Thriving in the Anthropocene: A Druid’s Garden Guide to Visioning, Caring, and Living in this Age

The question that many of us have on our minds is: How do we thrive in this age? There’s a lot to be concerned about. We are seeing the descent of many countries globally into fascism with extremist leaders being elected in multiple developed nations. The recently concluded climate talks in Baku for COP29 were disastrous and the world will blow past the Paris agreement goals likely 10 years sooner than projected…all of which came on the heels of the hottest summer on record. We are seeing an increase everywhere of clear signs of runaway climate change, while politicians are paving the way to drill yet more fossil fuels and don’t even talk about the fact it is happening. Many diverse people are afraid for their safety in this quickly darkening world. And of course, AI is turning all our lives upside down. I feel like we are living in a dystopia, the kind I used to read in books as a teenager and say, “oh, these things could never happen here.”  Well, friends, these things are here.  Many scholars and thinkers have written extensively about this for decades, using historical patterns to predict what will happen to this civilization, so what I’m saying should not be news to most.

Just before sunrise
Just before sunrise

But just because we are living in an age of collapse, this is not a time to give up hope.  Quite the opposite–this is a time to mobilize and act.  Because here’s the thing–as this entire worn-out destructive paradigm is crashing down around us, we are the seeds from which a new paradigm will arise.

There are a few things to remember in these troubled times. First, nature is still outside your doorstep. Nature knows how to heal you and support you now, and she knows how to play a long game. The Earth–and life on this planet–have come out of this kind of situation more than once.  And Earth will do it again.  And, for those of us who can learn to move with her cycles and rhythms, and can listen to her wisdom, we’ll come out of it too. So I keep arguing and sharing that new paradigm that is emerging, while also recognizing what we are all working toward is the work of generations.  For me, that means keeping up the hope, to keep building nature connections and community with all of you, and leaning into the healing power of nature to help keep me balanced and resilient.

And so today, I’m sharing another Druid’s Garden Guide. Now that this blog has well over 600 posts and almost two million words, I’ve been taking some time to organize writing into guides so you can find things easier and I can share them better. These guides are basically like a mini book that you can read and find all of the themed posts on a topic, organized and in order.  The Druid’s Garden blog covers a lot of different areas and is a reflection of my own thought processes and how I write–I have long themes on this blog that I explore in different ways over time, like a spiral.  I return and deepen the themes as my own evolution and experience grow, and as the Awen flows. Since a spiral is rather difficult to navigate, I bring them all together for you.  The first three guides I created this year are A Druid’s Garden Guide to Herbalism, a guide on Physical Land Healing and Permaculture, and a guide on Metaphysical Land Healing with Rituals, Songs, and Ceremonies.  I have many more guides to write, but, today’s guide feels the most pressing: On thriving in the Anthropocene.  So let’s get started!

Visioning The Future and Living the World You Want to Create

Strengthening our collective vision and coming together in community!
Strengthening our collective vision and coming together in community!

A big part of how I focus on surviving this age is working towards a better world than the one I’m living now, and envisioning a future that is brighter than what society tells me to expect. And there is much to focus on that is good: communities and people all over the globe are creating surprisingly similar value systems to create more care-filled and nurturing interactions with each other and the planet. And the other very good news is that we have models of human cultures that have care and reciprocation at the center and that have lived in balanced ways with their ecosystems.  More and more Indigenous people are publicly sharing alternative stories, perspectives, and paradigms that give us workable alternatives that people are putting into practice.  This is why I feel like I can keep going, regardless of how hard things get.

The Future is Here: An Emerging Paradigm of Hope: This is the most hopeful and powerful thing I’ve ever written, where I demonstrate that a positive, powerful vision for the future is already emerging in many different communities, all over the world.  It took me almost 20 years of participating in multiple communities to see where all the connections and threads linked up.  But reading this gives me joy and hope–and I hope it does for you too. So start here!

The New Paradigm for the Future: What do we do next?  How do we move forward and keep pushing our earth-centered, heart-centered, and reciprocal new paradigm forward? This is the follow-up to the Emerging Paradigm of Hope piece above. Here are many suggestions to get started. I hope you’ll read and add your own suggestions as we build this new world together.

