No Optimism Required; Hope Is Powerful

"Hope is a practice."

— Mariame Kaba

I describe myself as a "pragmatic optimist", meaning that I know I need to put in the work, I'm willing to accept incremental progress as progress, and I do believe we can move toward something better through our commitment and effort. Optimism is defined by some as a less than useful position because they conceive of it as a belief that you already know the outcome will be positive. I'm not that kind of optimist. I don't wait for the best possible outcome; I work for it. Maybe I'm an optimistic pragmatist instead.

I've been publishing the occasional round-up of poems on a theme. This one is a bit different. I collect quotations, and this collection includes quite a few of those as well as links to some poems. I'm putting together sources about hope in the spirit of the quotation from Jane Goodall and the poem below from Barbara Kingsolver, both of them women whose work and spirit I admire. 

I hope you find inspiration here.

Quotations

"Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement."
— Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope

"Hope is not a wish but an intention."
— Steven Charleston

"...it’s OK not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say, you know, feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out, so just be present… The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world — because it will not be healed without that. That [is] what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world." 

— Joanna Macy in an On Being episode  discovered thanks to this Brain Pickings post on Macy, Rainer Maria Rilke, and mortality

And then there's this:

"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. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. 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. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone." 

— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

— Howard Zinn, "The Optimism of Uncertainty" (2004)

"Hope is an act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and a culture of despair that depends on us not being able to imagine something better than where we are now."
— Rabbi Sharon Brous

“This is my hope: that the recognition of shared fate might cause us to act  as if shared fate is the reality that in fact it is.” 
—Jane Hirshfield

"Life is full of mystery. The mystery is our invitation to let go and to embrace uncertainty with the fullness of our being. This is how hope becomes our bearing. It’s how it becomes our compass in uncertain times." 
—Joe Primo

"We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _______. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith— only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer." 
—Mary Oliver, Winter Hours

"Hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, and each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two."
— Parker J. Palmer

"ln a century of staggering open questions, hope becomes a calling for those of us who can hold it, for the sake of the world. Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reverse truth. It lives open-eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It's a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be." 
— Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

"Hope is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is."
— Vaclav Havel

Poems

"Hope; An Owner's Manual"
Barbara Kingsolver

Pass your hope like a bad check. You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit.

"For the New Year, 1981"
Denise Levertov

Please take

this grain of a grain of hope

so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment

so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,

will hope increase,

"Hope"
Barbara Crooker

A thin drizzle of sun slips through clouds, a strand of hope against the icy odds.

"How to Hope"
Katherine Harer

hope is hokey

imperfect full of stumbling little acts

the way a strand of neighbors standing in the rain

on the shoulder of Highway One American flags

in their hands and homemade signs:

Peace is Patriotic

can make another strand start up

even in the imagination

"Hope (A Zen Perspective)"
Richard Schiffman

Hope is not about some future meadow.
Hope is not a triumphal march toward some brighter,
bloodless field. Neither is it lighting a candle
or cursing the darkness or calling the glass half full.
It is this half-empty tumbler turning cartwheels
above the chasm.  

"There Was a Time I Disdained Hope"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And isn’t
that what hope
is—a sprout
that grows
when conditions
are poor,
as if to prove

"Thanks, Robert Frost"
David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...

"Relearning Hope"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Hope was never meant to be trapped,
to be tamed, commodified, it was always
meant to flow through. 

"A Poem on Hope" (video of Berry reading it in an interview with Bill Moyers)
Wendell Berry

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

*Links in book titles are Bookshop.org affiliate links. Go to your local independent bookstore or get the book from the library. The links are here in case you need them. Any proceeds will be donated to nonprofits advancing hope, social justice, and safer streets for all of us.

Tomato Jammin'

Today's theme song: Bob Marley and the Wailers, "Jamming."

What to do with home-grown tomatoes that's more interesting than making canned tomatoes that you can buy from the store? Tomato jam, that's what. (I do lots of things with tomatoes, actually, but never, ever ketchup.)

For the past three years I've made the Food In Jars Smoky Spicy Skillet Tomato Jam, in much larger quantities than her recipe. I really love it, so much so that I still have some left from last year. So this year's tomato crop went into two other recipes.

