“Mom, you remember that day we saw kids killing nature?”
That’s what my 4-year-old said before breakfast this morning, his voice calm and clear. He was asking a real question, about something we saw a few days ago.
Something that clearly hasn’t left him.
We were at the park, just after enjoying a hike.
It was one of those late summer afternoons where everything feels a little softer.
The breeze carried a hint of fall - and also a zapping sound from across the way.
I looked, and there they were: three teenagers waving those electric fly swatters.
The kind shaped like tennis rackets, with batteries that zap anything they touch.
They were outside. In a park. Swinging at bugs. Laughing. Hunting for anything that moved.
Curren and I were appalled. We looked around for some parents.
There they were: sitting in their air-conditioned, still-running cars, watching, saying nothing.
I couldn’t make sense of it. Why hand a kid essentially a weapon (because that’s what it is, even if it looks like a toy) and send them into a living ecosystem?
Sure, I get it. Flies in your home are annoying. But outside, bugs are just… being. That’s their home.
We didn’t say anything directly to the kids or the parents, but we spoke loud enough to ourselves that our frustration hung in the air - frustration that, apparently, gripped our 4-year-old.
And now, days later, he’s still asking about it.
“Killing nature,” he called it.
And he isn’t wrong.
I hesitate to call myself overly sensitive.
I am, in some ways. I feel a lot.
Partly because I live my life without blinders.
I don’t usually turn away from the “ugly.”
I remember being seven months pregnant and feeling physically ill seeing how many people were sleeping on the streets of San Francisco.
I remember the nausea of knowing I couldn’t help a single one of them.
That powerlessness did not sit well with me.
I guess that makes me an empath.
But I’m not glorifying that, at all.
I say it because I’m also very direct. Critical. Harsh, even.
I call out nonsense when I see it.
I’m not always polite or patient, though I try to come toward truth in a way someone can actually hear.
I think it’s important to know yourself as a human if you’re a storyteller.
Not to glorify your best traits, but to recognize your shortcomings, too. In accepting your own, you can accept others flaws more readily.
As an Enneagram 1, I’m well-acquainted with my worst tendencies.
I’m my own worst critic. And one of my biggest insecurities is the very thing I’m most drawn to: the stories I can’t let go of. Stories that many find difficult.
A friend watched my latest film the other day and noted, “Another devastating film.” He’s right. It is. It’s heartbreaking.
Although I try to understand my orientation in the world, I still struggle to explain why and how I want to tell stories of brokenness.
There could be many reasons. But hear me out when I wonder: maybe it’s because I am actually deeply hopeful.
Not naive. Not hopeless. Just hopeful (and also realistic).
I often feel a little silly caring about moments like the bug zapper, and stories like this, when the world feels like it’s upside down.
But I also know (deeply, stubbornly) that the world is and always has been upside down.
History proves it.
There have always been wars, injustice, heartbreak, failure.
The house is always on fire.
And still:
People love.
They build.
They make music.
They tell stories.
Maybe it’s wise to remember that making something (and telling a story) is a form of resistance. A small act of rebellion.
So I try to engage in the ways I know how. I teach my kids right from wrong. I volunteer and give when I can. And I make work that gives hope - not false hope, not tidy resolutions - but something that breathes in uncertainty and keeps breathing anyway.
Anne Lamott writes:
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”
I return to that often.
Because hope is not a mood.
It’s not passive optimism.
It’s not pretending you’re not scared.
It’s a practice.
Hope is showing up anyway.
Hope is knowing your art, your advocacy, your love might not change everything
but it might change something.
Hope isn’t certainty. But it’s not nothing.
It might be the most important something we have.
So I remind myself: Just do the next right thing, just tell the next story.
And maybe part of that hope - the durable kind - comes not just from protecting nature, but from learning to accept our own.
To stop trying to kill off the parts of ourselves that feel too much, care too loudly, question too deeply.
To stop killing our own nature.
Maybe my work is, in part, learning to let those parts live. Learning to teach my kids how to let their full selves live, too.
Because if we’re going to raise children who notice when someone is killing nature, we have to raise them to recognize and honor their own.