Visioning the Future: The Web of Relationships: My third post on visioning where I outline some of what I personally would love to see in the future: a sustainable, relational, and connected world with cultural protections against narcissism and care-filled interactions with nature. A lofty goal, but one many of us are striving for every day!

Visioning the Future through the Bardic Arts: Creating Vision, Creating Hope:  In this post, I offer some perspectives for ways to envision a brighter present and future using bardic arts (creative practices such as painting, music, drawing, writing, etc). Remember–we have to have a vision in order to bring it to the future!

Diary of a Land Healer: A Vision of a Healed Landscape and the Power of Hope. Sharing the vision of hope on your own land is part of the work we need to go! Go to your rivers and your forests and your deserts and tell them of the future we will create together.

Beyond the Anthropocene: Druidry into the Future.  Nature spirituality, including traditions like druidry, hold what I consider to be a huge role in transitioning us into a better paradigm and approaching the world with care, deep relationships, and wisdom.

Bringing in the Care: Rekindling Reciprocal and Care-Based Interactions with All Beings

As I have shared many times, we have to build the world we want to see, with every interaction and every breath. I firmly believe that that world begins in care.  Care is the foundation of respectful interactions with all beings.  Care is the foundation upon which we can engage in nurturing and reciprocal relationships with others.  Care is the opposite of narcissism, the destructive belief that “I am better than you”, a belief that is currently shattering our world.

My Book: Sacred Actions: Living the Wheel of the Year through Earth-Centered Spiritual Practices.  My entire book is rooted in two principles: that every moment of each day can be an opportunity to engage in sacred, care-based actions, and that we are better humans when we embrace care.  Care is the foundation of this book and every activity in it.

Permaculture’s Philosophies of Care and Awakening the Heart: Through this I talk about the deadening and re-kindling of the heart and introduce permaculture’s ethics of care: people care, fair share, self-care, and most importantly, earth care.  A good place to start to think about care and the relationship between yourself and the world.

Paper Wasps, Care, and Gratitude: A perspective on care, especially caring for parts of nature that are dangerous or challenging to us.  This is the first thing I wrote after the US election results in 2024.

Animism, Permaculture, Ethics, and Care:  A bit part of my own care-based ethics are rooted in the intersection between permaculture ethics and animism. This post explores those connections more deeply.

Kindness as a Radical Act:  Exploring the idea of bringing to our daily interactions kindness, care, consideration, generosity, and attending to the needs of others.  This is especially needed in the present age.

Druidry, Colonialism and the Spirit of the Mountain: One of the things I believe we need to strongly fight against in the lack of care in the Anthropocene is colonialization. If we want to bring this new vision into reality, we have to recognize colonialism, how we perpetuate it, and how we are colonized. And we have to decolonize from all of it.  Here’s one of my own explorations on the topic and the complexities of own own identities and positionalities.

Bringing in the Joy, Happiness, and Wonder

Part of surviving and thriving in this age is never forgetting our own joy, wonder, hope, and bringing those energies to our lives as often as possible.  I think this is such a critical part of today–it is too easy to get bogged down in everything that is going wrong, in the news cycle, and in the death and sadness. I have written a few posts to help us get there–never forget to bring in as much joy to each day as you can.  Surround yourself with kin who will bring joy.

Embracing the Wonder of Nature: Opportunities to explore and embrace the wonder present in nature are available to you all the time! It is just about being open to it, being willing, and seeking out opportunities!

Cultivating a Whimsical Life: Just becuase the broader world is hard doesn’t mean you can’t bring joy and whimsy in.  In fact, this is one of my primary focuses in staying sane and happy.  I love a bit of whimsy with each day.  This post shares many options and opportunities to bring in the whimsy!

Land Healing in Small Ways: Showing Care and Concern for Life: Care can be shown in the smallest ways, and yet these ways bring joy and help keep your feet light upon the path.

