REsources for Living
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In what is surely the most famous English-language description of hope, Emily Dickinson declares that:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
It’s certainly not a definition that you could put in the dictionary, but, frankly, I haven’t seen a dictionary definition that really gets at hope as I understand it. “A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen” describes some piece of hope, but not, I think, the whole thing. Certainly we can want something to happen without having much hope that it will. And we often hold out hope when we really have no reasonable expectation that what we want will actually come to pass. Somehow, hope goes beyond expectation and desire to a place where poetry serves us better.
Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul. Hope is a lightness inside. A lift. A conviction that even though we might not see any way to walk away from where we are stuck, we have wings. Hope sings the tune without the words—it doesn’t depend on details and definitions and a workable ten-point plan. Hope just sings, because the tune is enough. And it never stops at all. Hope is not dependent on circumstances. It is a conviction, not a prediction.
Hope is more of an experience than a belief, somehow closer to faith than to expectation. But what happens when you lose hope? What if that feathered thing in the soul should, in fact, stop after all? It happens. For whatever reason, whether circumstances or brain chemistry, pretty much everyone knows what it feels like to experience silence rather than singing, hopelessness where once there was hope.
Of course, as Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford points out elsewhere in this issue, hopelessness isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Giving up hope can look very much like the Buddhist practice of non-attachment.
In a section of his poem “East Coker” T.S. Eliot writes:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Sometimes we have to wait without hope, settling into the emptiness and the not-knowing in order to open ourselves to something new. Sometimes we need the stillness with no bird singing in order to discover the dancing at the heart of stillness. Sometimes we need to give up and sit still before we can discover a new way forward. Hopelessness can be our friend.
But I would say that hopelessness is not the same thing as despair. Hopelessness happens when the feathered thing in your soul stops singing. Despair sucks that bird up and eats it for lunch. The dementors of Harry Potter are the embodiment of despair. Despair is the thief of joy, of courage, of creativity. Despair lies. It not only tells you that the situation is hopeless, it tells you that you, yourself, are hopeless, useless, pointless. Hopelessness invites you to sit in the dark and wait for the sunrise. Despair assures you that the sun has been snuffed out, never to return. You can sit with Hopelessness in companionable silence. Despair will shove you off the bench and into the dirt.
Despair is an enemy that requires us to fight back. Luckily, we have weapons. Humor is a potent weapon against despair—it introduces lightness to counter Despair’s sucking weight. Movement—action of any kind—fights back against Despair’s lie that there is nothing to be done. There is always something that can be done. What you can do might not fix the problem, but simply doing anything that feels like a step or a lean in the right direction is proof that you have agency and choice. When you move forward, despair moves back.
And, perhaps more than anything, connection and community are weapons against despair. We know that the powers of greed and cruelty are more than any one of us can take on. Each of us can throw stones at those dragons, but there’s not much hope that any of us can stand against their might.
But you know what? We have no idea what we might collectively be able to do. Certainly, no victory is guaranteed, but when people come together (in person, online, on the written page) then there is simply no telling what could happen. Love in the shape of justice has done what seemed impossible before. Connection creates possibility, and Despair cannot withstand possibility. Despair depends on your belief that the future is fixed and nothing can change. But simply the act of reaching out to connect with another person is a declaration that something new could come into being. Connection creates possibility, and possibility is, of course, another name for Hope.
- REsources for Living - December 1, 2020
- A Fond Goodbye - December 1, 2020
- REsources for Living - November 1, 2020
