Guest Post: Cultivating Hope
“Doozy” is a pantheistic hedgewitch on the east coast. She enjoys connecting with magical energies through every day actions, radical activism, and intuitive engagement.
I’m excited to again share a guest post from Doozy! In this post Doozy reflects on the necessity of hope in the world. She writes about things we might take for granted or not appreciate, our interconnectedness with the seen and unseen world around us, and the hope those things can provide when things look bleak or we are exhausted by everything happening. She talks about her view on hope as an important magic that takes conscious effort but can transform the world.
As Delta, fires, and political upheaval sweep through a world already exhausted by our ongoing calamity, it is too easy to fall into hopelessness and cynicism. Bitterness and jadedness are a - not the - natural path from here. The weeds of nihilism and vengeance, great fuel for oppressive forces, are poised to send out their runners. And so hope takes conscious cultivation.
Hope requires remembering just how much magic we have available to us to use in creating what hasn’t yet been weaved. Our magic goes so far beyond the edge of a spell circle or the pages of a book. I can stick a small white piece of specially organized carbon and other molecules and by the powers of earth, air, water, heat, and care it can turn into giant orange orbs that can make someone nourished and full of warmth (pumpkins – I’m talking about growing pumpkins). Can you truly tell me that is not incredible magic that made a tangible difference in the world?! With just my words or presence I can alter how another human sees the world for the better, even if often that impact needs time and good conditions to germinate and grow, just like those pumpkins. Is that not a beautiful spell?! How easily we get so distracted by what is still left to do that we forget what we are capable of doing.
Hope requires appreciating just how many allies we have in making what is to come. For those of us fighting for a more sustainable, ethical, just, loving world to live in, do you think the plants and the soil and the water and the animals and the fungi and the air and the warmth all around you do not want the same? When I decompose into soil, when the moisture from my body evaporates to return to the water cycle, when the building blocks of my cells are transformed into mushrooms and apple trees, when the warmth I generate dissipates into the environment, when my exhalations join the air around me, when I become all those things and more, will I not still want and benefit from a more just and loving and balanced world? And if I will, then would it not be natural if the beings all around me do too? We may feel overwhelmed by the seeming enormity of the greed and oppression we are up against, but we have more allies that they ever could, if only we were open to feel their presence and join up with them.
Hope requires remembering how powerful we really are. Of course we are exhausted when, after all we have already done, greed and hate and oppression are still here. And in our exhaustion we may lose sight of our still-here-ness. As long and as hard as oppressors have fought, despite how many systems have been created to try to stop our growth, they haven’t succeeded in getting rid of us. Because just in each of our little actions towards good we self seed and begin to regrow our movements at every opportunity. I cannot be bound in such a way that I cannot encourage others, nourish others, make something – anything - around me a little bit better. If I want to live in a world that is more generous and kind I can literally just make that happen by being generous and kind and no one can stop me. How exhausted must oppression be then after facing liberation so many times? Together with all our magic and all our allies and all the natural inclination the world has toward healing, we have so far on the grand scale been unstoppable.
Hope requires remembering why we ever cared to begin with. I do not wear my mask because others have, I wear it because I love others enough to protect them. I do not give a few dollars to my unhoused neighbor because I want to buy control over their actions or pay for their gratitude, but because I want to live in a world where someone was given to. I do not fight for liberation to spite or get vengeance on those who do harm, but out of love for everyone who will benefit from it (which is everyone). The fact that we want ourselves and others to enact good, and the disappointment we feel in the moments when that doesn’t happen, that is in itself evidence that there is something worth striving for here. We are our own evidence that there is good in the world that deserves protecting.
Hope is a powerful magic, and we will never lose the ability to cultivate it.
