I took this photo last summer in July, on my grandmother’s birthday. It was also the day we scattered the ashes of both her and my late grandfather. It was an occasion marked by mourning and grief, and many of us shed tears, but the act of making the climb together also brought laughter and a strong sense of connection as we trudged up the ridge. The weather was not optimal for hiking. Rain fell for most of the ascent, and the wind made the climb to the ridge feel longer and colder than it should have. And yet, the mood of the group was undeniably joyful. My grandparents had passed down a love of rigorous hiking, so this kind of effort felt familiar to us. We were mostly adults, apart from my one-year-old cousin, and whatever solemnity the occasion held was softened by humor. We joked about the literal weight of carrying twenty pounds of ashes up a mountain.
What stands out to me now is not the contrast between grief and joy, but their coexistence. The two were not in conflict. They moved together through the same bodies, in the same moment, shaped by the same place.Though we often try to separate them, Claudia Eppert suggests that in the Anthropocene, joy and grief are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. There is a real power in the vulnerability of grief, but a future defined only by that grief would be difficult to endure. To remain balanced, we must allow ourselves to hold both sadness and the possibility of something else at the same time.
This is where joy returns, not as an escape, but as something grounded in the same embodied experience. It emerges through presence, through physical engagement with the world around us. There is a particular kind of joy that comes from feeling rooted in the natural world. When we begin to understand that we are not separate from nature, but part of its fabric, that connection becomes a source of strength.
In this sense, joy becomes a kind of survival tool. It allows us to recognize our relationship to everything else and gives us the emotional endurance to continue. By leaning into a form of joy that remains grounded in the earth, and that does not deny grief but exists alongside it, we find the energy to move beyond a purely dystopian outlook and continue the work of repairing and reshaping our shared story.
In addition to scholarly research such as that done by Dodds et. al, spoken word poets also commonly investigate the entwined nature of joy and grief. Below, is one of my favourite spoken word poets, Harry Baker:
