Every Blooming Thing

Do Not Lose Hope

The world just keeps feeling heavier and heavier. When I take little half-steps into the news, I have no idea how to process what I’m seeing. And then I have no idea how to process the way other people are processing it across social media.

I’ve been in this state of frozen semi-panic for a while now. Especially since the proposed mind-bogglingly massive Stratos Data Center¹ just up the road from me and then a proposed 20,000 seat amphitheater² at the mouth of the canyon in my neighborhood — which would entangle and likely block one of the only access roads from Utah County to the Uintahs.

It feels like the world is being run by developers with lots of money and little (or no) regard for the people who have to live with their decisions. I don’t want to live in a world where money means you can call the shots. Because very few of us have the billions necessary to get our way.

Luckily one of the things I did stumble across in the tangled world of the internet was this piece by Clarissa Pinkola Estes titled Do Not Lose Heart (via the lovely Kathryn Knight Sonntag).

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope.

Do not lose hope.

That last line struck. I dabble here with little essays about this and that, hoping that I’m adding more hope to the world, but I don’t think I always am.

I think hope is hard, hope is work. Hope is an effort. Especially when I have to witness the disappearance of civil discourse, basic human rights, and the rule of law. I am not always a hopeful person. But I want to be.

Again, the wisdom of Estes,

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there.

I want to live in a world that’s run by wildflowers and bees, but I am weakened by ruminations on all that is outside my reach, all that I cannot change.

But Estes has a way of framing this feeling that I found really helpful:

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

I would so like the world to tip toward an enduring good.

This morning I walked up to Rock Canyon with Howie the dog, just trying to shake all this noise from my brain.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Do Not Lose Heart

I went slowly up the canyon, trying to notice every blooming thing, trying to light my soul. (In this case, “every blooming thing” is not a genteel sort of curse, but an actual thing I was trying to do.)

And, blooming things are incredible.

This Antelopehorn Milkweed, for instance, is incredible. What are those petals inside the other petals? How is it so many different colors?

Antelopehorn Milkweed in Rock Canyon

And this Spreading Dogbane. Such a delicate pink.

Spreading Dogbane near Rock Canyon.

I’m not sure I know all the way yet what it means to show my soul, but I’m going to try. I know that moments in the mountains: just me and the sun and the grass, fill me. Whatever light I have, I want to shine. Whatever soul sparks I have, I want to give.

I hope all my small hopes, half hopes, glimmers and glimpses, add up to large hope.

And I hope that large hope lights you.

1. The linked website is pro-data center from the team leading the initiative.

2. The link takes you to a news article from KSL, relatively unbiased source that leans right.