Dearest Friends,

Thank you for the medicine of your company in our most recent gathering.

In our last session, we explored the beloved environmental activist, systems theorist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy’s idea of active hope and how this construct can support us in the work of transforming ecological grief.

Like I shared in my opening reflections, I struggled for years to reconcile my intellectual understanding of our planet’s devastation with some kind of hope. Given how overwhelmingly bleak much of the research on ecological loss has been, being hopeful seemed like an exercise in wish fulfillment at best and a descent into delusion at worst.

Hence, encountering Joanna Macy’s idea of active hope (developed in collaboration with Chris Johnstone) was profoundly transformative. The conventional idea of hope rests on a particular kind of cognition that then generates a specific kind of emotion and behavior, e.g., “I believe that a better future is possible…and that inspires and motivates me to take action.” The foundational role of belief in conventional hope is why it’s so challenging to rouse in the face of planetary science—and why it can so easily devolve into despair.

Active hope, however, reverses the sequence by starting with values-driven behavior, e.g., “I’m going to take action because it’s in line with my values”—and the behavior then generates a specific kind of emotion (i.e., inspiration) and cognition (i.e., trust that the effort will produce some kind of result).

In other words, active hope doesn’t rely on outcomes or guarantees. It doesn’t evaluate the worth of one’s actions on their likelihood of their success. For this reason, it can remain steadfast even in the face of catastrophic predictions and doomsday scenarios. Rather than asking “Is my envisioned future possible or probable?”, active hope asks “What can I do to bring my envisioned future to life?”

SUGGESTED PRACTICE:

Sit quietly and attend to your breath. As you inhale, silently and gently say the word “open.” As you exhale, silently and gently say the word “soften.” Invite openness on the inhale; invite softness on the exhale. Practice like this for a few minutes. Then silently ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I hope for, long for and yearn for?
• What is my love for this planet calling me and inviting me to do? What’s the medicine that’s mine to give?
• What am I committing to practicing in daily life? What daily expressions of care are aligned with what matters to me most?

RECOMMENDED POEM:

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower (translated by Joanna Macy)

REFLECTION PROMPTS:

1. What is your vision of a flourishing and thriving planet?
2. What actions are within your reach to help bring this vision to life?
3. What daily habits can you cultivate in line with your vision?