A few years ago, I moved to Athens to be closer to my best friend. She was the only person I visited multiple times a year, and being with her in that city made me fall in love with the place. Every visit felt like a dream. We talked like we only had a few days left to live; we ate the best food in the world; we survived our mornings on iced coffee; we smoked Greek tobacco in tavernas until the wee hours of the morning. At the end of 2023, when I found myself at a loose residential end after thriving in the London gift economy, I floated the idea of moving to Athens. We had discussed how much fun it would be for years. She quickly found me an apartment in a neighbourhood I didn’t know but was excited to discover, and two months later I arrived. I was persuaded that I was about to have the best year of my life, being physically close, finally, to the person I was closest to emotionally. It did end up being the best year of my life. Sadly, my most profound sadness that year, though, was her. 

I don’t ever expect to know what happened for her, and even now I struggle to put the pieces together of how our relationship could have so dramatically transformed in the blink of an eye. I arrived in Athens and everything was different. I spent the better part of a year trying to reach her, and in the moments I did I was elated. But something would settle between us again almost immediately, an invisible impasse that I could not find the edge of, no matter how long I struck out searching. Every few months I asked for her help in getting past it. I am sure a big part of her wanted to, and we would talk about it. But neither of us could find the words for the truth: the thing that was settling between us, the chasm opening up, was coming from her. 

It took me 18 months to realise that my best friend simply did not want to be my friend anymore, and it broke my heart. There had been some relationships I had believed would be as permanent as my life is long, and she was top of that list. It was utterly beyond my imagination throughout our friendship, and the 18 months of struggle, that our friendship could ever end. But it did. And not because of an event or a conversation. Simply, I woke up one morning and looked at a brief and impersonal message she had sent me, and I suddenly no longer had the energy to cross that impasse. In that same moment, I realised that all of my desperate and anxious striving to banish it had come from the painful awareness that if I failed, she would not attempt it for us. For 18 months, I had been bailing water out of a boat that was not only sinking, but had been stripped of its sails and oars; even if it could be patched up, there was no way to move past where we were. 

After my heart healed, I felt lighter than I had in months. Around the same time, an entire branch of my family tree broke away from the rest of us with no explanation. At any other time in my life I would have chased them down, in both anger and determination to set things right. But I had learned my lesson — that the world will not bend to my will, even when that will is full of love. I let them go because I understood that unless I wanted to spend yet more time sick with desperation and anxiety then I had to accept what was, and that only by accepting what was could I ever have a say in what could be.

To be ecological is to be in relationship with the world around you. It took me thirty-two years to understand that means being in relationship with the world as it is around you, so that you may also shape it. It took me thirty-two years to understand that my relationships never die, they merely change; they evolve and take new shapes as I evolve and take new shapes, and as the people I love evolve and take new shapes. I was once the girl that actively ended relationships. Now I sit with them, even as the other walks away, letting the new shape emerge, and letting it shape me. I cannot be friends with the person who does not wish to be my friend, nor family with those who do not wish to be my family. To believe so, as I did for so long, is wishful thinking, and fantasy has no correlation with ecology. Only by understanding what had become of my world, by plunging into an honest relationship with those who walked away, did I finally grasp that I do not wish to have friends and family who can so readily behave as if they are not that. I pulled my head out of the sand and gasped for air. 

I have the sensation that our collective fantasy is cracking, and through those cracks both pain and possibility is emerging. The fantasy of living well under exploitative, extractive systems can no longer be maintained as those systems collapse in on themselves, revealing nothing more than empty promises and rudderless leadership. We are each faced with a choice to either independently polish that fantasy so that it shines bright enough to blind us to the world as it is— our impending ecological collapse, biodiversity loss, climate catastrophes, economic losses and energy failures—or to face down exactly this moment in history so that we may yet, hopefully, have some say in our future. I am surprised by how many are choosing the latter, mounting opposition across the world to whatever piece of the corrupt puzzle they can. In the handful of public meetings I have attended since returning to Scotland, I am astounded by how common place talk of the climate crisis is, or energy security, or wealth inequality. So many of the locals with whom I share this territory are taking matters into their own hands instead of hanging around for more promises to be broken by local systems of bureaucratic government. These conversations extend far beyond the sphere of local politics. One of my favourite moments from the month of June was walking into the kitchen to find my mum and the electrician having a lengthy and detailed conversation about the war in Iran and the tangled web of Washington relationships which has driven its illegality. 

Each of our communities has living memory of hardship and suffering—I come from an area where Thatcher’s name is still regularly used as a curse. But what is curious about the state of the world right now is that so many communities who are not yet suffering hardships as bad as those we remember are preparing themselves, conscious that something is coming down the tracks. Yes, our energy bills are too high and our food bills are climbing higher and the kids can’t find jobs and our local funding is getting cut and these are all terrible things, but rather than blame fleeting circumstances so many folk are, in my opinion, looking out at the world—really looking at it—and grasping at the bigger picture at play, putting words to it, joining the dots, and plotting out its advance. People know something is coming. They are readying themselves, slowly. They are refusing fantasy, for the fantasy cannot sustain even itself anymore. 

Is this what it means to be ecological? To find one’s footing in reality and dig deep?

Some weeks ago, as we sat next to the fire pit, I looked upon the ivy growing around one of the birch trees in our garden and thought about how relationships in and of themselves are neither good nor bad, they just are. We will soon have to remove that ivy, which is determined in its slow suffocation of the birch tree, as we do every year. Their ecological relationship is not positive, but extractive; not mutual but violent. It would be foolish to romanticise the ivy and the birch as a symbiotic relationship, or even one that is working towards the greater whole of the wider ecosystem. Simply, the ivy is a strangler. Only with that acute understanding can we effect any impact to protect the birch, and by protecting it protect its neighbours, too. Only by taking the ivy for what it is can we truly become gardeners—beings capable of seeing what is and responding accordingly. That we may choose how to respond is not a gift of human greatness bestowed upon the world, it is the gift of love bestowed upon each of us. To only see what we wish to be true is to never be at home.

To be ecological, then, is not to return to Eden, but to toil for it—here, now, in the way the world is. But we cannot begin to know the lay of the land if we are not willing to live in it, exactly as it is. And only when we know a thing can we begin to understand how to change it, for the betterment of us all. This is what distinguishes our human actions from the ivy’s compulsion to strangle the birch tree: we get to choose. 

Perhaps this is what it means to be ecological then: to be in the world as it is, to know the world as it could be, and to act with whatever power you have to make it so. This is why we uproot and plant. This is why we hold public meetings and protest and write and paint and gather. This is why we have always gathered. There is nothing unnatural about humankind and our manner of being, not unless we choose to turn away from the world and reach for what could never be.

There are impasses that can be crossed and those that cannot, just as some rivers can be forded and others not, just as there are some mountains that can be ascended and others not. Enough of the world is full of promise that we need not chase down ghosts. There is a garden waiting for each of us to get our hands dirty. Tend to what is, not what once was.