I did an event at the Imagine Festival in Belfast at the weekend, Writing For Nature. Ruby Free and I chatted about what inspires us to write, the environmental challenges facing Ireland, and the interconnectedness of living things. At the end, there were questions. Here is what I wish I had said:
Dear Friend-Who-Asked-About-Hope,
I told you I had hope, but that it’s complicated1. I said when hope looks like optimism, it can be dangerous. You see, I was raised to believe that there was a happy ending to all of this - heaven. No matter how bad things were, there was a sense of divine design and purpose which distracted us from our suffering. The belief that there would be a new heaven and a new earth led to indifference about the state of the one in which I lived.
Former Czech president, Václav Havel wrote:
‘Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing regardless of how it turns out…(Hope) gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.’
I do not wish to criticise Christian hope. It is a source of deep comfort for many and a fundamental part of the faith. I am simply trying to explain how my understanding of hope led to apathy, not action. When hope brings our attention to the horizon, to a time when things will be better, easier, perfect, then it prevents us from engaging with the tangle of pain and beauty at our feet.
And why would I want to do that? I hear you ask.
Well, what we do and how we live matters. If we hold an underpinning belief that everything is pre-ordained, or everything is doomed, we are more likely to do nothing, to fall asleep, or, worse, to despair.
‘When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free - truly free - to honestly start working to resolve it…when hope dies, action begins.’2
Hope is a muscular word. To Mary Oliver, hope, ‘…is a fighter and a screamer.’3 It meets us in the gutter, at the graveside, beside the polluted river, among the dead and dying ash trees, in the felled forests. It feels like rage because it knows that things should be better and could be different. It is a song you once knew the words to: Keep going, it’s not over yet.
Nature Doesn’t Need Our Help
Someone asked us: What is the one thing you wish more people knew about how to help nature? I said that nature didn’t need our help, that if we, as a species, disappeared tomorrow, nature would thrive, but if nature disappeared tomorrow, we would not survive. Then I said that if there was one thing I’d love more people to know, it would be this:
We are nature.
The myth of separation is dangerous. Nature is not out there somewhere, it is a wealth of ecosystems of which we are a part. To go outdoors, is to enter a sanctuary where birdsong cuts right to the heart of the matter, and lesser celandine put on their best show regardless of who is watching. Nature will help us, if we let it.
Creepy Nature
One of the characters in Paul Murray’s book, Beesting, puts it like this:
‘Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was?’
I love the humour of this, and how it depicts creepy nature as this separate malevolent force. But it also articulates a real disconnection from our day to day lives and the wild things battling for survival beyond our front doors. I believe this to be a spiritual crisis that requires root work. We need to dig down through the layers of leaf litter into the top soil where seeds are beginning to germinate, and the truth of the matter is revealed: a vast underground network of mycelium that we are only beginning to understand. Wherever we are rooted, no matter how our thoughts and opinions differ from the person next to us, we’re all bound by invisible threads to one another, to oak and otter and osprey. What we do has a ripple effect.
I asked Ruby how those without access to wild spaces might nurture this connection with the wild. She spoke of being in London, overwhelmed by the pace of the city, then hearing a starling rap on a pylon nearby. It cut through the din of traffic, but only because she has taught herself how to hear. Have you ever seen an urban fox? What resilient craftsmen they are. What about the buddleja that thrives along motorways and on pieces of scrap ground - it is a haven for butterflies and bees - turn pollinator and let it draw you in. Every wall crevice and pavement crack is a potential rooting place for dandelion, daisy, red valerian or the thistle-like edible, burdock4. These street kids can teach us just as much as their countryside cousins. Pay attention.
The Fighting Kind
Back to your question: Do I have hope?
Yes, but it’s the fighting kind, and it is fuelled by love, not hate, fear, or a sense of guilt that I should be doing more. I don’t know if there is a way through (we really have done a number on our planet), but love helps me to find a way forward. When I watch the hooded crows fly to and from their nest with beaks full of twigs, or I lift the lid on my hive to find it bursting with bees after a hard, wet winter, or I walk by the lake at dusk to see otter, sleek from the water on the opposite bank, or trees in leaf, again, or a red grouse on the heather - the first I have seen, or skylarks, ascending - I fall in love.
This love does not tell me that everything will be okay, or that everything happens for a reason. It does not tell me very much, if I’m honest, but it teaches me to see, and it inspires what Joanna Macy calls ‘active hope’5, so I can engage with our burning world with an open heart.
Last night, we returned to Sligo in the dark. I took my post-event vulnerability hangover to the bathroom. Through the open window, a long-eared owl called. These are highly secretive birds who only make themselves heard during the mating season. These are the tongues of nature that cannot be rationalised. Like the wild geese Mary Oliver writes about, who call over and over, ‘…announcing your place/ in the family of things.’ It was a soul-affirming message from the dark woods around our house, and I took it very much to heart.
So, yes, hope is complicated, and requires a little etymological dissection before I can fully commit to it. But if Emily Dickinson believed that, ‘Hope is a thing with feathers’, then I’ll spend as much time as I can with my avian sisters so I too might grow wings - will you join me?
With love,
Bethany
I first heard this phrase in Brian McLaren’s book, ‘Life After Doom’.
Derrick Jensen, ‘Beyond Hope’, Orion Magazine. Read the full piece here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/.
Mary Oliver, ‘Winter Hours’, Winter Hours.
This article highlights some of the amazing urban plants we can spot and highlights the damage of ‘plant blindness’: https://theconversation.com/the-amazing-flowers-growing-in-pavement-cracks-and-why-you-shouldnt-pass-them-by-236953
Read more about Joanna Macy’s ecophilosophy here: https://www.activehope.info
You spoke so well on Sunday, Bethany. I love when you said ‘everything is spiritual’.
How gorgeous to get a little of your time relayed here ! In the end, as well as moving out , I also had nurovirus on Sunday , (it’s only gone today ) so all in all a rough time! Love imagining you two together talking hope x