LIKE A GARDEN LOOKED AT FROM A GATE

What is this nebulous thing we call "hope," and where do we find it?  Throughout history, many great writers and thinkers have chosen to view hope through the cold lens of logic.  Shakespeare suggested that hope exists only because "the miserable have no other medicine."  Nietzsche took it a step further, proclaiming that "hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torments." 

I'm inclined, however, to side with those who see the positive side of hope, people like Norman Cousins who recognized that "hope is independent of the apparatus of logic."  Maybe Samuel Johnson came closest to expressing the truth when he observed that "hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords . . ."

So how do we find and keep hope?  Hints to the answer can be found in this poem by Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature: 

                                                        Hope

                                             by Czeslaw Milosz

                            Hope is with you when you believe

                            The earth is not a dream but living flesh,

                            That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,

                            That all things you have ever seen here

                            Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

                            You cannot enter.  But you're sure it's there.

                            Could we but look more clearly and wisely

                            We might discover somewhere in the garden

                            A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

                            Some people say we should not trust our eyes,

                            That there is nothing, just a seeming,

                            These are the ones who have no hope.

                            They think that the moment we turn away,

                            The world, behind our backs, ceases to exists,

                            As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.

THE HOPE BENEATH OUR FEET

Collage of Happiness

Followers of this blog know that I frequently return to the poetry and essays of Wendell Berry, a remarkable philosopher and writer whose poems and essays speak to me almost daily as I try to navigate the treacherous waters of an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.  The poem that has my attention at the moment is Sabbath poem VI from 2007, as it appears in This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems (2013).  It's a poem about hope, but not the abstract notion of hope that one might find on a Hallmark sympathy card.  It's about what could happen to the world if each person could find his or her place, come to truly know that place, and recognize that caring for this place — this local place "underfoot," as Berry writes — is, ironically, the best way to care for the whole earth and the whole of humanity.

Knowing that most people do not have the time to devote to a lengthy blog posting, I hesitate to post a poem as long as this one.  I'm making an exception, however, because I think that the subject addressed — keeping hope alive by living well and responsibly on a local level — is vitally important, especially when our world leaders seem to be so bereft of solutions.

Sabbath Poem VI (2007)

from

This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

 by Wendell Berry

            It is hard to have hope.  It is harder as you grow old,

            for hope must not depend on feeling good

            and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.

            You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality

            of the future, which surely will surprise us, 

            and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction

            any more than by wishing.  But stop dithering.

            The young ask the old to hope.  What will you tell them?

            Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

            Because we have not made our lives to fit

            our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,

            the streams polluted, the mountains overturned.  Hope

            then to belong to your place by your own knowledge

            of what it is that no other place is, and by

            your caring for it as you care for no other place, this 

            place that you belong to though it is not yours, 

            for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.

            Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are

            your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor, 

            who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,

            and the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing

            in the trees in the silence of the fisherman

            and the heron, and the trees that keep the land

            they stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.

            This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power

            or by wealth.  It will stop your ears to the powerful

            when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy

            when they ask for your land and your work.

            Answer with knowledge of the others who are here

            and of how to be here with them.  By this knowledge

            make the sense you need to make.  By it stand

            in the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.

            Speak to your fellow humans as your place

            has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.

            Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it

            before they had heard a radio.  Speak

            publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.

            Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up 

            from the pages of books and from your own heart.

            Be still and listen to the voices that belong

            to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.

            There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,

            by which it speaks for itself and no other.

            Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

            Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground

            underfoot.  Be lighted by the light that falls

            freely upon it after the darkness of nights

            and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.

            Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,

            which is the light of imagination.  By it you see

            the likeness of people in other places to yourself

            in your place.  It lights invariably the need for care 

            toward other people, other creatures, in other places

            as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.

            No place at last is better than the world.  The world

            is no better that 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.

Wendell  Berry, This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems, 

One of the sentinels on my little piece of land . . .

