Seeds of Hope
“…nature has rhythms of dormancy and growth – and just when winter seems its coldest and meanest, the tiniest green shoots remind us that new growth and new life are just around the seasonal corner…”
I sometimes share words written by someone else that could be coming straight from my thoughts. Anne Lamott is often the writer of these words.
“Today I woke up old and awful in every way. I simultaneously cannot bear the news and cannot turn it off: It’s cobra hypnosis — Gaza, Israel, the shootings in Maine. The world is as dark as a scarab.
My body hurt quite a lot when I got out of bed this morning, and I limped around like Granny Clampett for the first hour, until it unseized. Worse, my mind hurt, my heart hurt and I hated almost everyone, except my husband, my grandson and one of the dogs.
I don’t think I could have borne up under all this 20 years ago when I thought I knew so much about life.”
My body also hurts these days, but it does not compare to the hurt in my heart. What a world we live in! There are nights I lie awake filled with anxiety, wondering what the coming years hold for my children and grandchildren. I am not alone in this darkness; I hear it from you, the women in my life story workshops, and my friends. We all hope for a happy and bright future for our loved ones and the world.
One of the women in my Alumni writing group sent me an email last week. She wrote, “Helen, I have been awake since two and, as there isn’t much happening at that hour, my mind went into overdrive. I had a thought for a writing theme, Planting Seeds of Hope. I added hope to keep us away from seeds of destruction.”
An uplifting theme to explore, I thought, particularly as these last months, many of the stories shared in this group have been dark, and deeply emotional. I began working on this theme, digging up quotes and writing prompts that speak to hope. As my research continued, I thought we could all do with some seeds of hope. And so, I want to share some words and practices you might want to consider.
In the piece I quoted above, Lamott continues and writes, “Age has given me the ability to hang out without predicting how things will sort out this time.” And that’s the thing, when we plant seeds of hope, much like planting a garden, there are no promises that anything will grow. Hope comes from the Old English/Frisian hopa meaning, ‘to have confidence in the future’. Hope is only an expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.
Do I have confidence in the future? Not lately. But then I think of all we have endured and fought for and all that has come to fruition. And yes, I have hope.
Back in 2016, Rebecca Solnit wrote that the 21st century has seen the rise of hideous economic inequality, attacks on civil liberties and the arrival of climate change. We can now add to this the pandemic, a growing divide between left and right, the threat of nuclear war, and the growth of artificial intelligence. And that’s just the short-list!
But Solnit also wrote, “Hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them and addressing them by remembering what else the 21st century has brought, including the movements, heroes and shifts in consciousness that address these things now. This has been a truly remarkable decade for movement-building, social change and deep shifts in ideas, perspective and frameworks for large parts of the population (and, of course, backlashes against all those things).”
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”
As theologian, Jürgen Moltmann puts it, hope doesn’t just whisper ‘It will be different,’ it also shouts ‘It should be different’ and ‘It can be different.’ It speaks soothing words about trusting and waiting, but it also takes the form of a holy impatience that declares, ‘Enough is enough. The time is now!’
Spirituality and Practice offers several readings and practices to build hope through their Communities of Hope. The site is worth visiting. I will end with a practice they share based on a book by one of my favourite authors.
In Barbara Kingsolver's novel Animal Dreams, the main character reads a letter from her sister: "Codi, here's what I've decided: the very least you can do is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither destroyers nor the destroyed. That's about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the wall on both sides.”
Imagine a house of hope. What hopes would you write on the walls?