Invitation: BE HOPE.

Hope is your birthright. It is so much more than saying something tentative or the text of a greeting card. When we externalize hope as something aspirational, we remove its power.

In these challenging days our brilliant brains, our deep convictions are VITAL. Nonetheless always following logic chains… “If A, then…” Finding causation among billiard balls can take you only so far.

As people with enough privilege to be reading email, I invite you to revive our fundamentals. OH! Please don’t compound my invitation with an “-ist” or an “-ism”—simply identify the foundations on which you have built your work, or your life, or even, yourself.

Love, courage, wisdom, generosity. Hope is also one of these. Foundations.

These do not depend on how recently we have uncovered them, or thought about basing our life on a fundamental… they are part of us, woven in…or as used to be said “dyed in the wool.” Always there.

Each, under the right circumstance can become a verb—To love; To be courageous; To hope. If we go one step further, we can BE LOVE, and we can BE HOPE.

Our society is so bereft of hope…and it is so easy to be sold a bill of goods—that you have to earn the right to hope—that somehow hope depends on results…so we are collectively in a downward spiral since our consumer culture and economy that sucks such a disproportionate percentage of Earth’s resources (per capita)…I could keep going. We could fill pages of the signs that give anyone who is awake reasons to despair. How DARE we be hopeful when the evidence is so darned hopeless?

IT could also be said “How dare we forsake hope in these dark ours!”

I experienced this as an insight one night when I was in a room of about 20 people—people who were taking action in relation to some of the gravest threats to our collective future, and doing so lovingly, with great courage. These people were one of the first groups I had ever been in that were BEING HOPE. I felt like I was breathing oxygen after being deprived… I couldn’t figure out what was happening—and then I got it. Hope. The room was full of it. Those gathered in the small restaurant in Vienna Austria in 2014 were boosting a project that would change and perhaps save the world (it now has a name: The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons).

I vowed then, and there, to bring my “hope seedling” home, and let it grow.

This was in stark contrast to growing up during the Cold War. In 1970 I was 12 years old and the first Earth Day seemed too hollow compared to the threats I was acutely aware of…many children know the mess we are in, and that we are accelerating destruction of our living planet. Greta T is a worthy icon for millions of other youth, past, present and future. I lived from age 5 to age 12 believing at any moment a nuclear weapon would fall from the sky, not only on my home, but worldwide. Mutually Assured Destruction was not an idea—it was, for me a reality, and one that had reduced me to hiding under the covers for weeks…which became unbelievably boring.

…Finally, in order to get out of bed I cut a deal with myself, phrased this way:

While the world may in fact end in nuclear destruction, I can make a hypothesis: It is not too late to make things better on Earth—and if that is true, then I have a moral obligation to try.

This was a numb child’s logical formulation of hope—and I bet most reading this post have consciously, or unconsciously, signed on to some version of this deal in order to be walking around (not under the blankets) in 2021… and the basis of that “deal” with myself was the ever-present, undeniable, woven-into-our-very-souls: HOPE.

Hear this unequivocally: hope itself is not a negotiated deal, or something we earn, or a word we use for something that seems unattainable or in jeopardy. HOPE came with me when I was born—and came with each and every one of us. It is a part of us, and we can choose to turn it UP. We can BE hope.

Right now, in this moment, each of us IS HOPE for someone else. A roof over our heads… hot water—hell, water at all. BEING HOPE is a version of “counting our blessings” and I invite you, today, for even thirty seconds to do this. Here. Now. BE HOPE.