Dear Hopeholders

I used to call myself an Eternal Optimist. It’s true that I have always had a positive orientation in life. My Mum said, “You were always such a happy baby.” I am sure that was in part due to her ever-loving presence and care. She was a wonderful and present mother.

But I have also had my share of losses and hard times, especially as a kid. So perhaps my operating system was geared that way from the start.

Before I arrived at a mature hope, I was someone who would leap to the positive position. I would skip past the difficult realities, skim over complexity, and arrive as swiftly as possible at a cheerful vantage point. I would point to a positive outcome, a hasty solution, a silver lining.

Regrettably, and probably annoyingly for those close to me, I bartered in false hope and toxic positivity.

False hope can take many forms. It looks like bright green dishwashing detergent made in a lab, with no accountability for what happens once it is flushed down a drain, sporting a 100 percent recycled bottle sticker to make people feel hopeful enough to buy it. It looks like an app that tracks your personal carbon footprint, subtly shifting responsibility onto individuals while large systemic emitters continue largely untouched.

It smells like a housing project on stolen land that speaks of partnership. It plants natives, hires a cultural advisor, uses Indigenous language in the marketing copy. But ownership structures remain unchanged. Profits flow outward. Decision making power does not shift. The soil might be restored but the title deed is not.

I have not personally peddled false hope, but I am not immune to its pull. I have indulged in consumerism with the hope that my purchasing decisions will bring about a brighter future, while my brain shimmers with dissonance, knowing that the choice to buy and support this product merely perpetuates its existence.

Over this tumultuous decade, as my hair greys and I have dedicated myself to the tutelage of hope, I have found a more secure footing in something else. Real, mature hope. This is a place where storms, devastation, floodwaters and loss cannot sweep me away. Rather than bypassing reality, real hope stands right inside it.

It is us. It is our humanity. It is our choices. It is our desire.

It is our yearning. It is our love.

It is our will for our one precious life.

Rebecca Solnit writes about this distinction. Hope is not optimism. It is not the belief that things will turn out fine. In Hope in the Dark she describes hope as an orientation toward uncertainty. History, she reminds us, is shaped by moments we could not foresee. False hope promises guarantees. Real hope lives where outcomes are not yet written.

Real hope is the seed of our greatest longing that we plant into the world precisely in the sites where there is rot, destruction and decay.

But what do I know about hope in the extreme? I have to check my privilege and look to voices forged in proximity to hardship and pain. My go-to person on hope is Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger, who wrote The Choice about her harrowing experience as a Jewish teenager. One of just seventy-five survivors among fifteen thousand Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, she said, “We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.”

She ties hope to choice and inner freedom. Even in the hardest moments, how we respond and what we hold onto can shape our way forward.

We can scatter seeds of our greatest yearning all over this earth. There are seeds needed in every site of decay and harm. Seeds of potential. Seeds of new thinking, or ancient thinking. Seeds of healing and recovery. Seeds of slowness and connection. Seeds in the form of children. Seeds in the form of kindness.

If you scatter seeds and walk away, some might take hold. But in my experience of gardening, survival depends on care. On tending the conditions. Sheltering. Weeding. Protecting.

When I send money to a war zone halfway around the world, it feels like a scattering of seeds. But when I plant seeds closer to home, I can care, nurture and protect with my knowledge and connection to the local environment I know so well. There is no such thing as a remote gardener. That is why the gardening metaphor feels so intimately linked to hope.

So, fellow gardeners. What sites around you need seeds of hope? And how will you water and tend and defend that seed so it survives?

Lots of love, 

x Megan

P.S I am sending this whilst camping, so taking a few shortcuts to get this to you on time!