“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all the darkness.”
- Desmond Tutu
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
- Martin Luther King Jr.
In Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person well on their way toward enlightenment who chooses to use their wisdom to help other human beings liberate themselves. On the threshold of an enlightened life, such a wisdom-being refuses to cross over, committing to wait till all beings can come and join. What moves me is the implicit truth that a bodhisattva knows that all will never come. And so, in essence, he or she embraces an awakened life on Earth. Not shaping or purifying others, but wandering authentically among the living.
- Mark Nepo
Last week, we considered the possibility of joy being something quite different than most of us have been taught. Rather than joy being an emotion akin to happiness, we contemplated the idea that joy is a relationship we have with our emotional body in which we allow ourselves to feel all emotional states moving through our field of experience - a conscious communion with the vibrational in which we feel the elation of being alive. As we have learned and continue to learn, we access this communion when we are willing to listen beyond the voice in our head and tune into the energy (or the music) of the present moment. When we have the courage and the will to do so, we reveal a world of wonder and awe.
Today, as we conclude our autumn session, I wish to explore Hope. Discussing hope is timely as we are now in the season of hope - the midpoint of winter, the darkest period of the solar cycle. Throughout many cultures there are tales describing this time as the birth of the archetypal Sun King - including the Christian story of Jesus’s birth - representing the hope of renewal .(Steven Farmer).
I believe that, like Joy, the real meaning of Hope has become lost for many. So much so that many spiritual teachers including Pema Chodron suggest that we abandon hope. She is not suggesting we enter despair, quite the opposite, in fact.
If we're willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path... ...if we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.
- Pema Chodron, “When Things Fall Apart”
What Pema is suggesting is that we give up hope as we have come to know it, which is a wish for something other than the present moment. The invitation is to give up on this kind of hope …and embrace hope (or dream) as a state of being and not a place to arrive at.
We get so caught up in whether the dream comes true or falls away, when its purpose is to charge the circuit of life between us. I now think of dreams differently: not as individual aspirations, but more as transpersonal conduits of grace; filaments of soul that helps us find each other and illumine the world. When we can feel a dream moving through - and drop its name, even more, drop its game - it expands us with a moment of aliveness that enlights us, lightens us from within.
- Mark Nepo
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
- Vaclav Havel, former President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Rebublic
Imagine a Woman I & II
by Patricia Lynn Reilly
Imagine a woman who believes it is right and good she is a woman.
A woman who honors her experience and tells her stories.
Who refuses to carry the sins of others within her body and life.
Imagine a woman who trusts and respects herself.
A woman who listens to her needs and desires.
Who meets them with tenderness and grace.
Imagine a woman who acknowledges the past’s influence on the present.
A woman who has walked through her past.
Who has healed into the present.
Imagine a woman who authors her own life.
A woman who exerts, initiates, and moves on her own behalf.
Who refuses to surrender except to her truest self and wisest voice.
Imagine a woman who names her own gods.
A woman who imagines the divine in her image and likeness.
Who designs a personal spirituality to inform her daily life.
Imagine a woman in love with her own body.
A woman who believes her body is enough, just as it is.
Who celebrates its rhythms and cycles as an exquisite resource.
Imagine a woman who honours the body of the Goddess in her changing body.
A woman who celebrates the accumulation of her years and her wisdom.
Who refuses to use her life-energy disguising the changes in her body and life.
Imagine a woman who values the women in her life.
A woman who sits in circles of women.
Who is reminded of the truth about herself when she forgets.
Imagine yourself as this woman.
II
Imagine a woman who is interested in her own life.
A woman who embraces her life as teacher, healer, and challenge.
Who is grateful for the ordinary moments of beauty and grace.
Imagine a woman who participates in her own life.
A woman who meets each challenge with creativity.
Who takes action on her own behalf with clarity and strength.
Imagine a woman who has crafted a fully-formed solitude.
A woman who is available to herself.
Who chooses friends and lovers with the capacity to respect her solitude.
Imagine a woman who acknowledges the full range of human emotion.
A woman who expresses her feelings clearly and directly.
Who allows them to pass through her as naturally as the breath.
Imagine a woman who tells the truth.
A woman who trusts her experience of the world and expresses it.
Who refuses to defer to the perceptions, thoughts, and responses of others.
Imagine a woman who follows her creative impulses.
A woman who produces original creations.
Who refuses to colour inside someone else's lines.
Imagine a woman who has relinquished the desire for intellectual approval.
A woman who makes a powerful statement with every action she takes.
Who asserts to herself the right to reorder the world.
Imagine a woman who has grown in knowledge and love of herself.
A woman who has vowed faithfulness to her own life.
Who remains loyal to herself. Regardless.
Imagine yourself as this woman.
