NPR Interview With Michael Meade On the Inauguration of Barack Obama and the Second Layer of Hope

Please visit the Mosaic website, www.mosaicvoices.org, to listen to the NPR interview with mythologist Michael Meade on the inauguration of Barack Obama and the Second Layer of Hope. This is very powerful.

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From the website on the Second Layer of Hope:

The Second Layer of Hope"It is the nature of hope to become lost; what begins with high hopes often ends in deep despair. Hope hid under the lid after Pandora's box opened, as if all the troubles of the world must be released before genuine hope can be found. Any hope for this hopeless world might have to be found inside the currents of despair that increasingly accompany the news reports of cultural unraveling and environmental disasters.

Initial hopes tend to be false hopes and high hopes that never reach the ground of reality. After naive hopes have been dashed against the hard edges of the world a second level of hope sometimes appears, a "hope against hope."

For, what can be found at the edge of hopelessness and in the depths of despair are the images hidden in the soul, the core imagination that waits to be found when all seems hopeless and the end is in sight. The second layer of hope includes a darker knowledge of the world and a sharper insight into one's own soul. Perhaps it would be better to name the hidden hope "imagination," for it is imagination that keeps the world a becoming thing.

The core and crucial power of humanity is not simple hope, rather it is the capacity for renewal that attends the inborn powers of imagination. Hope is reborn each time someone awakens to the genuine imagination of their own heart. Hope springs eternal as long as people can find a sense of mythic imagination that can create ways to hold the ends and beginnings together, even when things appear hopeless to most."

Excerpted from The World Behind the World, page 63
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To really enter the world, you usually have to lose your hopes.

Once a person loses hope, the actual word for that is despair.

In other words, you want leaders who have lost their initial hopes,

who have survived their own despair

because then once you go through that kind of darkness

you find that second level or layer of hope which is not naive

and not overly hopeful, but is more of a

wisened and smartened hope,

and it's a deeper hope that is not deterred by simple defeat.

And my hope is that Obama's sense hope is that second level of hope

because given our difficulties, that's the kind of hope we're going to need.

~ Michael Meade