How Do We Find Hope in Hard Times?

I spent an hour and a half on Friday in the Zoom-company of four amazing people - Writer and Teacher Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Pastor and Poet Drew Jackson, Writer and Poet Cole Arthur Riley, and Musician and Joy-monger Jon Batiste. It was a 90 minute zoom webinar from the Center for Action and Contemplation entitled “How Do We Find Hope in Hard Times?”

It was such a beautiful gift of wisdom, hope, courage, and of joy even as they talked of lament and despair. I hope that CAC will offer it as a recorded download for those who didn’t get a chance to participate. Here’s a screenshot from the latter part of the conversation.

There were so many nuggets of wisdom that were shared but here are a two that stood out to me:

In defining both hope and despair, Cole Arthur Riley said that “hope is one’s ability to believe in a specific future whereas despair is the inability to see beyond the catastrophe.” Her definitions aren’t direct opposites but I hope you can see the ways that there is a flip-sides between the two.

At one point Jon Batiste said that “we are all stardust and water - we should always be shining and flowing all the time.” Shining and flowing - yes!

As I receievd the wisdom of these four amazing people, I was going back to the poem I wrote about in my last post - Hope by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. What I didn’t share in my last post were the notes I took as I was working my way through the poem. Here they are:

I took these notes after an insight from a recent episode of the Poetry Unbound podcast by Pádraig Ó Tuama where he talked about the ways that poets use line breaks to give multiple meanings to phrases. Such as in the first two lines of the one above. The first line says, “Hope has holes” and then continues to finish the sentence with “in its pockets.” However, that can also be read as first a statement about hope in general - it has holes. It isn’t perfect. It isn’t infallible. But then with the 2nd line it is that the holes are in hope’s pockets that are leaving trails behind for one to look back and see from where they’ve come and can return along that path.

There’s a similar thing later when it says, “...that all roads // begin with one // “ There, what is the “one” - one voice, one person, one group, one church, one action? It is continued with “foot in front...” Ah - a foot stepping forward. Is it stepping out to be in the front of the pack, to be the first to step up, to begin the march, to make the choice? It could be but then when it continues with “...of the other” it is sending a message that hope here is also just the daily one step after another after another...

That was the sense of the whole of the conversation I received today as well - there were the pushes that hope arises out of people being bold and courageous in difficult times, but also hope is the individual writing a song to express what is deepest within them or in my case to photograph and to write.

Drew Jackson shared at one point in the conversation:

Our responsibility is to pay attention to the beautiful with the same attention we pay to the terrible - the world is on fire as it always is. The world is still beautiful as it always is.

I know I shared these the other day but they are still working on me right now and I’m seeing hope in both - the narrow path rooted in something strong but stretching out over the waters and the singular plant growing in the midst of something bigger.

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And in case you need a weather forecast for the Cincinnati area, Scout’s right ear is sharing it pretty clearly… windy…

Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed

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