Spiritual Self-Care: Managing Your Grief and Emotions

I’ve written a lot on the topic of spiritual and physical self care because I feel like it is one that I have to keep returning to.  This is also why I practice herbalism–becuase herbalism, ultimately, is about using nature directly for healing the mind, body, heart, and spirit.  I have to find a way forward when the thing I love is being destroyed by my fellow humans, and I have to witness that destruction, witness, and hold space for so many things.  There is so much we want to change right now and we can’t. It is a heavy weight to bear. So this series of posts helps us process these feelings, work with them, and work towards self-healing.

Finding the balance in these difficult times
Finding the balance in these difficult times

Taking a Breath: Spiritual Care for Intense Times. A short guide to how to “lean into” your nature spirituality to help engage in self-care during these challenging times.

Straddling the Edge: Deepening and Seeking a Way Forward: Many of us feel like we are straddling the edge, trying to keep one foot in the natural world and our new paradigm while also having to pay our bills, eat, hold jobs, and still live in the remnants of the old. This post explores that experience and makes suggestions for how to move forward.

Living with Climate Change.  In this post, I share many perspectives for living with climate change and the many emotions that people go through as part of this experience.

Herbal Supports for Living in the Age of the Anthropocene and Dealing with Climate Anxiety:  In this post, I offer an overview of the nervous system, adrenals, stress, and how stress impacts the body. Then I share a number of holistic approaches to stress management that you can take, with a special emphasis on nervine and adaptogen herbs that can help you and how to figure out which ones are actually the best.  This is quite an extended and detailed article and I’ve heard that is has been useful to many!

A Druid’s Guide to Dealing with Climate Change: Addressing Deep Emotions and Grief: Resources, research, and psychology to help you understand the emotional stages of climate change and climate grief and practices such as attunement, ritual and emotional work for healing, bardic arts, community sharing, and more.

Reflecting on Climate Change and Processing the Grief of Experience: In this post, written in 2024 at the end of a drought summer, I share my experiences and invite you to share your own.  This is a space for us to feel, share, and simply process our climate grief.

Herbal Grief Ritual for Healing of the Soul: A ritual to help with your grieving process.  A lot of us are grieving the loss of many things right now, and herbs can support you–they are one of nature’s gifts to us to help us through this age.

Addressing Challenging Times with Gratitude for Lessons Learned: A hard lesson, perhaps, but a useful one!

Going Dark Week: An Approach to Spiritual Care and Rejuvenation: This is my favorite retreat of the year, and one that really sustains me for the entire year.  Going dark week!

Cultivating New Skills and Resiliency for Today and Tomorrow

A big part of what we need to do to transition to a life-affirming and regenerative culture is to build new skills that put is closer in relationhip to our basic needs that come directly from the land. I’ve written tons on reskilling and different aspects of reskilling, which will be another guide. In the meantime, here are a few specific practices that I think are important.

Resiliency in the Age of Climate Change for the Homestead and Home Garden: In this post, I share the many approaches and redundant systems we have been developing at the Druid’s Garden Homestead to have our garden and land thrive in the age of the anthropocene.  This includes cultivating a proactive mindset, dealing with temperature extremes with shelter and additional infrastructure, dealing with heat and water stress, as well as air quality issues.  All of these techniques are useful for those who are seeking to grow their own food.

Cultivating Resilience as a Physical and Spiritual Practice. Many methods of thinking about and cultivating resilience both in your everyday life as well as in your spiritual life.  I also have more on resilience under the wheel of the year, below.

Ditch the Screen, Embrace the Green: Part I: Arguments for the Elimination of Screens + Part II: Practices for how to ditch the screen If we want to truly bring in a new paradigm, we have to distance ourselves from the screens–which are the primary purveyor of most of what isn’t great right now.  Working to reduce and eliminate the screen can help you find yourself, build trust in your own instincts and abilities, and re-orient yourself toward nature.

A Wheel of the Year for the Age of the Anthropocene

One of the things I have personally found myself shifting away from  as we move deeper into the age of the Anthropocene are the traditional wheel of the year meanings for my druidry. It depresses me that my own ecosystem has shifted so much that some of these no longer apply at around the right time of year.  I am not excited to celebrate some of these, especially the cross quarters, especially with the traditional themes.  So instead, re-framing the Wheel of the Year for my own druid practice towards the skills I need now has helped my spiritual practices feel more embodied and relevant.