Orange Tomato Jam: Yield from 10 cups of chopped tomatoes: 4 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints.

A couple of years ago I created Citrus Tomato Marmalade because the recipe title had made me think something called Orange Tomato Jam must surely have a citrus element. I didn't grow enough orange tomatoes that year to make an orange tomato jam. The marmalade turned out pretty good, although it was super sweet.

This year, though, my word, the Orange Brandywine! (A Hobbitish name, that.) Tomatoes bigger than my hand and lots of them. I ate plenty and stashed a bunch more in the freezer along with Hillbilly, an orange tomato with red shoulders.

When I tasted this jam as it reached the early jammy stage, I felt the spices needed a bit of oomphing up, possibly because I used ginger paste from a tube rather than freshly grated. Added 1/2 t. paprika and ~1 t. ginger paste. That brought it up to Resident Taste Tester-approved levels of a gentle heat. So I added another 1/8 t. cayenne. 

Tomato Jam: Yield from around 6 pounds of tomatoes, some with a firmer flesh than others: 4 half-pints, 10 quarter-pints, and a couple of tablespoons left over so guess I'll just have to have that with some cheese and crackers.

This recipe from Serious Eats uses cumin, cinnamon, and crushed red pepper for its seasoning. I ran out of crushed red pepper flakes, but luckily cayenne pepper is a good substitute. Not 1:1 though! More like 1/2:1 cayenne:crushed red pepper, then taste and adjust. As it approached the jammy stage I tasted and decided I want a bit more cumin presence. I added 1/4 t., then another 1/4 t., then figured I'd better stop since I wasn't going for a straight-up Mexican flavor. I'd forgotten I made it back in 2024. Since each year I grow a slightly different mix of tomatoes, each year's jam will be its own taste sensation.

The eternal tomato skins question: To remove completely or do something else? 

They don't "dissolve into the jam," as a different tomato jam recipe promised. They show up as little shreds. I don't mind them; they can't be more fibrous than blackberry seeds. They're not that aesthetically pleasing, though.

For the orange tomatoes I took a chance and learned that indeed, their skins don't melt. I kept my kitchen scissors handy and kept snipping longer shreds into smaller bits as they surfaced in the pot.

For the red tomatoes I took a different approach. I had (yet again) not blanched and removed skins as I threw tomatoes in the freezer in the peak harvest season. If I'd taken the skins off when they were fresh I could have tried making tomato powder. I didn't, though.

The skins slide off pretty easily after freezing for most tomato varieties, although I learned the giant meaty Amish red tomatoes I grew this year like to hold onto their skins even after freezing. 

I slid off as many as I could and threw them in the food processor for some serious smashing. Out of around 6 pounds of tomatoes this yielded nearly two cups of tomato-y paste, well worth the effort to extract all possible flavor from the fruit.

I also used the food processor to pulse the fresh tomatoes and those Amish (which really hold up beautifully to freezing!). The frozen San Marzano and Black Prince pretty much fell apart so they were jam-ready right out of the freezer. Yes, recipes refer to chopped tomatoes. In the past I've spent a long time at the chopping board with a knife. Then I realized I was putting a lot of care into chopping things that were going to cook down and lose their shape. You know what a food processor does, used carefully with pulses? It chops tomatoes.

Related reading and recipes

• Green Tomato Caponata Recipe
• Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce
• In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup 
• Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes.
• Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini)
• Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!
• Canstravaganza 2025
• Canstravaganza! Food Preservation 2024
• All my posts about food, gardening, and the environment

Autumnal Equinox 2026: Thoughts and Readings

I'm thinking about the idea of the equinox: 24 hours supposedly* divided evenly between day and night, happening twice a year. Half of one, half another, and yet that isn't at all how we experience day or night. My day starts when I wake up, ends when I fall into sleep. This time of year night, meaning darkness falling, begins before I sleep, and I definitely go to sleep more than 12 hours after I awaken. The Latin roots may mean "equal night"—aequus (equal) plus nox (night)—but that doesn't mean we divide our energies equally between day and night or that I rest as much as I wake.

