Notes on Hope: Rebecca Solnit

To hope is to gamble. It is 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 of this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the couch 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 the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether or not we act on it has everything to do with it. 

-Rebecca Solnit; Hope in the Dark 

Taking Endless Shapes

Life is liquid, in it's underlying essence. Careening, cascading, and taking the endless shapes of the containers we create for it.

Even in stillness there's soft, subtle change. 

The question to ask then might be: What shapes are the containers I've built for my life to flow through? 

Some of these shapes are narrow, thin strips where life flows hesitantly: built up by safety banks that have buffered disappointment.

A sliver of life moves here where once a quixotic torrent of open hearted feeling carved it's hollows. 

We might funnel the flow into feedback loops, a figure eight that seems to turn a corner only to find itself treading territory we've coursed over

and over 

and over again.

Sometimes we keep life's substance frozen in tiny pools where we can (seemingly) control is contents. We anchor what we love in cautious ponds of the familiar and fixed. 

It undoubtedly feels safer that way. 

Life may conform to it's containers and shift to the shapes, but it is not that.

Life will only stay frozen for so long without freezing our flexibility and then evaporating in the sun; stay sealed so long until it cultivates claustrophobia.

Life will only stay thin and restricted without, too, making us closed off and brittle.

There's freedom in knowing that we can usher our circumstances without constructing dams.

Allowing life to dart and vacillate, live through us.

Resonant, vivid, dynamic. 

Nothing stays put here in the current of creation.

Even -- unspeakably-- ourselves.

We simply move with it. Arms out, hips steady, rocking back and forth from our centerline of gravity. 

Careening, cascading, and taking endless shapes. 

GONE FERAL: An Ode to shedding Convention and Living by Instinct & Intuition

Feral women trade rules for rituals.

Listen to the language of the bodies. Hear the call of adventure whispered on winds and follow.

They give themselves permission.

Feral women peel off perfectionism and stand patiently exposed.

Blossom from within. As everything in nature does.

Feral women know that the root of "humility" means "close to the earth" and shed their feathers to fall on their knees when necessary.

They draw a line against injustice, love like children, play like animals.

They travel lightly. In packs. And barefoot when possible. Their only home is in their skin and regard it as a worship ground. Scale trees for ripe fruit without avoiding bruises.

Feral women speak from a place just below the navel and speak up even when their voices shake. 

They occupy both soul and spirit, shadow and light.

They embrace their impermanent nature and choose not to squander mortality in an effort to keep things fixed and controlled.

They're discerning, pragmatic.

See elegant design and structure in the systems of nature and recreate them in their lives as an act of reverence.

They're wise, intuitive.

See unsustainable design and structure in systems built by man and defy them in sacred rebellion.

They seek out the stories of their grandmothers and keep them close for their daughters. Recount them to each-other to keep our core mythologies supple.  

They are paradox. 

Both In the moment and on the precipice of pure potential. 

They are you, they are us.

Liberated and welcomed home.