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Flipping the Script: Loons, Butterflies, and the Courage to Begin Again

Flipping the Script: Loons, Butterflies, and the Courage to Begin Again

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 In this second bonus episode from Climate Changed, we return to the 2025 BTS Center Convocation, where participants were invited to flip the script—shifting climate conversations away from data and debate and toward lived experience, spiritual insight, and imagination. Co-hosts Peterson Toscano and Ben Yosua-Davis introduce two deeply personal stories from members of the BTS Center community: Tyler Mark Nelson and David Arfa. Their stories explore mental health, vocation, migration, lineage, wonder, and responsibility in a climate-changed world—offering listeners not solutions, but companionship, honesty, and renewed attention to the wisdom of place. About This Mini-Series: Convocation Stories At the 2025 BTS Center Convocation, participants were invited to share climate-centered stories grounded in their own lives—stories shaped by courage, vulnerability, and spiritual practice. Rather than expert lectures or policy analysis, these stories center on imagination, grief, hope, and relationships. In this mini-series, Peterson Toscano and Ben Yosua-Davis share two of those stories in each episode, offering listeners a glimpse of how ordinary people are integrating climate concern with faith, creativity, and daily life. These episodes are especially suited for seasons when exhaustion, uncertainty, and longing coexist—and when stories can help us breathe again. How These Stories Were Made: The Story-Making Process To bring these stories to life with care and craft, The BTS Center partnered with Stellar Story Company. Months before Convocation, community members were invited to submit story “seedlings” connected to the Convocation theme. From more than twenty proposals, seven storytellers were selected. Each storyteller worked closely with an experienced storytelling coach over several months, meeting multiple times to shape, revise, and rehearse their narratives. The goal was not polished performance for its own sake, but faithful storytelling—stories lovingly and prayerfully crafted for a shared community. As Associate Director Nicole Diroff explains in the episode, this process was itself an act of “flipping the script”: centering voices from within the community and trusting that lived experience can open pathways to courage and connection. Stories in This Episode “Teach Me the Ways of the Loon” – Tyler Mark Nelson Tyler Mark Nelson begins his story seated on a warm rock along the north shore of Lake Superior—a place he returns to when his mental health falters, and his vocational path feels uncertain. Living with long-term depression and anxiety, Tyler finds himself one year away from graduating from Yale Divinity School and questioning everything. As he watches loons dive and resurface in the cold inland sea, Tyler recalls another moment years earlier when he stood at this same shoreline after dropping out of college. The loons become unexpected spiritual companions, offering a metaphor for nourishment, patience, and survival beneath the surface. A simple prayer—“God, teach me the ways of the loon”—marks a turning point. Tyler does not emerge with easy answers or dramatic healing, but with breath, presence, and a renewed commitment to care for his body, spirit, and community. His story reframes vocation not as certainty or ordination, but as learning how to swim alongside others in deep water. Tyler Mark Nelson Tyler Mark Nelson is a community educator, ecotheologian, activist, and artist. He currently serves as a Research Associate with the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and is involved in projects exploring kinship and public ritual in a time of planetary crisis. Raised in Minnesota, Tyler’s work is deeply shaped by place, contemplative practice, and the more-than-human world. “What Migrations Have You Been On?” – David Arfa David Arfa’s story begins with a childhood encounter with a snake in a Detroit backyard—an early moment of exhilaration and curiosity rather than fear. As David studies ecology, wrestles with family expectations, and searches for spiritual grounding, he finds unexpected resonance in Jewish ritual, prayer, and lineage. A formative experience with monarch butterflies in California—hundreds falling frozen from eucalyptus trees and lifted back into flight by human breath—becomes a moment of awe and ethical clarity. Weaving together migration stories of butterflies, ancestors leaving Warsaw, and his own vocational journey, David invites listeners to consider what migrations—spiritual, emotional, generational—have made their own lives possible. His story holds wonder and responsibility together, asking what we are creating now that may not come to fruition for generations. David Arfa coordinates bereavement services and offers grief counseling at Baystate Hospice. A storyteller and educator rooted in Jewish tradition, David’s work weaves together ecological awareness, spiritual lineage, and narrative as tools for ...
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