oh the precarity of hope
and how faith, desire, nihilism can show us the way
(this is a piece I published in 2022. today I called my landlord to talk to him about co-buying these three properties I live on so that me and my freaky loves can lock down this affordable housing and save the farmland chris and isia have been tending for almost 20 years now. I feel like a very brave baby, and I am thinking of this piece a lot. I have recently paywalled older posts, so I will be re-publishing old pieces every now and then that feel resonant so folks can read them for free again for awhile.)
i.
I have a weird relationship to hope.
I am feeling it now, in like big-bubbling-up ways. I feel seven dwarves in my chest trying to contain it as if it’s a spring overflowing. or maybe its mickey mouse in a wizard hat trying to scoop up infinitely pouring sentient buckets of mop water.
this morning I listened to a podcast on hope. well, I started to. a woman said “hope, mmm that word just washes over you. mmm, thats a good one.” every word out of her mouth pushed me farther away from what she was saying, and by the end of the sentence I said out loud, nose wrinkled, to no one: “IS IT? IS IT A GOOD ONE ???” I turned the podcast off and started writing.
in 2016 I was working on a series of work. art work. fiber art work. little art baskets that hung on the wall. I was deep in my emotional work, and textiles were the only way I knew to navigate the muddy waters. I made this series of baskets as a way to create physical space for attributes that felt foreign to me, things that I wanted to call in, or create safe containers for. the most special one to me was called “hope is a small but heavy passenger.” it hangs in my hallway, now. it was the smallest, tightest basket I made. woven with leather bookbinding scraps and string someone stole for me on a first date that was pink, stained with green ink from a burst pen. it was behind a bar, but we got it. anyway it is this tight, tiny home. it looks like a basket carrying a basket, perched precariously on a pink dowel. that time in my life was the first time I had felt hope for myself, hope for my future, and it terrified me.
there is a precarity to hope that I don’t think people often talk about. those of us who have experienced longer periods of hopelessness than hopefulness, whether due to interpersonal trauma, grief or systemic oppression, know that the feeling of hopefulness can incite panic in the body: an instant clenching of the internal heart-fist that closes around the hope and fights off any perceived threat to it. or, conversely, a soon-after spiral into self-destructive behaviors that ensure the hope leaves. both of these actions, actually, seem to ensure the loss of hope. which, in a way, is experienced as a relief. loss of hope is accompanied by grief but at least it is familiar.
as the nervous system is my current lens for viewing literally everything, I wonder if hope is activating to me. I see the ways that hope induces black-or-white thinking in me, the ways nuance falls away as I both narrow the scope of what I’m hoping for to a slim window of potential outcomes labeled “good” that could positively reinforce my hopefulness (I was right!) and simultaneously broaden the scope of outcomes which would induce feelings of failure, bad, or wrong. outcomes that will tell me I was silly to have hoped, that will blame my disappointment on myself so that I feel some sense of control over it.
stepping my imaginary body onto the threshold of hope feels groundless, untethered. letting myself move slowly, incrementally is essential. I saw a meme recently saying that we talk about baby steps as if they’re this small, delicate unit of measurement when in reality (the reality of the baby taking them) they are these huge, earth-shattering, death-defying leaps into the unknown.
I’ve been speaking a lot with folks this week about unlearning. how we have so much shared understanding that learning is a slow, iterative process. we are still impatient with it, yes, but the reminders that we’re learning hit home and soothe. unlearning is baby steps. unlearning is death-defying leaps into the unknown. unlearning takes time, yes, does it take longer? both learning and unlearning are iterative processes: learning is a series of exposures and unlearning is a series of noticings. as we work to unlearn harmful internalized structures, we realize that the most readily available options we have with which to replace them are more harmful structures. unlearning necessitates sitting in uncertainty. unlearning means leaving the paths laid out for us and forming our own desire paths by walking. by baby steps. by death-defying leaps into the unknown. in the past, periods of “what the fuck am I doing” have meant wrong or bad, and now “what the fuck am I doing” is an indicator of wellness. it means you have left the path of certainty, you have left the path laid out before you and you are now forging your own. hurtling your baby body into unknown spaces with heroic amounts of trust and faith and wild abandon.
there is an anarcho-nihilist mantra I come back to often: no future. I don’t have the patience for theory, mostly, so I will certainly butcher the intentions surrounding this, but as it was explained to me it means that we can’t depend on the future, we can’t wait for reform. we can’t wait until things are “good enough.” that we must act, every day, in ways that resist and undermine the structures that oppress us. there is no someday revolution that will come along and free us. we are the someday revolution, today. every day. how will you choose to manifest that? what desires or destruction will you enact if you stop waiting for the right time? if you stop waiting for the future?
ii.
so if hope is a small but heavy passenger, I think that faith must be the basket that holds it.
and guess what?
