For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep. — William Stafford
Hope
Is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all. — Emily Dickinson
Recently, the UK’s environmentalist Green Party won a by-election in Manchester, securing the party’s first member of parliament in the north of England. Hannah Spencer, a young local plumber with a ready bright smile, secured 41 per cent of the votes. It was a cheery occasion and among my social circles there was much talk of hope in an overall disillusioning political landscape. A day later, on 28 February, the news presented a very different scene: billowing dark clouds over bombed cities in the new Israel/USA-Iran war. I happened to meet with a circle of activist friends and facilitators of the Work that Reconnects (WTR) and someone said they felt weighed down by hopelessness. We went on to discuss the concept of hope—Joanna Macy’s work is also called “Active Hope”—wondering whether it best describes what we need. It is understandable, but imprudent to link hope to outcomes, which are essentially unpredictable and influenced by countless factors outside our personal agency. We need something less brittle and vulnerable to sustain us and inspire action, something beyond optimism and pessimism.
The Czech statesman and playwright Vaclav Havel says: “Hope . . . is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” And, “It is I who must begin. Once I begin, once I try—here and now, right where I am . . . I suddenly discover, to my surprise, that I am neither the only one, nor the first, nor the most important one to have set out upon that road.” (pp 151–2) This is close to Joanna Macy’s encouragement to stay focused on values, not wasting energy hoping for specific results, and to open to the shift of consciousness that arises in collective engagement.
This understanding reframes hope as a practice of awareness and compassion, including the ability to notice and allow the physical and emotional deflation that can be the result of witnessing the wanton destruction of lives and the eco-sphere, without falling into catastrophizing. Instead, we can recognize our feelings of sadness, outrage, and even our numbness as signs of our love for this world. Mindfulness practice builds confidence in our inner agency, being able to choose where we place our attention and getting used to this expanded sense of who we really are—inextricable parts of the whole. This can naturally flow into an equanimous agency in the outer world, acting courageously and skillfully without being tethered to results. We still experience emotions of all shades, but rooted in awareness, we are less likely to be dislodged from our center when things turn out different from our expectations.
Hope also has a boldly forward-looking face—the visionary, galvanizing hope that dares to imagine what doesn’t yet exist. Langston Hughes captured its urgency:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly. (Poets.org)
Without this dreaming dimension we would lack direction, energy, and motivation. It is hope as raised banner, as defiant vision of a world not yet realized.
Another illuminating aspect of hope is its relationship to certainty. Rebecca Solnit writes:
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. . . Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. (The Guardian)
Acting when we can’t be sure what’s going to happen requires trust. I am not just talking about political activism—simply getting up in the morning, starting to cook a meal, or arranging to meet a friend for a walk—are made possible by the confidence that we can handle the coalescence of unpredictable and non-linear processes along the way. In fact, life thrives on the unintended consequences of our actions, and there will always be a plethora of those. Pinning hope on the success of a particular outcome just doesn’t make sense. Life doesn’t work that way.
The Rosa Parks bus boycott in 1955 was intended to desegregate Montgomery’s buses—which it did. But its less intended effect was to launch Martin Luther King Jr. as a national figure and establish the template for nonviolent mass protest that would shape the entire civil rights movement for decades.
During that walk with the friend, I bump into an old acquaintance which opens up a new work opportunity. It turns out that we have run out of tomato sauce, so we’ll have a stir-fry instead. A meditation learned during a WTR seminar that we ran, despite low numbers, helped an activist through a prison sentence. Our actions ripple out into the web of life and are fundamentally affected by it in return. Hope may not be the best term to describe what it feels like to partake in newly emerging outcomes—or is it? Are there words that describe an exhilarating, heartening or resilient kind of hope, rather than one dependent on favorable conditions and certain outcomes?
There is a Latin word, fiducia, meaning trust, confidence, or reliance—but with a specific quality that distinguishes it from both fides (faith as assent to doctrine) and spes (hope as expectation of future goods). Fiducia is trust in a relationship rather than trust in an outcome. It connects to the Buddhist concept of shraddha—often translated as faith or confidence, but more a quality of wholehearted trust in the path and the teaching. Both fiducia and shraddha are relational and present-tense, not predictive.
And there is another quality that is part of the territory. I came across this poem by the American activist and writer Marge Piercy, which speaks about wholehearted, careful attention in action:
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. (The Slowdown)
It brings us back to the essential point Havel and Macy make about acting in accord with our values: when we write a talk, paint a banner, or grow vegetables in an unhurried manner, with attention to detail and an eye for beauty, we communicate so much more than the obvious message of resistance or resilience.
Hopelessness fills us with heaviness, passivity, meaninglessness. Shraddha and fiducia don’t try to combat hopelessness directly; they work at a deeper register, where difficult feelings such as grief are transformed into fuel for living courageously and beautifully. Acting from this ground, we find ourselves less at the mercy of the winds of circumstance—we can celebrate the Greens winning in Manchester and weather the next dispiriting headline, without our fundamental orientation being shaken.
“The darkness around us is deep,” Stafford reminds us. (Poetry Foundation) Hope—in all its many faces—is the light we bring to that darkness. There is the hope that raises the banner and dreams the seemingly impossible: Hughes’s pressing hold fast to dreams, because without them life becomes a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. And beneath that, hope as perennial refuge, neither rising nor falling with circumstance, independent of victory. Emily Dickinson called it the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, singing its tune without words, never stopping at all.
References
Dickinson, Emily. 1891. (posthumous). “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” (Fr. 314 / J. 254). In R. W. Franklin (Ed.), The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Havel, Vaclav. 1990. Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Knopf.
Macy, Joanna, and Johnstone, Chris. 2012. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library.
See more
Dreams (poets.org)
‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times (The Guardian)
463: To be of use (The Slowdown)
A Ritual to Read to Each Other (Poetry Foundation)
