Change #22 HOPE

Dear Birth Peeps,
It is too easy to become jaded, righteous, or hopeless as we consider the state of the world, and birth in our culture. If we become hopeless, who will dream the healing, who will take action? A friend of mine shared the following excerpt from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit.

"Causes and effects assume history marches forward; 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 change of weather.

"I say 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. All that the 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 are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

"...Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable."

In-Love and Hope,

Pam