hope (essay)

the last statement i made to gerald (an ex from long ago), in ocean falls this summer was, “i don’t believe in hope,” and then the ferry horn sounded and i had to run down the hill to get on before it sailed away. i felt uneasy for days, leaving a conversation at that supposedly bleak place seemed a bad omen of something – particularly because i delivered my parting line in a town of 35 residents, its structures crumbling back into the earth amidst a patchwork of lush rainforest and clearcuts. the boarded up hotel, the eyeless hospital windows, the junk museum set up in the old co-op grocery store – a scene both hopeful and hopeless, which is often how i see the world, one sentiment negating the other. perhaps this is what i meant to say, or maybe it was just that “hope” seems like a difficult (if not untenable) place to situate our energy.

we were talking about peak oil, unfettered development and the collapse of land and ocean resources at the time. i’m not sure who initiated the conversation – likely me because i had just read derrick jensen’s yet-to-be-released book, Endgame and was thinking through the implications of environmental degradation and civilization’s reliance on shrinking resources. it was here that gerald said “you can always hope that people start making the right choices and consume less” to which i made my reply. and of course – he is right – i can make a million wishes, which is all that hopes are, and pin my energies there. or (and this is what i was getting at in my sharp response) – i can take action on those leverage points of change where i find them. my reaction to him, was really a reaction to the society that throws its hands up and “hopes for the best” rather than taking steps to make real changes.

but of course it is not true that i don’t have hopes or wishes or dreams; it is false to say “i don’t believe in hope” except as a retort in a conversation with an ex who has always been a riddle to me. there are things i want, that i can’t manifest by my physical actions in the immediate – which require some wishing and positive thinking just to keep them alive as dreams and desires. this is a type of hope, albeit one without expectation of fulfillment, which really just goes back to one state cancelling out the other (a hopeless hope).

i suppose i bristle at the word “hope” because it feels too much like saying – “there is nothing i can do about this anyway except pray” – and giving up so much agency, while our life-support systems of air and water and plants are slowly poisoned around us and by our actions as a collective body seems a bit disingenous to me. it’s the avoidance factor that makes me recoil and then react – and i suppose that is what i did mean in my parting statement to an ex last july in a tiny central coast village. looking back at it, i am pretty sure it was not a bad omen of anything.