As we turn to look towards spring here in the northern hemisphere, I find myself pondering hope. What is hope? What are my feelings on hope? Y’all, I need you to understand that I really thought I knew what there was to know about hope. And then I spoke with my team here at The Gladis and found myself thinking otherwise.
helped me understand that, especially in the U.S., we cling to this notion of hope while not actually defining what it means. It is as if we are all being propelled forward by a vague idea of hope while at the same time, all having private interpretations of the word.The more I sat with the concept of hope, the more I realized I didn’t quite have a full grasp on it. I realized I have been given many examples of other folks’ understanding of hope, but have never come across a definitive definition. Additionally, my own experience of hope has varied vastly, according to my mood. Hope can feel bright, cheery, and sweet when I’m excited, but also be a life raft I cling to with every fiber of my being when I’m filled with despair.
I wanted to write a beautifully well-thought-out piece on hope and what it means to me but I find myself still lacking a single, fully-satisfying definition. And so, I present to you my thoughts, in the order they have come to me, to bring you along with me on this ride. I hope these musings spark something in you that leads you to intentionally create your own fresh relationship with hope.
Hope is a Hail Mary. It is letting go.
It feels as though when we are stripped down to nothing, when it is down to the wire and time is running out, that hope is what we are left with. It is reminiscent of a Hail Mary pass under the Friday night lights of American football—a high-risk, last-ditch effort to see results. It’s what allows us to give it our best go, then release our grasp on a situation and let what will be, be. It is longing and tears, trust and nail-biting, a “fuck it” and a leap. It’s a surrender to what will come. And I think that is beautiful. There is something so holy and primal held in the moment when we let go. It is the ultimate liminal space, where we have done all we can and have yet to find out what will become of us. There is something there and I don’t know what words to put to it yet, but it feels innate and ancient and true.
Hope takes immense strength to wield, and our relationship with it must be renewed daily, hourly, minute by minute.
Hope takes practice. We must train in order to be strong in our ability to wield it.
Hope takes tending to. Just like the spring seeds we plant, strewn along our dining room tables with thoughts of sunnier days to come, we must steadily keep watch and offer care as they begin to reach toward the sky. Hope is a small capsule bursting at the seams with natural-born grit that will, with a bit of assistance, feed us for seasons to come.
Hope is something we must build a relationship with. I picture her as a Goddess or deity that requires previous offerings before you can draw from her well of power. In this way, part of me feels as if the outcome of hoping is karmic - as if we’re helping to tilt the scales back toward the natural balance of the world through meaningful action. I feel deep in my bones that hope operates within the bounds of divine balance and that to truly embody hope requires us to look ego dead in the eye and submit to events outside of our control. Maybe that is the work of our lives.
Hope in relation to the Grief and Gratitude paradox
“Your sorrow carves out a space for your joy, and conversely, your joy carves out the space for your sorrow.”
-adrienne maree brown, paraphrasing Khalil Gibran's The Prophet on For the Wild podcast
During the past year and a half, I’ve been doing a lot of work to understand this paradox between grief and gratitude. It’s come to feel like part of my life’s work, and as I was sitting with hope over the last few weeks, I couldn’t help but link the two. In fact, it’s starting to feel like hope may be what lies in the liminal space between grief and gratitude; it binds the two together.
It’s easy for us to understand how we may hope for gratitude when we are feeling stuck in a place of grief. The work becomes harder when in a place of gratitude—I don’t know that I have ever hoped for grief. However, I don’t believe the two can exist without each other. Our greatest loves, and the gratitude we have for them, dig our deepest wells of grief; and it is that very grief that allows us to better appreciate and have gratitude for all that we love. And so, should we not be hopeful in grief if it is that very grief that, in turn, allows us to live fuller, more beautiful lives?
We’re most reassured our grip on hope is not delusional when we are close to nature.
As the days turn sunnier in the northern hemisphere and the birds begin to chatter once more, I am reminded of why it is so crucial for me to make time to immerse myself in nature. I take one step outside and suddenly signs of hope are all around, and I see them through the lens of the aforementioned grief and gratitude paradox. As a tree falls and decays, it releases its hold on life and begins to feed the ecosystem that continues around it, including its very own seedlings. The butterfly loses its form completely and turns to goo before emerging once again, remade. All around me the natural world is free, refusing to hang on longer than each part of its cycle demands, flowing from one state to the next.