HOPE FOR THE PAST

Robert Frost

(1874 - 1963)

Photo by Walter Albertin

The concept of hope is usually reserved for the future.  As Robert Frost and David Ray's poem remind us, however, it may be that a more pressing question is whether there is hope for one's past — all of the actions, decisions, and indecisions that undergird what one has become.

                                                 Thanks, Robert Frost

                                                         by 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 . . .

                                The future, yes, and even for the past,

                                that it will become something we can bear.

                                And I too, and my children, so I hope,

                                will recall as not too heavy the tug

                                of those albatrosses I sadly placed

                                upon their tender necks.  Hope for the past,

                                yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,

                                and it brings strange peace that itself passes

                                into past, easier to bear because

                                you said it, rather casually, as snow

                                went on falling in Vermont years ago.

Credit:  David Ray's poem, "Thanks, Robert Frost," is published in Music of Time: Selected and New Poems (The Blackwater Press, 2006).  Thanks also to Parker J. Palmer's column, Meaning Changes As Life Unfolds, published March 18, 2015, on Krista Tippett's excellent site, "On Being".

WAITING FOR HOPE AND HISTORY TO RHYME

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Against the backdrop of this week's horrendous massacres in France, and now the outpouring of more than one and a half million people of good will on the streets of Paris, I offer the hopeful words of the late Irish poet and playwright, Seamus Heaney:

                                         Human beings suffer.
                                         They torture one another.
                                         They get hurt and get hard.
                                         No poem or play or song
                                         Can fully right a wrong
                                         Inflicted and endured.

                                         The innocents in gaols
                                         Beat on their bars together.
                                         A hunger-striker's father
                                         Stands in the graveyard dumb.
                                         The police widow in veils
                                         Faints at the funeral home.

                                         History says, don't hope
                                         On this side of the grave.
                                         But then, once in a lifetime
                                         The longed-for tidal wave
                                         Of justice can rise up,
                                         And hope and history rhyme.

                                         So hope for a great sea-change
                                         On the far side of revenge.
                                         Believe that further shore
                                         Is reachable from here.
                                         Believe in miracle
                                         And cures and healing wells.

                                         Call miracle self-healing:
                                         The utter, self-revealing
                                         Double-take of feeling.
                                         If there's fire on the mountain
                                         Or lightning and storm
                                         And a god speaks from the sky

                                         That means someone is hearing
                                         The outcry and the birth-cry
                                         Of new life at its term.

                              From Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy

"WONDER KEPT DAZZLING ME . . ."

For many years, I have been inspired by the life and writings of the late William Sloane Coffin, who was a minister, a civil rights and peace activist, a prolific writer, and an unapologetic liberal.  In reading one of his books — specifically, The Heart is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality — I've come across a poem by Czeslaw Milosz which offers me both solace and hope as I attempt each day to process the onslaught of news about the wars and economic injustices that seem to be tearing the world apart.  Perhaps this poem will speak to others as well.  If we can continue to be dazzled by wonder, and "recall only wonder," it may be that we will have the collective energy and perspective to pull the world back from the precipice of self-destruction.

          Pure beauty, benediction: you are all I gathered
          From a life that was bitter and confused, 
          In which I learned about evil, my own and not my own.
          Wonder kept dazzling me, and I recall only wonder,
          The risings of the sun in boundless foliage,
          Flowers opening after the night, universe of grasses,
          A blue outline of the mountains and a shout of hosanna.
          How many times I thought: is this the truth of the Earth?
          How can laments and curses be turned into hymns?
          Why do I pretend to know so much?
          But the lips praised on their own, the feet on their own were
               running,
          The heart was beating strongly, and the tongue proclaimed
               adoration.


From Czeslaw Milosz, "A Mirrored Gallery," The Collected Poems: 1931-1987, trans. Renata Gorczymski (Ecco Press, 1988).