the joy of the struggle…and the struggle is real.

hoping for squash

Hope is the place where Joy meets Struggle
Joy Stafford

It’s been hard to be hopeful and optimistic with all that is happening in our lives right now. Covid Resurgence, Main St closing and the Portland situation now poised to be repeated closer to home in Chicago and across other cities in the country. Earlier this week I peeked under the summer squash leaves to find that the chipmunks had eaten all the baby pattypans and zucchini that I was ready to pick. It sent me running to hide my head in my pillow I was thoroughly defeated - I let that be the last straw. I cried for my garden, but more for George Floyd, for the Portland moms, for the people sick with Covid and for those who are likely to get sick in the coming weeks, and I cried for families who’ve lost loved ones but couldn’t be with them in their final moments, or grieve together the way they’d like to. I cried for the injustice that exists today and has in this country since its inception, and I cried for my clients who are losing their businesses in the restaurant and hospitality industries. I cried for my tiredness and my loneliness and hopelessness. Until I was done. There’s nothing like a good cry.

I read this OpEd in the NY Times from Eric Utne where he suggests that hopelessness is actually a gift —that it might help one savor the moment and the preciousness of life. He referenced Vaclav Havel’s view of hope: that “It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” And I followed the thread to read Vaclav' Havel’s piece in Esquire from 1993 and this caught my attention as we live through this historic moment -"But history is not something that takes place elsewhere; it takes place here. We all contribute to making it. If bringing back some human dimension to the world depends on anything, it depends on how we acquit ourselves in the here and now.”

To be honest, I haven’t been practicing as much as I’d like (sometimes the only time I made it to my mat was to teach and that’s not a good sign for me) and I’ve been slipping into the shadows of my mind and feeling depression knock at my door. Last week , beginning with our Sunday practice I doubled down on my daily yoga and contemplative practices of sitting, journalling and picking flowers from the garden at dawn. And it’s beginning to move the needle 5 days in (I didn’t make it to my mat 2 days this week and that’s ok with me). I’m calling this the seeds of change that I need and I’m celebrating.

It’s in the action, that forward momentum of taking a next logical step (albeit imperfect), that I worry less about hope and am beginning to feel a sense of leaning into possibility - that I’m doing the best I can and that it will be enough, that each step is going to keep me on the path. Something like these words from Victoria Safford:

“Hope”
by Victoria Safford

Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of self-righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges; nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right,” but a very different, sometimes very lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle — and we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.