A Very Reliable Pocket of Hope

— Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

Over forty years ago, poet and activist Audre Lorde, reflecting on the activism of the 1960s, wrote,  “We were poised for attack, not always in the most effective places.”

I think about this a lot, in the context of now; what are the most effective places?

I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, far removed from activism on college campuses and city streets, from the violence against movements for civil and human rights.   But I watched it play out, and I soaked it in, and when it was my turn to speak, I stood self-righteously poised, if not to attack, to make my case.  I was stubborn in my understanding of why the world is as it is, and what to do about it. I insisted that others were in the wrong unless they agreed with me.

That was decidedly not, I know now, the most effective place to stand.

Lorde said that the 60s were “characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions,” then reminded listeners that liberation is not “a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change.” 

The most crucial, most accessible of those opportunities, Lorde wrote, is, “the most important resource I have, myself.”

At the ILI we practice and teach the personal practices of steadiness, curiosity, compassion, accountability, and grace. Our own learning and that of others suggests those behaviors will drive change that means more people thrive, and we’ve found that to be true.

Personal practice is one way to apply that “most important resource, myself.”  But there is another depth of practice, another source of hope, I hadn’t considered before. It’s not about how I apply myself in relation to others.  It’s in how I relate to myself, and how that relates to change.

Therapist, teacher, organizer, and writer Prentis Hemphill asks a question that stopped me this week: “How could we ever be satisfied by something that didn’t emerge from our own longing?”

I think I thought there was too much work to do to consider my own longing.  But Hemphill lovingly disagrees, suggesting that tending to personal longing is a crucial precursor to any external action for change, and an essential source of hope.

Harriet Tubman’s life was a source of both curiosity and insight for Hemphill growing up, “I couldn’t quite understand how someone could  imagine that things could be different in conditions that weren’t only intense, but were actually trying to eliminate hope for change.”

Tubman was born in a country and a time, Hemphill writes, when order was kept “by both casual and ritualized public violence, by intimidation, and denial of rights. Masses of people were being indoctrinated by propaganda that created and reified the world’s most recent invention, race.”

I read that sentence again and see how with only a couple small changes it could describe the present. And the lesson of Tubman’s life for the now, Hemphill writes, is that “In the most unsteady and dangerous times, we need our imaginations, we need visions.”

Audre Lorde writes, “Do not be misled or by despair, [as if] there’s nothing we can do.”

There is something to do. Always, forever and irrefutably: No one can stop me, no repression can keep me from practicing steadiness, curiosity, compassion, accountability, and grace. Nor can I be kept from imagining and longing for a different future.

This week I texted a good friend to ask how she was, and she wrote, “I am doing pretty well ... trying to find my own pockets of hope as the world spirals.”

The world has spiraled before, and it probably always will.  But ways to stop and even reverse those spirals are as close as my imagination, as accessible as my longing, as reachable as my own thoughtfulness, as possible as my own practice.   All of that’s a reliable pocket of hope.