Another wheel I created!

The Wheel of the Year for the Age of the Anthropocene: An overview of the wheel I created to help us all thrive and develop new skills for the Age of the Anthropocene, complete with rituals, activities, meditations and perspectives.

Release at Samhain: We begin at the Celtic and Neopagan New Year, Samhain, where we focus on the first part of the healing process: release. Release can be themed around individual healing, where we work to release pain, trauma, sadness, grief, and suffering. Release can also be focused on helping us move past the old, worn ideas of the recent past that have caused the unfolding of the climate crisis: ideas like infinite growth, the myth of progress, consumerism, colonizing mindsets, and other ideologies that no longer serve us, and that culturally, have led to nearly all of the challenges we face.  Release can also focus on healing our emotions surrounding witnessing the breakdown of the ecosystem and climate firsthand.

Restoration at the Winter Solstice:  The deep grief work of Samhain is completed, and now it is time to rest and heal. When I look out at the landscape here where I live at the winter solstice, it is dark, cold, and bare. The land is hibernating, the animals have gone into their burrows, and the sun–when I see it at all–lies low in the sky.  This is a time for us too, to work for rest and restoration so that we can move forward in the work we want to do in the world.  Restoration is about giving ourselves permission for this rest, not feeling guilty about it, and learning how to build restorative, self-care practices into our lives, even beyond the winter solstice.

Reskilling at Imbolc:  With the hard work of healing behind us, we can now move into cultivating some of the themes that will help us be more responsive, present, and connected to our own lives and how to transition our lives–and those of our communities–into earth-honoring, receptive and balanced living.  Reskilling is the first of these practices and is incredibly powerful and empowering. Reskilling is the work of bringing back traditional skills that often bring us close to the land and learning how to work with the land to provide for our needs. One of the major challenges we face in the age of the Anthropocene is that most of the traditional skills passed on from generation to generation were lost.  By developing a set of new skills–skills practiced by all of our ancestors throughout much of human history–we are more resilient and prepared to meet our needs and the needs of our family, friends, and community.

Resilience at the Spring Equinox:  Resilience is the capacity to endure, to overcome difficulty, and to thrive even when faced with struggles or adversity.  This is particularly hard, especially since most global education systems try to produce the opposite kind of person–a person who is dependent, passive, and looks to others to solve their problems.  Resiliency is a quality we all need to learn to embrace in order to live our best lives, thrive, and do good even in a difficult world.  And if the global pandemic, resulting in political and social instability globally has taught us anything, it’s that the systems we once depended on are breaking down and we will need that resilience in the coming age. Nature is one of our best teachers here, like everywhere else, where we can look to resilient flora and fauna like dandelions, Japanese knotweed, and raccoons for lessons for how to adapt and thrive.  By building this concept into our meditations, rituals, and spiritual practices, we can learn to be strong, brave, and flexible.

Regeneration at Beltane: I see Resilience and Regeneration as two sides of the very important coin in the work of helping humanity create a better future where we can live in balance with other life on this planet. Nature is a master regenerator, and we humans can learn a lot about how to help her regenerate faster.  The challenge, of course, is that nearly all planetary destruction, whether that be habitat loss, ocean acidification, global warming, and the ongoing 6th mass extinction event is caused either directly or indirectly by humans.  One of the most powerful things we can do is to right those scales by taking an active role in healing the land, restoring the land to health, and fostering healthy ecosystems.  This work is best done locally, right outside your door–in your front or back yard, in local parks, in local watersheds.

Revisioning at the Summer Solstice:  By working with our hands, hearts, and minds (reskilling, regeneration, resilience) we can turn ourselves into a force for good. The next step along the 21st century wheel of the year is putting another one of our key human gifts to use through the power of visioning a better world through our creative expression. The more that we are able to counter this with magic of our own, to write our own future story for ourselves, our community, and our world, the more power these better visions will take on. This “revisioning” asks us to use tools of our human birthright: our creativity, the gift of storytelling, music, art, and other bardic gifts to weave the magic of a better future.