And yet, and yet—

These astronomical grace notes of the year give us reason to pause. Reason to recognize we live within larger and larger spheres. We may pause within our minds, yet we're always moving even when we're standing still, riding atop an earth spinning on its axis at over 1,000 miles per hour (1,040 at the equator) and whirling around the sun at 67,100 miles per hour. The Sun and Earth orbit the center of our galaxy at something like 447,000 miles per hour. The Milky Way Galaxy is moving. Everything is moving. We are never, ever still. Or we are both still and moving, half and half.

The ancient Celts (who provided some of my ancestry), the Mayans and others used the wheel to symbolize or track time and the seasons. We now enter the season of Mabon (a name given to it in the 1970s, not an ancient traditional name). This is a time of harvest, balance, reflection, releasing what we don't need as we approach the dark. A site on the pagan or Wiccan calendar tells me "the ancient Mayans designed Chichen Itzá to mark the equinox sun, while Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples built sites like Carin T in Ireland and Mnajdra in Malta that align with the sunrise on this day." The Goddess moves from Mother to Crone, a journey I'm taking over the decades although the role of Mother stays with me always.

This is harvest season. My shelves are lined with row upon row of jars, jams, jellies, and chutneys, apples making a prominent appearance thanks to an unexpected gift from a stranger. The ground may be cold, the skies grey, as we move toward winter, but blackberry, elderberry, cherry, hot peppers, mint, tomatoes, and other sweet or savory flavors will join freshly baked brown bread on my plate. This comfort food rewards my labor planting, tending, picking, gleaning, cooking, canning, kneading, shaping, baking. I learned this from my parents, who stocked basement shelves and freezer through summer and fall to lay up stores for the cold season. Measuring time by what ripens, what is past, tells me when summer is turning toward fall.

Emergence Magazine provides me with seasonal meditations. These ask that we pay attention, real attention, to the changes in the world around us. This time of year I both see and feel the change in the angle of the light over the course of the day. Seasonal practice #29, "Slanted Light: for when the sun is slung low," speaks to this:

"Place yourself in a patch of shallow sunshine. What hush does this low light bring to the landscape? How is each space listening to the changing of the light? While the glare and warmth of summer feel like an out-breath, this muted, shallow quality of light is like an in-breath. In long shadows and pale hues, what retreats?"

Then there is #38, "Falling Leaves: for when a colorful carpet adorns the ground":

"Lie down in a pile of fallen leaves. Touch them. Smell them. Are they damp, spiced, sweet with the smell of rot? Imagine the cycle of decay and renewal taking place right beneath you—the leaves slowly breaking down, becoming soil. How do you feel this cycle present within you at this moment: what parts of yourself do you feel called to shed and transform in order for new growth to begin?"

I happened across a piece on the idea of knitting the wheel of the year, each season suggesting different projects, different weights of yarn for the changing daylight and temperatures. As a knitter I love this idea of settling into the season as I settle into my chair with yarn and needles (and a woolsucking cat who needs to be kept far, far away from my tasty bag of merino cat snacks).

My hemisphere of the Earth begins to tilt away from the Sun, taking us from warmth into cold, from light into more and more darkness. The leaves reveal their true colors, the scarlet and gold and orange there all along beneath the green of chlorophyll. I gather leaves on my walks and arrange them in patterns by my door, my "leafspedition land art" decorating the earth for a few days before becoming earth. Like the leaves, I settle into what I am becoming, the yarn in my hands becoming something new.

*I say the equinox is supposedly an equal division between day and night because the equilux, the actual half-and-half division, happens a few days after the equinox, much to my surprise. The Farmer's Almanac explains:

"The Latin root says “equal night,” but the day of the equinox is not actually the day day and night come out exactly even at most places. That day is the equilux, and in the Northern Hemisphere it falls a few days after the September equinox. Two effects pull the dates apart: the Sun is a disc, not a point, so sunrise begins the moment the top edge clears the horizon, and Earth’s atmosphere bends sunlight, letting us see the Sun slightly before it rises and slightly after it sets.

