Spring: Grounded in Resilience to Grow Critical Hope

Spring - a season of transition. A time to observe what comes after the winter. A time of planning for summer.

Spring is one of my 4 favorite seasons, ha. I do love it. Sincerely.

Spring makes me feel like the carefree kid I never could be, but am now.

Spring feels so earthy and rich. The surprise pops of color. The reemergence of insects. The grass turns from brown to lime green. Buds on trees and shrubs. Winds come over the mountains that snap but aren’t too biting. There’s an energetic buzz of new love in the air.

Spring makes Earth so easy to love. Nature pulls out all the stops to get our self-absorbed humxn attention back to her. Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his poem, Hamatreya, that ‘‘the Earth laughs in flowers.”

Spring reminds me of all there is to love on the Earth and within all beings, even us humxns have unlimited love — although it’s hard to find that love shining out brightly these days with all the fuckery. But I’m not here today to digress into despair. Because spring is the hope to the despair - which is fear based.

So instead of getting beaten down by it all, I remember the seeds germinating and bulbs planted previous years. Just as we’ve been rebuilding resilience over winter — with resilience as the ability to recharge — we all need to know how to cultivate critical hope, which is something you do not something you have. Spring reminds me of that - spring is action oriented.

Critical hope is about assessing the bullshitery of life/systems/wars/climate/racism and then putting into place action plan of change. It’s not fake Pollyanna hope that leads to nowhere besides a head in the sand. Critical hope bucks the toxic positivity we have seen during the wellbeing movement that companies and supervisors because it can hold space for the grief and anger and trauma of all that we’ve been through. And then critical hope invites us into the space of tension - the space where the hypocotyl pushes up and away from the seed to become the stem, leaves. Without that point of tension — there is no growth.

Monday March 21st was global poetry day and this Mary Oliver seemed perfectly fitting for spring equinox.

I love Mary Oliver’s simple, direct way of asking questions. She says, “How to love this world”

How do YOU love this world? How do your behaviors show love for self, others, community, and Earth? Because only one type of love isn’t sustainable or healing. We need a love that is accepting, inclusive, supportive and interconnected.

Are you making decisions and actions based in love or fear? Because fear is the death of critical hope.