Reverence at Lughnasadh:   As we move into the harvest season, we turn our attention to another core practice of responding to today’s age and building a better world: reverence. Reverence is the practice of deep respect, which includes gratitude, honoring, and reciprocation. To revere something is to hold that thing sacred–recognizing its deep and intrinsic value–and allowing us respectful interaction and experience.  Reverence is a balm to the numbness and apathy of the present age–it helps us connect, stay focused, and ground. And of course, it provides a very necessary balm to our living earth and her spirits who are very much in peril.

Receptivity at the Fall Equinox: In its most simple form, receptivity is about openness: openness to new ideas, to change, and new experiences or patterns of life.  It’s about accepting what comes rather than trying to force things in a specific direction.One of the reasons that Receptivity is such a good theme is that it is a counterbalance to the effort-reward cultural narrative that is tied to the Fall Equinox and themes of harvest. There is one enormous problem with the effort/reward theme on a larger cultural level: it belongs to a different age. It belongs to the Holocene, an 8000-11,000 year period of stable climate that allowed humans to develop agriculture, allowed humans to have some predictability about their surroundings and allowed us to develop symbolic understandings like those drawn upon for the modern wheel of the year. It also belongs to the 20th century, when stable careers were common and people would retire from blue-collar jobs with pensions. But we are not in the Holocene any longer, both climate-wise and culturally, and receptivity (along with the other seven themes) helps us be open to what comes. Cultivating receptivity allows us to be more open, aware, and engaged with the world as it is.  It allows us to hold space for what is happening and approach it with gratitude and respect.

Conclusion

There you have it, my friends.  My collected writings–probably both my most difficult, most raw, and yet most hopeful.  This is a topic that I’ve been drawn to so much in the last five or so years, and I’m sure there’s lots more to say.  If there are any things you’d like to see me write on this topic in a future post, please feel free to share.  Blessings to you, yours, and remember that we are not alone. We are in this together, caring for each other and for the living earth.  Embrace the green!

Dana O'Driscoll

Dana O’Driscoll has been an animist druid for 20 years, and currently serves as Grand Archdruid in the Ancient Order of Druids in America (www.aoda.org). She is a druid-grade member of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids and is the OBOD’s 2018 Mount Haemus Scholar. She is the author of Sacred Actions: Living the Wheel of the Year through Earth-Centered Spiritual Practice (REDFeather, 2021), the Sacred Actions Journal (REDFeather, 2022), and Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth (REDFeather, 2024). She is also the author/illustrator of the Tarot of Trees, Plant Spirit Oracle, and Treelore Oracle. Dana is an herbalist, certified permaculture designer, and permaculture teacher who teaches about reconnection, regeneration, and land healing through herbalism, wild food foraging, and sustainable living. In 2024, she co-founded the Pennsylvania School of Herbalism with her sister and fellow herbalist, Briel Beaty. Dana lives at a 5-acre homestead in rural western Pennsylvania with her partner and a host of feathered and furred friends. She writes at the Druids Garden blog and is on Instagram as @druidsgardenart. She also regularly writes for Plant Healer Quarterly and Spirituality and Health magazine.

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7 Comments

  1. just a thank you. <3

    1. You are welcome! Thank you for reading!

  2. This post came at such a serendipitous time today! Your central theme of care is deeply helpful.

    1. Thank you, Meredith! :). Care and connection are the answers.

  3. My heart aches for the Swannenoa and Nolachucky rivers of North Carolina. I am sending them full restoration.

  4. First, thank you SO much for all your writings and encouragement in our difficult world.
    I wanted to make you aware of a site called Fix the News (you may already know about it, but just in case…) about positive things that are happening in science, human rights and the environment. It sometimes helps to read it!

  5. I’m excited to go back though these posts, and to see the ones I’ve missed! Thank you for going to the trouble of compiling them.

    I also wanted to say that your book, Sacred Actions, had a huge positive impact on my spiritual practice and the way I live. Thank you so much for writing it.

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