My Love Letter to Rebecca Solnit

This post is a love letter to Rebecca Solnit. Every once in awhile I read something and immediately wish I had written it myself. After Rebecca Solnit’s article in the Guardian gave me such insight, I settled down to read Hope In the Dark and I immediately wished I had written it. Not just for the calming, soothing, meditative way of writing. Not just for the clarity of vision and insight it displays. But also because of the whole body of life experience it represents.

In the early 2000s, I was a regular attendee at the Quaker meeting in Milwaukee. I remember a particular meeting after 9/11 when someone started spontaneously singing the hymn “Balm in Gilead.” I didn’t know the song but others did and they joined in.  The first few lines had an immediate effect on me: There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. The words and music and the setting together created its own kind of balm for me and I’ve always thought of that song and that moment when something immediately soothes and calms me and reminds me of what is possible.

Hope in the Dark is like another kind of balm. The book is situated within the despair many of us progressives felt after George W Bush won the 2004 election. I remember that time as a low point in my life, before now. I felt such a sense of betrayal by America, that people would select this person to lead us despite the horrible events that transpired during his first term, including but not limited to the Iraq war, its devastation and destruction for the people of Iraq, its empowering the war-mongering profiteering companies that got rich off the war, and the rollback of American civil liberties that accompanied it.  I hadn’t believed it possible that he could be reelected so I felt the surprise blow that much more.

Rebecca Solnit felt it too. But she didn’t sink into the despair, she wrote a beautiful meditation on hope. I could write about this book every day and not get to all the things that touched me about it. But here are some key ideas:

• We need hope to have any possibility of making change. Hope is the idea that you can make things different. It is an expression of some (perhaps small) amount of power to produce a different future.
• Hope is an active state. You can’t just sit on your couch and sustain hope. But if you take action, that deepens connections with others and the sense of power you have and that alone increases your capacity to feel hope. It is self-reinforcing with action.
• We have so much reason to hope. Even in some of the darkest times in our history communities and leaders have made amazing and beautiful advances. She documents moments when the cause of justice won out over dark and troubling times. 
• She especially takes us on the left to task for seeing only what is wrong – and there is plenty wrong – while ignoring the moments when the cause of justice and wholeness advance. We have an inability to see multiple realities at once, and so if anything is wrong we can only see everything as wrong.

Part of what made this book so powerful for me is its connection to the philosophy of yoga that animates my life. For example, one of the yoga sutras talks about how practice of the physical poses teaches us to transcend dualities. Meaning we become able to hold multiple realities within ourselves at any one time. You can see how this can happen – at the simplest level yoga poses require some parts of the body to be firm and effortful while others are soft and relaxed. In fact in almost every pose the mind is supposed to remain soft and relaxed while other things are working. Cultivating this ability to experience multiple states of existence at once also conditions our mind to be able to accept and understand seemingly opposite realities in other aspects of life.

Holding hope in the era of Trump requires us to transcend dualities. It is understanding – and seeking out – places where beautiful things may happen. Where communities may stand up for each other. Where resistance may show a different future is possible. Where even under attack we may feel a spiritual connection to each other or our deeper values. It also requires us to allow ourselves to feel that beauty, to not dismiss the moments of perfection because everything else is so imperfect.

The emphasis on action presents another connection to yoga. Yoga is the path of action – of seeking out spiritual knowledge and experience through discipline, study and devotion. Hope in the Dark exhorts us to action even in dark times. But not uninformed, messy action without direction. Action that is driven by analysis and points toward real change. And, like in yoga, we are reminded to let go of attachment to outcomes, because we don't often see the real impact of our action until years later. We may never even know how our actions affect others or the broader world we seek to change. So practice and detachment - abyasa and vairagya - keys to yoga and also to making hope a reality in our lives.

In the last few pages I read this passage, which felt like it was written just for me:

… We have to have hope and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift, but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the people who do these things.

This whole book also reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Arundhati Roy:

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

This book was written at an earlier moment, but it rings even more true now. And this is what I wish for myself and the people around me who are hurting so much, and in need of direction and a sense of possibility: that we use our art and music and joy and brilliance to mock the unjust use of power. It is the most beautiful and unruly expression of hope that is going to get us through this difficult time. 

With love, gratitude and solidarity.