A brief glance around the world today doesn’t offer much for the hope column. Yet is hope really something we can add and subtract in a column? And once we have it, what purpose does it serve but to alleviate our distress over things we witness and see coming? Is that really the kind of hope we need right now?
It’s not surprising that at one of the early meetings of our local Extinction Rebellion chapter, the thing we all talked about when introducing ourselves was our personal wrestling matches with hope and hopelessness. All of us pretty much admitted we had lost hope, yet there we were.
In the end we agreed it doesn’t really matter what quantities of hope supposedly exist or don’t exist in the world. We each have to decide for ourselves whether or not to fight for what we love, and we’d already answered that question. It wasn’t hope but something else that brought us, something less definable but apparently more powerful. What should we call it?
I don’t know, but it gave me hope.
~
The other night New York’s gleaming Grand Central Station was filled with a sea of people in black t-shirts printed with the words “Not In Our Name” and singing for peace. They were brought there by Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish anti-Zionist organization, and had completely shut down the terminal. I heard an interview with an eighty one year old Jewish woman, Rosalind Petchesky. “I am older than the state of Israel,” she said and proceeded to directly address President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken, telling them to listen.
They didn’t hear her of course, but her voice, as a Jewish woman, is not so easily dismissed. There’s a certain moral might that resides in those who seek justice for the Other, beyond the interest of self or in-group. It channels something more powerful and ancient than the immediate balancing of scales. It’s like a candle brightened by darkness. It can’t be extinguished and instead has the sense of inevitability.
As I listened at the stove, preparing dinner, I felt something open in my shoulders, and began breathing larger breaths. My posture subtly lifted and I felt the movement of my arms relax and quicken, as though having slid into a fresh gear. I hadn’t gone anywhere but it seemed I stood in fresher air.
I think I was feeling hope.
~~
It is four years ago and I am standing on the high grassy plains of the Columbia Plateau, one side of my face nearly numbed by a freezing northern wind. Bunch grasses and fescue, toughened by that wind, stream gleaming around me, and I am thinking about hope, whether or not I should have any.
I’ve brought this question to this open blowing expanse but it feels out of place here, which bristles and shines with something other than hope, something less contingent, more durable, fiercer. To wonder if there’s hope for the world is a purely human invention, I realize, and in that a lonely question.
I wander over to some brightly lichened stones, where snow has melted into a patchwork of gin-clear pools rimmed in ice. I peer in the water. “Is there hope?” But it doesn’t seem to understand the question. I look at the distant mountains and ask “is it hopeless?” but the wind tears the words out my mouth as I speak them.
~~~
Life doesn’t hope; it is hope, and strives no matter what. Maybe it’s that constancy of commitment that makes it seem so full of hope.
We on the other hand worry. We count. We constantly gauge our odds. It’s a habit of the human mind most other minds would find strange. Certainly a salmon would never make it up a river scaling waterfalls, dodging bear claws and fish hooks, if it thought that way. A migrating sandpiper might think twice about the daunting trek down to Chile. Irises could well keep their fragrant shops closed for fear of hail. But they don’t. They open. They blossom. They strive.
You could say many of the same things about the human body. Whatever our mental calculus, it’s always busy at work. The heart pumps, arteries stream, kidneys filter, the cranium flashes like a small lightning-cloud. The human body is like the salmon and the seabird and the iris, a creature of Earth. It is the horse we actually ride, not the one in our heads wondering if it’s going to work out.
If life is hope, then hope has form. Consider two vacant lots side by side, littered with trash. Plant one with gardens and native plants, with butterflies showing up and “at risk” kids learning to grow food for their community. Tell me which side has more hope. Behind a dam a river appears listless, devoid of hope, but breach the dam and watch hope flow. Preserve a prairie, watch it grow. Reverse the collapse of songbirds and hear it sing.
It's quite difficult now to imagine a day when Palestinians and Israelis might live in peace. But put a Palestinian child an Israeli child in a yard together under a shade-tree and in a matter of hours or minutes watch hope laugh and play.
Brilliant, as always. Thank you!
Rob, beautiful work, again.