Yes, | #66

Yes, 

hope, 
	despite your
crazy schedule

	we
remain
friends somehow. 

Hope – ceiling
above the roof
	of my head. 

Or spotless

mirror
showing
my
age (I can handle it
sometimes). 

Yes, 
esperanza. 

- Guillermo Filice Castro, from Best American Poetry 2023

---

This poem begins mid-conversation. There’s a familiarity to it. I can see a playful eye roll along accompanying “yes, hope, despite your crazy schedule,” the way someone might tease an old friend.

Like an exchange with an old friend, the conversation doesn’t really end. The speaker ribs hope (so busy, so important) and hope ribs him back (so old). Then, with a pet name in the speaker’s native language, they settle back into intimate silence. The shape created by the line breaks and indentations creates an open, easy feeling. There’s no rush in this time together.

This is a comfortable hope, and it’s new to me.

Earlier this week, I had a long conversation about the relationship between hope and action. It was sparked by a Rebecca Solnit passage describing hope as “broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.” Solnit insists that hope isn’t “the belief that everything was, is or will be fine,” but something more critical that calls for active engagement.

I see what Solnit is going for here: a pull away from passivity towards a more collective, activist understanding of hope. That version of hope is important, but all of us in the conversation felt like something was missing. What about, for example, the hope of a closeted high school kid holding out for graduation day? Or a cancer patient waiting for biopsy results? What about the kind of hope that Viktor Frankl talks about: the quiet, internal faith that persists when action is impossible?

When I was 19, I spent a summer in Tanzania, “interning” at a local HIV/AIDS relief organization. I was young, idealistic, and high on hope and my own potential to Make A Difference.

A lot of bad things happened. My aunt died while I was away and I missed her funeral. My malaria medication gave me vivid, full-body-paralysis stress dreams. On a weekend trip to Dar Es Salaam, someone stole our cash and left me and my co-volunteers stranded. Several of the women in my group were harassed or assaulted. I walked through villages overwhelmed by poverty and loss, meeting families rent by disease and children abandoned out of stigma. On top of it all, the work I came to do turned out to be mostly meaningless; while my donations were helpful, my presence was not.

I felt betrayed by hope. In the face of suffering, it didn’t do anything. Hope just kicked in when nothing was left — an evolutionary suicide-prevention instinct. It just kept us going one more day.

In my grief and frustration, I couldn’t imagine that being enough. I wanted things to be different, and when people said “I hope,” nothing changed. But the more I’ve encountered loss and hardship, the more I’ve come to think differently. There are so many reasons to despair, to lose oneself and give up trying. But hope kicks in when nothing is left and keeps us going one more day. Incredible.

This kind of hope, I think, is closer to the hope in this poem. This hope shows up when we’re at the bottom and tells us to hang in there. It hears our sorrows, sticks around, and maybe reminds us what it feels like to laugh again. It’s the ceiling above that can’t stop the rain from falling, but won’t buckle in the storm.

Hope-as-action has a place, but so does hope-as-friend.

Yes,

Jess

p.s. As you certainly know, a three day weekend consists of two Saturdays and a Sunday. Since yesterday was technically Saturday No. 2, I’m here in your inbox today, the true Sunday of the week. In other words, thanks for your patience and I hope you’re enjoying a day off.

p.p.s. Thanks Rachel and the Groundcherries for sparking my thoughts this week. Profoundly grateful to have had you all in my life for over a year(!).