In honor of Anna's timeliness, I am tardy. I was so proud of myself for drafting this post early and then I completely forgot to send it. Please forgive me. By the standards of our friend group, it's almost like I'm on time.
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There are few moments when I feel as grateful and humbled as
I do when I read all of your words. Ruthie, thank you for having the vision and
intuition to bring together when we needed it many years ago. And to everyone
in this community, thank you for showing up and reminding me that we are still
here and we still need each other. Some February’s, I think, “I’ve got this.”
But you all know me better than I do, and I can’t take this magical gathering
for granted.
I trust this is a group that will never tire of Mary Oliver,
so I will add to the collection, especially in honor of the fetuses growing
inside one of our beloveds!
Teach the children. We don't matter
so much, but the children do. Show them the daisies and the pale hepatica.
Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of blue sailors,
mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones-inkberry,
lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones-rosemary, oregano.
Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them
the fields and the woods and the possibility of a world salvaged from the lords
of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as the learn
to love this green space they live in, in sticks and leaves and then the
silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the beginning of
devotion.
And for the moments that feel a little less joyful, and when
it’s a little harder to remember that beauty grows within and beyond us, here
are the tough, beautiful and comforting words of Rebecca Solnit, excerpted from
Hope in the Dark.
Causes
and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a
crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake
breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her
words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world;
sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions
are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like
a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they
begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the
future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty
is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the
opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
I
say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on
the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break
down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because
it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war,
from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the
poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not
promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without
hope. At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German
philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, "The work of this emotion requires people
who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves
belong." To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to
the future makes the present inhabitable.
Thank you for reminding me that it is not our responsibility
to finish the work, but we must not desist from it either.
With love and
gratitude (and now Shabbat Shalom),
Sophie