Together those effects add several minutes of daylight to the equinox day. For most of the continental United States, the equilux in 2026 lands between September 25 and 27, with northern states reaching equal day and night a day or two earlier than southern ones. After that, the night side runs ahead, and the days shorten in earnest."

It seems to me, then, that we may think we see balance even though it actually falls somewhere else, perhaps a bit later and in a different place than we thought. We may find our balance standing still while moving faster than we can imagine, watching the light change and the leaves fall.

"Equinox"
Richard Wehrman

The Garden releases its last
radiance, not as something failed,
but as its full reason for being: to give
continually, to its last bit of energetic being.
Its giving is its beauty. It is a smile,
it is the heart of love.

“Autumn”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Leaves are falling, falling as if from afar,
as if, far off in the heavens, gardens were wilting.
And as they fall, their gestures say "it's over."
In the night the heavy earth is falling
from out of all the stars into loneliness.
We are all falling. This hand here is falling.
Just look: it is in all of us.
Yet there is one who holds this falling
with infinite tenderness in her hands.

"Natural History"
Sam Hamill

                    May she
be happy, filled
with the essential,
working in the twilight,
on her knees, at autumn equinox,
gathering the stories
of silence together,
preparing to meet the winter.

"Autumnal Equinox"
Terri Kirby Erickson

Autumn
shakes the summer
from our minds until it falls like leaves,
skittering down an empty street.

Related reading

• Canstravaganza 2025
• Canstravaganza! Food Preservation 2024 
• A Year of Poems: September
• Walking in September: Of Berries and Bunnies 
• Reruns: September Posts Worth Revisiting

Apple Mint Jelly Yet Again: The Ratios with Fresh Apples

Making jam or jelly is always an exercise in math if you're not following a recipe precisely. For apple mint jelly the question becomes whether I have enough mint on hand to flavor a given quantity of apples. This set of instructions helps you calculate proportions based on what you have.

X = Cups of mint leaves and stems, chopped (yes, you can use the stems, which also carry the minty goodness; I leave out ones that are very thick and woody)

2X = Pounds of apples, quartered, not cored or peeled because you want to keep the pectin, and including any skins or cores you have from other appley goodness you're working on to provide extra pectin, although it can't be all skins/cores because then you won't have apple flesh to extract juice and flavor from

2X = Cups of liquid: Water, or half water and half white vinegar

If this fills an entire stockpot, split it into two so the cooking goes more efficiently.

Bring apples, liquid and mint to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook until apples turn to a soft mush, approximately 20 minutes. Mash it all up a bit with a potato masher

Set the apples and liquid to drain in a jelly strainer set-up or a sieve lined with cheesecloth set over a big bowl. Do not press on the solids. When you do that you end up with cloudy jelly because you pushed some solids into the juice. Let the mash sit for several hours or overnight to get every possible drop with the help of gravity.

Your labors and time yield a given amount of juice. Some recipes will tell you to add water to get to a specific number of cups. Why on why would you dilute the delicious juice you just made? Don't do that.

Your final math problems: 

• For each cup of juice, add 7/8 cup of white sugar. This is 3/4 of a cup plus 2 tablespoons.
• For each 2 cups of juice, add 2 T. lemon juice 

You can figure out smaller proportions where you fall short of a full cup or you can accept that cooking is improv, start with a baseline that rounds down rather than up because you can't unsugar something, and taste the juice at some point as it cooks.

I did this the other day and ended up with 6 cups of minty apple juice. That yielded 3 half-pints, 9 quarter-pints of jelly. 

I probably skimmed off another quarter-pint of foam from the top to create nice clear jelly. That foam doesn't go to waste at our house; I put it in a little jar that goes in the fridge to be eaten as scrap jelly. It tastes good; it's just not ready for its close-up.

Related reading

• Apple Hot Pepper Jelly Recipe
• Apple Mint Jelly, No Pectin Needed (made with commercial apple cider)
• Spiced Apple Butter Recipe
• My Circular Economy of Apples
• Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe
• Apples, Apples, Apples!
• Canstravaganza 2025
• Canstravaganza 2024