A monk came to Joshu, asking,
“When times of great difficulty come to visit us, how should we meet them?” Joshu replied, “Welcome”.
~Koan by Tang dynasty Zen master Zhaozhou Congshen (Japanese: Joshu Jushin)

Kokushobi, pyrocumulonimbus, solastalgia:
new words and koans for our times

Dear Subscriber First Name,

It’s been a tough summer, hasn’t it?

Heatwaves across Western Europe, Japan, and the eastern United States. Torrential rains in Texas and Missouri. Devastating wildfires threatening communities in Canada, France, Greece and Spain.

Hardly a day passes without another reminder that we are living through the consequences of human-induced climate change. These are not isolated disasters or unfortunate anomalies. They are interconnected signals of a climate system that is being fundamentally reshaped by human activity—a reality that is unfolding before our eyes.

I’ve been struck by how our language is evolving to describe this new reality. In Japan, the meteorological term kokushobi—literally "severely" or "cruelly hot day"—was recently adopted for days when temperatures reach 40°C (104°F) or higher. At the same time, technical terms that once belonged almost exclusively to scientists and meteorologists are becoming part of everyday conversation and news reporting: pyrocumulonimbus, wet-bulb temperature, and catastrophic fire danger, to name a few.

Language shapes how we understand the world. As our climate changes, our vocabulary is expanding to help us name, comprehend, and respond to experiences that are becoming part of everyday life.

Another neologism is solastalgia.

In her book A Fire Runs Through All Things- Zen Koans For Facing the Climate Crisis- Teachings on Earth, Mind and Not-Knowing, Susan Murphy, an Australian Zen teacher, describes her community’s feelings after the megafires of 2019 and 2020 that devoured the forests of the eastern coast of her continent:

“In the aftermath, walking with dread through the ravaged world left by the megafires, we tasted another neologism, solastalgia -grief for loss of precious places, lanscapes, creatures, and ecosystems. This word combines solace, desolation, and nostalgia to describe the incredible sorrow for places desecrated by fires, floods, storms, drought, as well as loss of habitat due to development.”

A few paragraphs down, she refers to the term hyperobject:

“The climate crisis is at times simply too big to even dare see, overwhelmingly painful, and too threatening to all that we have previously known. In this way it is a hyperobject, philosopher Timothy Morton’s term, coined for processes that unfold outside the scale to which human comprehension has evolved. New words for new situations our minds are loathe to scale but now must…”

NB: This sentiment is beautifully expressed in the poem Global Warming by Jane Hirshfield (2006) which I reproduce below.

A very touching moment in Murphy’s book is when out of despair and exhaustion, after months of these raging megafires, and a day before she had to evacuate her temple, Susan Murphy sits outside to talk to the Earth. She follows the instructions that she had been given decades earlier by an aboriginal elder and talks to Mother Earth:

• Find a place that wants you to sit down on the ground.

• Take your time before easing your fingertips a little way into the earth,

• And then, when you feel the connection, speak your name out lout, saying, “This is your daughter/son [name], talking with you, Mother.”

• Take a moment for the question that needs to be asked to arrive in your heart, then speak it out loud and wait for the return touch, the unexpected words that sound in your own heart.

Murphy’s question was:
“What do you need me to know about this?”

The answer she received from Mother Earth:
“Your suffering with me is my care for you”

In a podcast with the Emergence Magazine, Murphy explains how she understands this koan-like response from Mother Earth:
"“ “Your suffering with me is my care for you”—that’s not a vindictive statement. It’s a “wake up to how this works, wake up to this mutuality” that’s so implicit in that response.”

She doesn't suggest that we should get rid of climate grief so that we can become more resilient activists. Quite the opposite. She suggests that our suffering can wake us up to relationship.

The grief we feel when forests burn, species disappear, or communities are devastated can be understood as evidence that the supposedly impermeable boundary between "me" and "the world" isn't actually impermeable. The suffering hurts precisely because we belong.

Murphy describes this as a "deep transforming purpose" in agreeing to share the suffering of the Earth: the suffering can wake us into relationship rather than drive us away from it. 

In other words, the question she is asking of us is:

“Can you allow yourself to know that the suffering of the Earth is not separate from you?”.

And perhaps that is why she calls it a koan. There isn't an intellectual answer that resolves it.

Warmly,

Anne-Marie
Aug 14, 2026
(from co2.earth 426.95 ppm of atmospheric CO2, last year 425.5 ppm, safe level 350 ppm)

PS: If you would like to further explore, see the resources provided below. Also the talking and listening to the Earth practice used by Murphy is the exact practice used in the medicine walks I offer and call Wisdom Walks, Wisdom Walks come in two flavors: (Inner Compass) Wisdom Walk and (Good Ancestor) Wisdom Walk. Contact me to learn more

Poem: Global Warming By Jane Hirshfield

When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.

Originally published in After (HarperCollins, 2006)

Resources for Exploring Susan Murphy’s Work
and Related Topics

• Emergence Magazine: Earth as Koan, Earth as Self (podcast)

• The Dewdrop Dialogues: A Fire Runs Through All Things: Susan Murphy on How We Can Meet the Climate Crisis (podcast)

• Tricycle Magazine: A Koan for These Times- How koans can teach us to embrace uncertainty in the face of the climate crisis (article)

• Pachamama Alliance: Earth Listening Circles

• A past newsletter about my (Inner Compass) Wisdom Walk: Sometimes All You Need is a Wandering Walk in Nature

• A past newsletter about my (Good Ancestor) Wisdom Walk: How Can I be a Good Ancestor?