Hope is a Verb with Its Sleeves Rolled Up

Hope is a Verb with Its Sleeves Rolled Up

foreword, Savage Grace (Quiet Moon, Jan 2018)

When John of the Cross, often accredited with the concept of the ‘dark night of the soul’ escaped his prison and torture, he penned a poem we know as the ’Dark Night’ and in it he wrote that what saved him and gave him the courage to risk his life to escape was a fire, a fire inside that no one could extinguish.  We must rekindle the fire inside us all if we are to be instruments of Mother Earth in her time of agony.

It is time to forego the rhetoric about loving our children and grandchildren and commit to doing something about the diminished beauty and health and diversity of the planet that they face if we do not act wisely and generously and bravely today and start creating a new society and indeed, a new humanity – one that is in tune with the Earth and not objectifying her for our own greedy goals.

The eco-philosopher David Orr defines hope as “a verb with the sleeves rolled up” and I like this definition for it tells us that hope is conditional on our willingness to act.  It is not enough to act superficially in a reptilian brain mode of action/reaction, rather we must act now from a deep place of non-doing and non-action, that is from our being.  That is why ours is a time not only for scientists and inventors, but also mystics and contemplatives to join hands so that our action flows from being and from a deep place of return to the Source.  Inner work as well as outer work is called for and the courage to examine our intentions and our shadows and do that inner work of examining darkness even as we swim in it.