I also have a weird relationship to faith. so so so so so many of us do. I am not even going to delve into the realms of ~organized religion~ because that is not what I am talking about here. weird relationship summary: family in a christian cult before I was born- church to me was listening to tapes of a homophobic man talking about jesus, while sitting alone in the basement. then came peer-pressured assimilation into the high school version of a christian cult (FCA) which lasted a couple months. then came militant atheism, then agnosticism, and now this funny opening I have to words like god and prayer that I play with and laugh as I unlearn (death-defying baby leap) all the dogma and find myself settling into an earth that is moving and holding me.
in preparation for the summit that happened last weekend, I had the honor of hearing stories from a Muscogee leader and reverend as we all sat around a fire. he talked about the ways that the earth is always moving us around to the right* places at the right* times. that idea was the final piece of the god puzzle for me. of the faith puzzle. that god is the earth. that we are the earth. and that idea is bigger than this essay could ever honor entirely, but it is all to say that, to me, this faith offers a physical groundedness that hope lacks. this faith holds hope like a hand gently holds a baby bird. there is a releasing of control, a trusting. as our pendulums swing back and forth eternally, faith lowers our anchor point. faith squats close to the ground to steady us. faith blurs the lines that hope has used to delineate success from failure and says “its All Right*. its alright.” the earth moves us together and apart like tectonic plates. do you think that the formation of mountains feels like the end of the world to the soil that is disturbed by it?
iii.
so if hope is what’s contained, and faith is the container, I think desire must be the energy that moves the hurtling baby body that carries that small but heavy hope passenger.
I wouldn’t say that I have a weird relationship with desire necessarily, but it is vulnerable. today in one of my sessions, a client named the anxiety between desire and disappointment, and my heart cheered. disappointment is quite challenging for me, although I think I associate it more closely with hope. I learned bodily to associate hope with disappointment. I feel hope as an openness in my chest, and I feel disappointment as a tight, closing, burning in my chest. like when the sand lion cavern thingy (cave of wonders, thanks google) in aladdin collapses in on itself and everyone has to run to escape. to me, hope and disappointment go hand in hand, one inevitably leading to the other. to avoid one, you must avoid the other. call in mickey and his hat, call in the seven dwarfs.
but desire, on the other hand…
desire is a body already in motion. desire emanates from a corporeal knowing that precedes thought and consciousness. desire is connected to our gut instinct that is connected to the roots that come out of our feet and permeate the ground into the rhizomatic network of life. desire isn't just the sexy stuff (but it certainly is that, desire is the energy that moves hand to leg, desire is the heat that emanates from hand through denim to thigh.) no, desire is also just… doing. desire can be mundane. like lately I have eschewed written lists and instead write my to-dos as options that are scattered across a page. I set my intentions, and then throw them to the wind, I let my hurtling baby body drive from one desire task to the other, and it is joyful. I look at obligation, turn it into an option, and wait for it to ripen into a desire.
I have to treat my hope like I treat my writing. when I start a piece, it fills me with hope. the joy of expressing myself leads to the hope of feeling seen, heard, having my words resonate with others. each time I feel the movement within me I feel an immediate clutching for it that says you have to finish this now or you never will. and I gently push back. I write when I can, and I leave it when I cannot. I come back to it if I want to. faith is what allows me to walk away, lets me give myself space for ripeness. desire is what leads me back to the page over and over.
I sit here in a life that is bigger than I ever would have let myself hope for. a life that is richer and softer and slower and more surprising than I thought I was capable of. I am faced with hopes of a magnitude I have never dared allow in my body before this. desire has led me here. listening has led me here. noticing has lead me here. looking at what I am already doing, looking at the desire path my body is already following has lead me here. each desirous baby hurtle builds a new faith basket room in my home for hope. hope for the rematriation of a forest with a history that tears me to shreds. hope for secure attachment. hope for the dismantling of oppressive structures. hope for the destruction of oppressive institutions. hope for liberation. hope for the collective liberation that comes from the consensual and consistent following of desire.
hope is precarious though, again, still. hope is a flame that requires tending. the tarot card I pulled yesterday said “the little flame that you look at with hope, fear, and wonder is a simple reflection of yourself. you are already the flame that you want to be.” hope is a flame to be tended but it is also a flame that can be used for sacred destruction.
(p.s. I have no idea where the disney references came from but I needed them.)
(p.p.s. I refuse to hold hope and nihilism in opposition to each other, and you cannot make me)
“with every rebellious footstep we take, we are entering an unknowable void. there are no reliable maps of the terrain that our struggles will occupy.” - blessed is the flame
“we are nihilists regardless of whether we call ourselves by the name, because we have no road out of this. we have only the starlit wilderness… the first act of navigation is to set foot in the wilderness. only then can we put our hands against the bare earth, feeling for the dim warmth of those fires still smoldering beneath.” hic nihil hic salta! (a critique of bartlebyism)
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