Promise

“When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?”

I love the promise of big skies.

As I walk and cycle my landscape, the expansive sky speaks to me of spaciousness, opportunity and optimism. Even if nothing material changes in my life, I can feel hopeful under skies like this.

As we emerge into an ominous new normal, hope feels like a helpful, resilient capacity to bring to the days when I concern myself with the legacy that we are leaving our children. Regardless of the fading reality of my own childhood, I remember growing up in a world full of potential and possibility. Now I worry that options our children face are much reduced: that they will endure life on a damaged planet and participate in an ecosystem struggling to survive.

Perhaps it’s been the lot of every parent to worry in ways like this?

But I know I can’t pause for too long in my worries and so I stare again towards the restorative distant blue.

And even as I look over monotonous expanses of modern agriculture, the skies tell me to trust that possibilities remain and, under their tutelage, the earth can provide for us.

Rebecca Solnit says that, ‘Blue is the colour of longing for the distances that you never arrive in, for the blue world’ that reminds us that we will never solve the problem of our enduring desire:

“If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival… ”

When I bring hope to my longing, my energy and agency are mobilised. I know that it is too late for us to avoid global warming, that new pandemics will strike us, that mass migration and conflict is inevitable. I know that the future has become a threat and that we will not leave this place better than we found it.

But if we are incapacitated by denial, fear or division, this world will get a whole lot worse.

Our task now is to work with hope.

And with hope, to rekindle the promise of big skies.

Notes:

My Rebecca Solnit quote is from her excellent ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost.’ On the flatlands near my house, it’s impossible to walk far enough to get lost. It’s difficult on my bike too as I have a little satnav/computer to guide me, but my greatest joy is to turn it off….

Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone has been widely praised for its contribution to how we might constructively and sensitively change ourselves and our world. The subtitle might help you judge if would be useful to you: ‘How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy.’ It says it all…

Finally, the latest copy of ‘Resurgence & Ecologist’ arrived today with the headline, ‘Building back hope.’ A UK subscription is £30 for a year- and well worth it.