Listen! Don't give up Hope!

Studs Terkel, a great listener, wrote the book Hope Dies Last when he was in his early 90s. Rebecca Solnit's second edition of Hope in the Dark was published a few years ago. Particularly since November 2016, we've become more reliant on these works to temper our increasing cynicism. Solnit's observation, that

“The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect…”

was affirmed by a personal experience these past few days, when a plant we were convinced was dead, displayed a bloom in the shadows of fallen leaves.

an aster bloom from a "dead"plant

Photo by J. Harrington

A day or two ago, we happened to glance at the leaves accumulating near the end or our drive. Peeking out from under a handful of oak and wild grape leaves was the purple and yellow flower of a New England aster. A little more than a year ago, we planted a couple of aster plants on the West side of the road at the South side of the drive. Come May of this year, we had what looked like two very dead plants. No sign of green whatsoever. They stayed that way through June, July and August.

Perhaps it's been the spell of abnormally(?) wet weather we've had during most of September and October, that same spell we've muttered about and cursed, that brought out the Lazarus genes in the aster. We'll never know, but we do know this: the reappearance of life from the dead plants has kicked our cynicism in the butt with a vengeance. For that, we are very grateful. As Terkel tells us

'Hope has never trickled down,' writes Terkel. 'It has always sprung up' - and he gets his title from Jessie de la Cruz, a founder member of the farmers union, who insisted: 'If you lose hope, you lose everything.'

Our hopes have definitely "sprung up" with the emergence of a beautiful blossom from a "dead plant." We wish you comparable sources of hope in your lives. We also hope you reinforce your hopes by voting on or before November 6, 2018, especially if you vote for politicians who've demonstrated their listening skills more than their promises of painless solutions. You know who we mean.

The Hope I Know

By Thomas Centolella

doesn’t come with feathers.

It lives in flip-flops and, in cold weather,

a hooded sweatshirt, like a heavyweight

in training, or a monk who has taken

a half-hearted vow of perseverance.

It only has half a heart, the hope I know.

The other half it flings to every stalking hurt.

It wears a poker face, quietly reciting

the laws of probability, and gladly

takes a back seat to faith and love,

it’s that many times removed

from when it had youth on its side

and beauty. Half the world wishes

to stay as it is, half to become

whatever it can dream,

while the hope I know struggles

to keep its eyes open and its mind

from combing an unpeopled beach.

Congregations sway and croon,

constituents vote across their party line,

rescue parties wait for a break

in the weather. And who goes to sleep

with a prayer on the lips or half a smile

knows some kind of hope.

Though not the hope I know,

which slinks from dream to dream

without ID or ally, traveling best at night,

keeping to the back roads and the shadows,

approaching the radiant city

without ever quite arriving.

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