Dear Reader, Hello.
This morning we got up and planted acorn squash seeds in the garden. It’s a little late in the season to do it—late July is usually when we would—but we didn’t have the seeds until now, so we took the risk. We got the bush variety, which is ready in 80 days, and we are about 80 days away from our average first frost. We’ll be ready with lots of blankets and jugs of water if frost threatens. Yesterday, we asked, should we even be doing this? But we love acorn squash, so we went for it. What are you sowing (metaphorically or literally) for the future?
I keep talking to people who are dreading the future. Everything feels so uncertain, and it feels like it’s getting worse. I have so many friends who have to go back to teaching in-person soon, or who live with someone who has to go back to teaching in-person soon. I have so many friends who have to work in places where they are coming into contact with people daily. I worry about all my friends and family all the time.
I worry about letting this worry take over. I worry that I will worry too much. I worry myself into worry. I’m worried that too much worry will slip into despair. Despair is something we cannot afford right now. It is immobilizing. I’m wondering about the antidote to worry.
What is that?
Hope?
I’m thinking about these lines, from a Wisława Szymborska poem titled “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”:
We’ve inherited hope —
the gift of forgetting.
Is hope a gift? Does it require us to forget? What kind of forgetting? Forgetting that the world is on fire, forgetting that death may come to those we love, forgetting that the systems around us are built to oppress? Should we forget these things? Is this the kind of hope we are looking for? Is this why so many people don’t want to think about their own whiteness and white supremacy and racism? Or am I being ungenerous here? Is it more like a temporary forgetting, a way of accepting the way of the world?
Maybe also despair is a kind of forgetting—forgetting that a favorable outcome is still possible.
Maybe it’s all about what we choose to forget, and what we choose to remember. Or, what we work to forget, and what we work to remember. I don’t think forgetting and remembering are passive.
I’m also thinking about this quote from Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist organizer:
Hope is a discipline.
What is a discipline? Is it like a practice? By worrying every day, am I building a practice of worry? Is worry my discipline? Of course, I also write these posts every day, I also try to start them with gratitude/the garden. I also question whiteness every day. I am building many practices. Many disciplines. Writing, reading, worry (maybe, someday, after much practice, this can dissipate), gratitude, dismantling whiteness, garden. Maybe also hope?
Let’s go back to thinking about the acorn squash. We worried that we would be too late planting the seeds, worried it might frost before they are ripe and the frost would kill them. We could have let that worry fall into despair, we could have let that despair stop us from planting. We could have said, it’s too late, there’s no point, we give up. But we decided to forget about all that and remember the possibility that it might not frost. That we might be able to save the plants even if it does frost. We planted those seeds out of hope. We didn’t let worry and despair stop us.
Now, let’s return again to dismantling whiteness. Maybe it seems impossible. Maybe you worry about your own whiteness, about white supremacy around you, about all the systems that keep white supremacy and racism in place, about all the problems that will keep happening as long as we live under capitalism. I worry, too. But we can’t let that worry turn into despair. We can’t let that worry stop us.
Maybe we do have to forget sometimes about how big the hill is that we have to climb. Maybe we have to forget about when we usually experience our first frost. It’s not about forgetting our whiteness—no. It’s about forgetting how impossible it seems to dismantle it. It’s about remembering that a different world is still possible. Remembering that whiteness and race are social constructs—human inventions—and haven’t existed for all of time. We can still deconstruct them.
Prompt: What do you practice? What are your disciplines? How are these related to whiteness?
Action: Find a way to cultivate hope. Make hope a discipline and practice. What do you do that brings you hope? Repeat that, over and over.
One of the things that brings me hope is all of you, out there, reading this. Thinking together. Not giving up. Thank you.
Until tomorrow,
Gwen