Building on Glassman rōshi’s groundbreaking work with bearing witness retreats, ZPI affiliate ‘Dharma of Trees’ has been working on a container for bearing witness to the suffering of the other-than-human and more-than-human worlds. As our attention today is drawn more and more painfully to the plight of the natural world, what might it mean to come alongside that suffering? Rather than retreating into the forest as a kind of refuge from our urban anxieties – bathing ourselves in the majesty of the trees – this open discussion commences with a provocative question: what could it mean for us to choose deliberately to sit in the ruined spaces of our wild world, to not turn away from them?