It is this perfect free fall from one state to the next that renews my strength and vigor in the fight for living a life full of hope. In witnessing nature’s continuous life / death / life cycle, my soul is fed. By the river or in the woods I feel my deepest sense of calm and stillness. In nature I understand the rhythms of life and my will to go on is renewed. This complete submission to release and loss of control propels everything forward. Tapping into this fluid consistency allows me to regain my trust in not only myself but the world so that I, too, may know my hope is not in vain.
Hope is anger and action.
Those who are power-hungry have forgotten the language of hope. But hope is not to be underestimated. She is not corruptible. We’ve all been in situations that begin to smother our hope. Get down to that last flicker and you know what brings it back time and time again, especially in the direst of situations? Rage, baby! It’s as if humans as a collective have this built-in, last line in the sand…and when it is crossed, all hell breaks loose.
I think hope, and her tie to anger, are key tenets of humanhood that are critical to our survival. If you have a rageful battle to wage because someone has been siphoning your hope, I say fight the good fight. After all, hope is action-oriented. She is tenacious and bold, fierce and alive. There is no room for bashfulness within a relationship with hope. Hope rewards those who are courageous, and champions those who are unashamed to live out loud as their full selves.
Through all of this I have learned that when we are in a state of hoping, we are dancing with hope and fate themselves. It is a ballet of taking an action and then allowing fate to play out; hope is the time and space between the action taken and the forthcoming consequence brought forward by fate.
Sometimes the action needs to be sitting back and allowing what will be to be. Sometimes we need to start a revolution, and take all the direct action that accompanies it. Every action, big or small, shapes our future.
Hope is growth and a catalyst for change.
I used to exist in a mild state of panic, constantly rushing from task to task. I still battle this tendency. However, for the last decade I’ve begun to make a crucial shift. I’ve committed myself to a life of growth. Now, this is not a way for me to be a “boss-bitch,” endlessly working, climbing the corporate ladder and all that. No, I greatly appreciate rest and am actively trying to build a slower life. However, I think the point of our lives here on Earth may be to be a catalyst of growth for the planet. I see everything on Earth as one piece of a whole. I think there is “I,” the individual, and “I,” the whole earth itself. I feel that when we are interacting with another human, or anything else on the planet for that matter, we are interacting with ourselves.
Because of this self-as-other relationship, I have made the decision to dedicate my life to the earth and its growth by steadily working on myself. I plan to always be learning, continually deepening my connection to my body, forever finding ways to be better in relation to those I hold near and dear, and learning how to, in general, become more of a well-rounded human.
I have found this shift within my life to be lifesaving. Previously, I spent my days filled with despair. Most of the time I was very nearly hopeless. It wasn’t until I gained this new focus within my life that I started building my relationship with hope. As a result, I began to understand that if I, as part of the world, could be moved to dedicate myself to its betterment, in whatever ways were available to me, then Earth wasn’t all bad. I recognized that if I am nothing more than a creation of all that is around me, I couldn’t be the only one who thought like I did, who was filled with love for humanity and nature, and who wanted to do the hard work of fighting for it all. It was this chain of thoughts, this longing for change and a newfound trust in the world and humanity that stirred hope alive in me again.
Hope is, above all, the most primal act of love.
Defining love would require a whole separate conversation. However, to me, love is the purest form of existence. Love simply is. As mentioned, I see everything on Earth as one piece of a whole. Following this line of thought, to love another is to love ourselves, as we are both part of a singular entity.
So if:
1) everything is one part of a single entity
2) hope is longing for change
3) longing for change is synonymous with longing for growth
then, what else are we hoping this growth that we are longing for will lead us to, if not the continuation of the whole? Is hope not simply the wish that we may last a little longer, that life itself may continue long after we are gone? Is not the hope of life itself to continue, the deepest, most pure sense of love? This has led me to believe hope to be a primal, rallying cry of love. Love of what? Love of all.
Just as I came to this conclusion, I picked up Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and my breath was taken away by the opening poem. It felt too pertinent not to include here:
“All that you touch
You ChangeAll that you Change
Changes you.The only lasting truth
Is ChangeGod
Is Change.”
Do I bring hope to all I touch? If not, what actions can I take to ensure that I do? Am I allowing all that I interact with to imbue hope into my life? How do I eliminate the mindsets or relationships that siphon my hope?
Does hope point us in the direction of truth? Is hope a longing for God/change?
I end with more questions than I began with.
This article was a collaboration from one of our teams led by . It was written by , edited by , and includes input from . Artwork is from
What an absolutely gorgeous evolution of a thought. I love every aspect of hope you've shown us here!
This is stunning!!! There is so much to chew on and yet, you’ve summed it up so simply ie. LOVE, I’m without words.