Hope is a living thread
Sarah Rocha
The artistic poem about hope helps me remember that hope is not something that we individually create, or individually feel, but hope is something, some kind of energy that we inherit, carry, tend and pass forward. Through the metaphor of threads and weaving, the poem reflects on the unseen hopes, love, prayers, land, courage and imaginations of those who came before us. It relates to hope within ancestry, relationship, collective care and our responsibility for the hope we inherit. Hope becomes an intergenerational practice of noticing what has made it difficult to hope, mending what is ours to mend, adding something of ourselves with love and placing the living threads of hope into the hands of future generations.
Perhaps this is the art of hoping:
To understand that I am not the source of hope. To remember that hope is not something I individually cultivate. Hope is some form of energy we inherit, carry, tend to, and pass forward.
I am a vessel for it. We are a vessel for it.
A living thread in a much older structure.
Someone before me had carried something of hope forward without knowing my name.
Someone before me endured.
Someone prayed, someone sang songs, someone danced
Someone planted.
Someone crossed a threshold.
Someone hoped and imagined a life they would never see.
And somehow, their imagining, their hope reached me, reached us.
I began to wonder
What hope did my ancestors carry when they could not yet see me?
What prayers were folded into their choices?
What courage traveled from heart to heart
generation to generation, until it arrived for us.
What will I leave behind for someone whose name I may never know?
Now, hope feels like relationship and collective care.
Relational threads streaming backward and forward.
A living thread within a much older weaving.
I am now one pair of hands holding the threads for a little while. Holding the responsibility for the hope we inherit.
As were those before me, before us.
As will be those who come after.
And perhaps that is part of the collective art of hoping.
To receive the threads carried toward us with open hands,
to honor the lands, hands, hearts, and spirits that carried it,
to notice where the threads have been torn and unraveled
to mend what is ours to mend,
to loosen knots that no longer need to remain tight,
to weave in something beautiful,
something of our being, something with care and love,
something we may never live long enough to see completed.
Then, with care, place the living threads into another pair of open hands.
Trusting that they too will add something of themselves before passing it forward.