Coming upon the poet and activist Joanna Macy (who lives just across the Bay from me!), I decided to see how her perspectives on life and healing our world related to my loss of hope and descent into despair and depression about six months ago. Some might call that the "well-informed futility" syndrome.
I've written about that and two solutions or motivations despite having no hope when it comes to current US politics and the general nature of social interactions. These solutions work to keep me moving ahead: first, do what is right and just, and second, express gratitude for the groundwork of other like-minded souls, by continuing to do my part.
These days I'm not worrying about my loss of hope that we will ever in my lifetime achieve a humanistic, just society for women and for all people. That's for two principle reasons.
First, even if there is no hope. there is still joy in the struggle and in doing what is right. Joy includes feeling good and often feeling happy, and those can result from doing what one considers the right and just thing to do in life. Too often I find writers urging hope and only connecting hope with joy. That seems to leave out a wide swatch of folks who have fallen into apathy through disillusionment with politics or various struggles in life. One can be apathetic, lack hope, even feel lost -- and still think through what is the right and just thing to do and then go out and do it.
Second, I'm just doing my normal creative and non-creative but necessary work and homework, and speaking up as I must for the values that I want evident in my world and for those whom I leave behind. Irish poet Seamus Haney had a great way to put it in his address to college grads, advice that seems apt for anyone at any stage of life:
Remember that the anchor of your being lies in human affection and human responsibility, but remember also to keep swimming up into the air of envisaged possibilities.
Then I found succor in Macy's like-minded comment about the absence of hope and added it to my above blog:
"I’m not insisting that we be brimming with hope — it’s OK not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say, you know, feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out, so just be present… The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world — because it will not be healed without that. That [is] what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world."
From her above words I initially thought Macy agreed with me, but apparently it is not entirely so. I ran across and am awaiting delivery of her 2023 book entitled: Active Hope: How to Survive the Mess We're In Without Going Crazy.
I guess she still believes in hope after all.
But I take to heart her advice to just "show up".
For me that means to volunteer for Groupmuse, call my BFFs, feed my kitties even if not as often as they might like, practice my piano, do my chores, write my poetry, get on with downsizing to simplify my life, celebrate my birthday in a few weeks, take my partner to brunch next week, find something suitable to encourage a friend who is soon going to lose his aging mom, checkin with and email a saying or picture - "A Happy" as I came to call it - to a good friend to encourage him and lift his spirits because he suffers from a similar type and quantity of lack of hope as I do, drop an email of appreciation to the next physician who posts a personal story in JAMA of continuing struggle to provide compassionate effective care to their patients, speak up against ageism to represent the struggles, needs and abilities of my age cohort (ageism being easily disguised as compliment and thus not so readily made evident, stated in the poem below).
I can do that!
It's all about singing my song in this lifetime.
Macy says:
"...you’re always asked to sort of stretch a little bit more — but actually we’re made for that. There’s a song that wants to sing itself through us. We just got to be available.
"Maybe the song that is to be sung through us is the most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet or maybe it’s a song of joyous rebirth as we create a new culture that doesn’t destroy its world. But in any case, there’s absolutely no excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it’s going to go on forever. Those are just thoughts anyway. But this moment you’re alive, so you can just dial up the magic of that at any time."
More and more I am convinced of the wisdom of noting a feeling or idea and saying "it's just a thought. Do I really want to go with that, or put it on a floating leaf and send it on down the stream?"
Or as my therapist once suggested that I ask myself when I enter into a catastrophizing, stressed-out state of being:
"Is this how you want to show up right now, Ann?"
Usually remembering that question brings me right back down to earth and into balance. Perhaps it will also help you to do the same.
Hope or no hope, there are always occasion and time to do what is right and just to do. Mahatma Gandhi said: "We must become the change we want to see in the world...You have to do the right thing...You may never know the results that come from your action...Glory lies in the attempt to reach one's goal, and not in reaching it."
***
AND WHEN SHOULD WE SENIOR WOMEN "NOT"???
“You look amazing” Michelle Obama said
to a lady sitting front and center
at the rally in Kalamazoo for Harris.*
When should we senior women not look good?
(And would she say that to a man?)
What is “amazing” about a woman at 100?
Inherent in what Obama said,
where is the fairness?
Should this senior (not to mention me) a zombie be
of skeleton bones
sporting bloody rags of dragging skin
and limping along, cane in hand,
with hoards of same through ragged fields of grass
approaching the final man alone, alive at last,
now hunkered down,
locked and loaded one man/one gun
against the hoards of
vermin botflies descending for their Final Supper?
After dinner should I preserve
this woman’s dregs in Tupper Wear?
Should you even care how words are used,
like “she’s still pretty” or “she still has sex”
as if I should be dead at eighty?
Should I give up my juice,
sit down or lie midst daisies o’re my head at 60?
Retire at 50 or give up at 40?
Anyway, who set the age (against which I rage)
for giving up?
As one obtuse piano teacher said in earnest,
“You should be proud my dear, at 80 to be
taking lessons and playing ‘as well as you do’”.
How terribly should I be playing now, at “my age”?
What’s so surprising if love and skill break through
that flattish score of notes and rests
when I’m not yet ready for my final rest?
Not a compliment, Michelle (nor piano teacher),
just more of same,
expectations lowered to below-ground level,
buried with the shovel of ageism.
So...when is it exactly that we women lose our value and our beauty?
“We suck up our pain” Obama says, about us seniors
suffering menopause.
I suck up my pain and suffer from her blindness
and dim view of her audience member,
and me.
"On what side of history do you want to be?" Michelle?
_____
*Former First Lady Michelle Obama keynoting a Harris rally
at Kalamazoo, MI on October 27, 2024, seemed clueless as to the
age discrimination she expressed by these words. She asked men
“what side of history do you want to be on?” when it comes to women’s
health matters and what Trump, if elected, threatens to do as President No. 47.
And yes, I sent this poem on to the best address I could find for Mrs. Obama.
###
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