Worth sharing again. When first reading, I wept as soon as I got to “not hope, but love.” This deep and sacred truth touches my heart so deeply. As always, heartfelt thanks, gratitude, and love to Chris Jordan. 🙏💗 Molly
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| Sunrise on the Winter Solstice over the Strait of Magellan, Chile, 2024. Photo @ Chris Jordan |
Not Hope, But Love
Two days ago I anticipated posting the photo below as a follow-on to the earlier image of darkness. I called that one "Crossing the Zenith," to illustrate a story of our symbolic dawning of new hope the next morning. Sadly, that story was not to be. In retrospect I feel naive for having hoped for it in the first place. But here is my sunrise photo anyway, along with an observation about the nature of hope.
By its usual definition, hope depends on things going well "out there." Hope is a kind of optimism that things are moving in the right direction, and in this way hope has its roots in the future. And we tend to hope for things that are beyond our control. I don't "hope" that I brush my teeth this morning; I just brush them; but I do hope the Earth doesn't get hit by an asteroid. In this way, we can see that hope, as least by standard definitions, is a fundamentally disempowered state of mind. Our feelings of hope are like a roller coaster that goes up or down with the daily news. If this is what we depend on to sustain us, then we live in a precarious position.
But letting go of hope also feels dangerous, risking a slide into despair, depression, cynicism. Hope is a feeling we all want to have, an energy that nourishes us and makes it worth it to get out of bed in the morning. I don't want to minimize or negate our need for hope; but I do think perhaps there is an error in our labels. Maybe it just has the wrong name; not hope, but love.
Love resides in the present. It doesn't depend on anything happening or not happening outside of us. Even if the war is lost, we can still feel love and act from love. The archetypal battlefield nurse, tending the wounded and dying, doesn't need hope; she is grounded in love, in the present.
In a moment like now, as our dreams and wishes collapse, perhaps we can see the truth in the teachings of our wisest ancestors: that the most important light in the world resides not "out there," but inside of each one of us. The question of what to do next, how to act, can wait for just a moment, as we turn up the dimmer switch inside of us and affirm the power of our own inner light. Everything else will follow, but let us begin here.
— Chris Jordan
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