What is hope? It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word. It is a suspicion that reality is more complex than realism wants us to believe and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual.

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are..

People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.

Hope has holes in its pockets. It leaves little crumb trails so that we, when anxious, can follow it. Hope’s secret: it doesn’t know the destination— it knows only that all roads begin with one foot in front of the other.

Hope begins in the dark, it’s a stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work!

Be careful of who you let regulate your dreaming. All dreaming is dangerous to those who benefit from our hopelessness.

The danger of hopelessness is that we can lose each other. In times of hopelessness, it’s easy to get scared of everything and everyone. It’s easy to start believing that your neighbor is the problem and that hoarding is a better strategy than generosity. The problem is that when community starts to break down, we lose the most important source of hope we have: each other.