground and warmer above—was called an inversion.
The inversion was stable: heat rises, so cold air on the ground stayed on the ground, and warm air aloft stayed aloft. It was as if the atmosphere was hibernating, just like so many small animals beneath it. Most things felt stable back then. It seemed as though you would live the same winter over and over again for the rest of your life.
But the inversion only persisted until the pale sun rose and warmed up the ground ever so slightly. That bit of heat, though it seemed so weak, broke the stability and replaced it with movement, turbulence, wind.
One day someone may ask you, friend, tell me again about the snow. Don’t ever forget that the earth was once this cold.
Bio
Lou Baker (they/she) is a scientist and organizer. They hold a PhD in Aerospace Engineering and studied how wind and water currents carry microplastics in different environments. They now organize workers in higher education.