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