Wow that bit from Eduardo Galeano is so poetic and wonderful thank you. Your writing is if anything becoming a richer tapestry of influences every two weeks.
You know I look to both Joanna and Chris's Active Hope as well as Rebecca Solnit for all she has written on hope, and our community impulse to save each other (in Paradise Built in Hell).
“Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. You can't go to despair, that’s a sin. And ‘optimism’? You just don't know enough. Hope is the sweet spot. If you're hopeful, you have got to be active. You've got to be DOING stuff.”
I recall having a specific academic difference of opinion with another earnest Zen practitioner fifteen hears ago, when he asked "Where in all of what Buddha taught is our instruction to hope?" He felt it was anathema to what Buddha instructed about the pervasive nature and root of suffering. In his view of Buddha's teaching, there was no room nor role nor reason for hope. However Roshi Joan Halifax has written and spoke frequently about what she calls Wise Hope, arising out of her friendship with Rebecca Solnit and their mutual conversations and writing. From just one example (https://www.lionsroar.com/yes-we-can-have-hope/):
"As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what will actually happen. Not getting what we hoped for is usually experienced as some kind of misfortune. Someone who is hopeful in this way has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. This ordinary hope is a subtle expression of fear and a form of suffering.
"Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of suffering—both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It’s when we realize we don’t know what will happen that this kind of hope comes alive; in that spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act.
"The Czech statesman Václav Havel said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Again I am left with the Not Knowing, and the avenue of compassionate action arising from bearing witness and not knowing - with wise hope.
I can't help but reflect that the word "hope" in French has two translations "espoir" and "esperance" giving the nuances of dream vs. active hope that you touch on, and that the latter translation shares the same root with the word "aspiration", one of Dr. Lertzman's three As - Anxiety, Ambivalence and Aspiration. Furthermore, while you could "perdre espoir" i.e. lose hope, become hopeless, you cannot lose "esperance". So again this is the brilliance of Joanna Macy's progressive narrative of the Great Turning, reclaiming this time as a New Beginning.
Thank you for such a thoughtful and rich essay! There is so much here to unpack. I wanted to share a couple of links on this theme that resonate:
A few years ago, I wrote about blowing up the hope/despair binary for Sierra: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/how-can-we-talk-about-global-warming
And more recently, this New Yorker essay touches on the theme: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-other-kind-of-climate-denialism
Wow that bit from Eduardo Galeano is so poetic and wonderful thank you. Your writing is if anything becoming a richer tapestry of influences every two weeks.
You know I look to both Joanna and Chris's Active Hope as well as Rebecca Solnit for all she has written on hope, and our community impulse to save each other (in Paradise Built in Hell).
David Orr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_W._Orr) has said "Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up."
From https://www.paulagordon.com/shows2/orr2/index.html
“Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. You can't go to despair, that’s a sin. And ‘optimism’? You just don't know enough. Hope is the sweet spot. If you're hopeful, you have got to be active. You've got to be DOING stuff.”
I recall having a specific academic difference of opinion with another earnest Zen practitioner fifteen hears ago, when he asked "Where in all of what Buddha taught is our instruction to hope?" He felt it was anathema to what Buddha instructed about the pervasive nature and root of suffering. In his view of Buddha's teaching, there was no room nor role nor reason for hope. However Roshi Joan Halifax has written and spoke frequently about what she calls Wise Hope, arising out of her friendship with Rebecca Solnit and their mutual conversations and writing. From just one example (https://www.lionsroar.com/yes-we-can-have-hope/):
"As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what will actually happen. Not getting what we hoped for is usually experienced as some kind of misfortune. Someone who is hopeful in this way has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. This ordinary hope is a subtle expression of fear and a form of suffering.
"Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of suffering—both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It’s when we realize we don’t know what will happen that this kind of hope comes alive; in that spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act.
"The Czech statesman Václav Havel said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Again I am left with the Not Knowing, and the avenue of compassionate action arising from bearing witness and not knowing - with wise hope.
I can't help but reflect that the word "hope" in French has two translations "espoir" and "esperance" giving the nuances of dream vs. active hope that you touch on, and that the latter translation shares the same root with the word "aspiration", one of Dr. Lertzman's three As - Anxiety, Ambivalence and Aspiration. Furthermore, while you could "perdre espoir" i.e. lose hope, become hopeless, you cannot lose "esperance". So again this is the brilliance of Joanna Macy's progressive narrative of the Great Turning, reclaiming this time as a New Beginning.