Alaska News Brief December 2025—a heart two sizes too small can grow after all
A bone chill keeps pestering me this holiday season. At times, the forecast for warmth and merriment feels superficial at best.
I mean, it’s cold around here. And dark. And though I hear of folks whooping it up on fat bike trails and in the backcountry, there’s also a wind-blown iciness blanketing our approach to winter solstice.
The wood stove that keeps Vicki cozy. Photo by Vicki Clark
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got a long, insulated skirt for joining Jasper on walks and plenty of blankies for working near the wood stove, so I know how to get cozy. I’m a cold weather person, 100 percent. I consider myself lucky to live in Alaska rather than someplace hot and muggy, like where I grew up.
(And, yes, I have a warm weather trip to the Galapagos planned for January!)
Still. Talking about the weather is just one way of talking about everything else. It’s been a long, hard year in our work, and it’s so difficult to shake the chill when repeatedly witnessing willful carelessness and cruelty toward Earth and all the living beings on it.
The gutting of protections for clean water and land and the all-out push for oil and mineral exploitation come hell or high water—and we see the flooding in the Northwest—well those intentions don’t reflect recklessness as much as an agenda and purpose, and that’s taking us back to a dark time indeed. The political violence, the disregard for the most vulnerable groups of people, the normalization of meanness, it all feels disheartening and cold. It’s true that hearts full of darkness often want to stomp hearts full of care and joy.
I suppose this is why we have stories like the beloved tale by the iconic Dr. Seuss, whose narrator muses about why the Grinch hated the Christmas season:
Page from “How The Grinch Stole Christmas.” Image sourced from the Internet Archive.
It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
It could be, perhaps his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.
I guess the moral of the story is that how we fill and share our heart is often a circumstance of harsh life experiences, and yet also a choice. “Clinging to hope” can seem Pollyanna and futile without action, but it can also come from a deep place inside ourselves, not as a bidding for something or someone else to change, but for our own change, our own accountability to our hearts.
Can we look outside our own perspectives and emotional reactions to understand others and ourselves more deeply? Can we light the kindling in ourselves to tap into our determined, caring selves and refuse to get entrenched in assumptions, biases, and divisions? Can we take a breath and listen, really listen?
There’s so much to learn from everything—our neighbors and family, the two moose that keep strolling down the block, the ravens shouting over a furious wind, and moonlight glittering through the ice in trees.
It would be easy to say it’s just a story, but when the Grinch’s heart grows three times its size, it’s not because someone lectures him or bullies him into seeing his naughty, thieving and cruel ways, but because he witnesses kindness between people even during their loss. He sees community even when he tries to steal goodness.
Page from Dr. Suess’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Image sourced from the Internet Archive.
Not every grinch grows their heart, that much we know, and cruelty demands a stalwart response. But in the end, “The Grinch” is about what it means to be human, about choosing a heart that expands rather than retracts.
That’s a hard ask of those in the crosshairs of cruelty, I know. For some of us, growing our hearts means making that choice only in places of belonging where we feel safe in doing so. That’s fine. It’s meaningful and it matters. It’s not one Who making Whoville a magical place, but all Whos.
I don’t know about you, but that kind of hope turns my bone chill into warmth and that warmth in turn allows me to continue the fight for the change I want to see in the world.
PS. Thanks to supporters like you, we can continue fighting to protect Alaska’s land, water, air, wildlife and people.
Pack ice in the Beaufort Sea, forms polynyas and leads between floes. Photo by Florian Schulz.
On beings and biomes—sea ice is everyone’s business
Hiking on a packrafting trip on the Hart River. Photo courtesy of Brad Meiklejohn.
Margaret Williams–a life of Arctic diplomacy
An Alaskan landscape drawn by a talented young artist! Photo courtesy of Siobhan McIntyre.