“Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.” 

— Mariame Kaba

You are getting two for one today. I wanted to post a piece of music, Our Phoenix by Mari Esabel Valverde, because it is a heartbreakingly beautiful reaction to the white-supremacist incited and enacted violence and terrorism in this country, Buffalo, NY as the most recent instance. The words are from a poem (full text of Our Dangerous Sweetness in the link) by Amir Rabiyah, who was born in London, England, to a mixed Cherokee and white mother and a Lebanese and Syrian father and who, as a trans poet, explores living at the margin.

I thought, though, that another one of their poems is more powerfully hopeful, needed in a world and era where positive thinking is ever harder to conjure, as well as gloriously full of double-meaning. So here’s my daily dose of practicing hope. And besides, I can show you what’s currently on my kitchen windowsill, glittering in the darkness …still waiting for blossoms, though.

Cactus Flower

We flash victory signs in the darkness, so the darkness may glitter.
                — Mahmoud Darwish

As the sun sets—we set our plan into motion.
Our sole purpose to overthrow

any assumptions, to change
the course of ordinary thinking.

Our work begins by speaking to darkness
and telling darkness    soon   :

             we will demonstrate through the secrecy of stars,

earth’s magnetic embrace
how we can be many things at once.

So much of the work we do
is internal, goes unnoticed, uncompensated.

We get written off or not written at all,
labeled freakish, prickled,
rough around the edges.

We learn to thrive
in the dry humor of soil;
carry water in our bellies
to quench our own thirst.

We survive, over again.
Adapt. Even after being
carried in the beaks of birds,
dropped elsewhere,

far from our roots, we grow.
We flourish.
And when least expected, when histories

not told by us, for us, claims we are defeated,

we gather our tears as dew.                        We release our anguish,
intoxicated by our own sexed pollen.
                                                              We burst,

displaying the luscious folds of our petals.

by Amir Rabiyah

And if you you are in the mood for analysis rather than poetry, read this. Or this from the Jewish perspective. Or this from an economic-systems approach.