Every spring, Earth Day arrives with headlines calling for better sorting at the recycling bin and tech solutions for carbon cuts. But the most powerful Earth wisdom I’ve received didn’t come from lifestyle upgrades or climate summits — it came from women taking a collective pause. Grandmothers, aunties, and sisters taught me that grieving, storytelling, and skill-sharing are sacred acts of care.
With another Earth Day in the rearview, Mother’s Day approaching, and federal protections crumbling, I find myself turning to a deeper practice. I’m studying the leadership that sustains life: women holding grief, circling in story, training each other, and acting with fierce grace.
I’m an author, lawyer, community resilience advocate, and daughter of a white mother and Filipino immigrant father. From the courtrooms to the streets, and from the ancestral waters in the Philippines to immigrant worker co-ops in California, I’ve learned that transformative action begins in the stories we dare to carry. The Earth asks us to lead differently — not with force, but with care. And the women who have carried stories through grief are showing us the way.
In my mid-twenties, when my partner, Terence Unity Freitas, was murdered while defending Indigenous land rights in Colombia, I was unmoored. He was kidnapped and killed together with Ingrid Washinawatok (Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaii) after exiting land coveted by Occidental Petroleum. Indigenous U’wa sisters held me in our shared grief and gave it context. A few days after the murders, spiritual elders described seeing Terence in a dream, offering a caracol — a white spiraling shell symbolizing connection to the cosmos. To them, it was a message of peace and problem-solving. Terence was still with us. That moment helped me connect the grief I felt over his murder to the grief I carried about ecological collapse. In that ache, I found a new clarity: Grief is not something to dislodge. It’s a sacred teacher. Sitting with it is where truth and our courage to wrestle with it begins. When we stay with sorrow, we hear the Earth more clearly. We find the resolve to protect what we love.
In every community I’ve walked alongside — from the Philippines to Colombia to California — it is women, and people who lead with feminine strength and care, who show up after the devastation. They feed mourners, stitch communities back together, and hold the line when institutions fail. In Truth Demands, I call this “seamstress leadership.” It looks like prayer and ceremony, but also spreadsheets, pursestrings, and walking the barrio to account for missing people and ensure teachers and medics have what they need to tend.
It’s my U’wa sister, sitting on the roadside in temporary defeat, watching oil trucks roll through her town under armed guard — unimpeded after breaking months of peaceful blockades. Those blockades were formed by U’wa members, whose bodies held the line until they were pushed onto the riverbank by force. Some braved the waters for survival, but not everyone survived. When my sister was done counting the missing and the trucks, she took account of the bruises on her own arms and legs. Then, with her daughters, she quietly pieced together the people and resources to steward a new generation of Indigenous youth — young people who came of age in the aftermath, trained up, and moved from the streets to the statehouse and the courtroom. Years later, that careful weaving of skill, solidarity, and story helped Pueblo U’wa prevail in the highest human rights court in the hemisphere — a ruling that not only repudiated the violence they endured but strengthened Indigenous rights across Latin America. This labor may be invisible to outsiders, but it is a deep strength. It sustains us when systems collapse. It is the infrastructure of community resilience.
I, too, chose the waters. After the murders, I swam daily in any ocean, river, or pond l I could find — learning to breathe again. I recognized the relationship between the world above and the world below the surface as vital, needing constant tending. This is a relationship modulated by the breath — much like the role of song in U’wa tradition, which maintains the equilibrium between the world above, where we live our daily lives, and the world below, where spiritual life takes shape. For me, swimming became a ceremony, a reminder of what the U’wa never forgot: that we are not on the Earth — we are of it. When I remembered that in my bones, I could move toward action more freely. My body already knew what to do.
We show up differently when we know the Earth as kin, not commodity. We don’t need to be told to act. Our bodies insist on it, like breathing. That’s what I felt after Terence was murdered. An allegiance to the Earth as the source. This clarity gives us the courage to risk comfort for what’s right. It fuels those who defend the sacred — not with rage alone, but with reverence. And Pueblo U’wa’s recent victory in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights proves this, decades later.
We live in a time of crisis — but also of remembering. To heal the Earth, we must first listen to those who have carried its stories in their bones. The women who grieve, tend, and tell the truth — they are leading not always with headlines, but with heartlines. Their stories are maps for the future. Instead of asking what we can do, we ask what we’ve forgotten. What stories are waiting to be remembered? What grief have we been told to ignore? And what kind of courage might come from listening to those who’ve never stopped carrying the truth? The Earth remembers. The waters remember. Our ancestors remember. The question is: What will it take to allow our listening to move us?
Abby Reyes is the author of Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, available now on Bookshop.org or wherever books are sold.
