Gathering Seeds of Hope
Autumn equinox was this weekend, and as a gardener, my curiosity turns to the seeds as the gifts and offerings from the summer’s growth. No surprise then that all my September workshops have the theme of seeds.
On a recent podcast with Pinnacle Health, I was asked what I find hopeful given my work with leaders and teams on workplace resilience and, specifically, my climate resilience work. I talked about seeds of hope.
The seeds of hope are these little moments where you experience joy, pleasure, love, and connection. We have to gather seeds of hope and then hold them with care, like the precious containers of life they are.
This is nothing new. So many have talked about variations of this. Deb Dana, a social worker, calls them glimmers - moments of joy. And adrienne maree brown talks about pleasure as what our human bodies are meant to feel because that is the pathway to true freedom and liberation. Mary Oliver begs of us to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
And yet, these sentiments are echoed by many because most of us have had lives that required us to disconnect from joy, pleasure, love, and connection in some or many segments. We are told by society, the workplace, our inner gremlin, ‘just get over it’ or ‘bounce back already’ or ‘grow some grit.’ (Okay, I made that last one up but I can totally see that coming as a Harvard Business Review article title.)
It’s time we stop bouncing back. And…we also have to stay out of denial and doomsday. Both of these extremes are destructive. As I’ve said before, we are not lumber and that notion of resilience comes from the manufacturing industry as to how much pressure a cut board could take before it broke. A bent board is akin to you living in chronic burnout mode and wondering why sleeping all weekend didn’t fix your exhaustion.
I don’t know how you ‘cure’ a bent board, but I do know ways you heal anxiety, grief, and burnout while living and working in a climate changed landscape. I feel hope when I can help people come to terms with their emotional landscape and their disconnection because through that we learn how to partner with our grief who’s real name is love. It’s the greatest experience we can give ourselves and it pays it forward, so to speak, to our loved ones and community.
When you learn to be a compassionate witness of the past and present, you can start to envision the future in a way that’s embodied - reconnected and healed with nature as nature beings.
Because Earth also is not bouncing back to what it was pre-industrial revolution. So what I find hopeful then is that there are possibilities to dream of a different future. It won’t be a future of what our childhoods used to look like, and definitely not previous generations either.
We get to choose what role we want to choose for the future - it’s not written. It’s a hope that requires embodied action and that is the seed that will change the landscape.
If you were to gather all your little seeds of hope and display them in front of you what would you see?
Seeds of Hope Inspiration Resources:
adrienne maree brown’s podcast episode of On Being with Krista Tippett: On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life
Ross Gay’s podcast episode of On Being with Krista Tippett: On the Insistence of Joy
Adding in my own offerings:
Join my community now and get access to this month’s group workshop on September 27 - Gathering the Seeds of Critical Hope in Uncertain Times (online) at 1pm MT
Embodied Climate Action Workshop: Gathering the Seeds of Critical Hope, at the Gardens on Spring Creek, Saturday, Sept. 28 | 1–3 p.m. (in-person, in Fort Collins, CO)