Fuzzy Socks and My Secret Book of Hope

How I prepare to battle against evil and apathy

Hello, Hopeful!

Today’s essay is about hope and gives you a little look into one of my creative practices, keeping a notebook.

I also mention the works of Octavia Butler. If you have never read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, now is a great time. These novels, written in the mid-90s, are both prescient and hopeful. There is also a stunning graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower created by Damian Duffy and John Jennings.

Fuzzy Socks and My Secret Book of Hope

The most beautiful thing about humans is our ability to create hope. Hope itself is a crazy thing. It’s an irrational notion that things can be better — and when properly nurtured and given enough time — that irrational notion has a way of becoming reality.

Hope gives us the strength to persevere amidst the horrors that life throws at us. Hope is why we continue to get up day after day as we undertake the Sisyphean task of making the world kinder and more just when many of our fellow humans are hell-bent on making the world crueler and twisting justice to their own ends.

In literature, my favorite example of the power of hope is in the books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. Lauren, the main character in Parable of the Sower, records this in her diary to describe the new belief system she is crafting and discovering:

The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.

Lauren has no rational basis to hope that her ideas will ever find expression in anything other than her diary, let alone spreading to the stars. Her home is literally on fire, and society is devolving into chaos. But still, Lauren hopes.

In the United States, our society seems eerily similar to the dystopia of Butler’s science-fiction. Why bother with hope at all?

I hold onto hope and actively work to build hope in myself and others because otherwise, I will be overwhelmed with rage and then fall back into apathy. I cannot sustain the eternal anger social media wants to cultivate in me.

That is the problem with anger — in short bursts, it can lead to powerful action. However, that level of vitriol is not sustainable. It will always eat away at you, slowly poisoning your mind and killing your soul over long periods of time unless you break the cycle by completely checking out and giving up — or unless you replace anger with the hope of a better future.

I’m not talking about toxic positivity and platitudes. Hope, like anger, is the fuel for powerful action. The difference is hope is sustainable.

You must remember that hope is not rational. You must allow yourself to be a little bit delusional to hope you can affect change in society. To quote another science-fiction franchise (Rouge One: A Star Wars Story):

Rebellions are built on hope.

No meaningful social movement or revolution has ever succeeded without hope.

Hope is built in the small moments that make up our lives. We have to look around and find tiny pockets of joy and allow ourselves to believe that we will find more of those small pockets in the future.

Hope is built on love and mindfulness.

You don’t have to know how things will change — at least not at first — you just have to believe that change is possible.

Every day, we choose what beliefs we will carry forward. We can choose to believe that there is hope for a better future. That will give us the strength to stand up to evil and apathy in small ways in our communities.

The other remarkable characteristic of hope is that it is ineffable. It shows up differently for each one of us. But if we seek it, hope has a way of finding us because hope itself is searching for us.

How do you find or build hope when everything feels hopeless?

I find hope in the natural world. Despite all we have done to our climate, nature is still beautiful and completely uninterested in our petty human dramas.

I work to walk in nature regularly and to notice what is happening around me. I write haiku and make poetry comics because those practices help me stay in the present moment and allow me to better connect to both the natural world and my community.

I also work to cultivate hope by giving myself small pleasures and taking time to create. For me, that means buying fuzzy socks to wear in the winter and working on my Secret Book of Hope.

My Secret Book of Hope

My Secret Book of Hope is the name I’ve given to my notebooks. In these notebooks, I write poetry, doodle, make collages, and write down what is happening in my world.

I want my notebooks to look like some kind of grimoire — only the spells are to cultivate hope in me when I look back through them. My Secret Book of Hope is an ongoing art project made just for me.

The physical acts of coloring, painting, drawing, writing, and cutting and pasting allow me to escape from the drone of the news and my own thoughts for a few moments. Having something physical to look at later allows me to hope-flip in my notebooks instead of doomscroll on social media.

The fuzzy socks remind me that being soft and cozy are good things and that I don’t have to be hard and bitter.

Hate is destructive. The way I fight against hate is to create beauty and hope. Apathy allows hate to flourish because it offers no resistance — it simply accepts the status quo.

But hope built through connection and creativity is the most powerful resistance to hate. It refuses to accept the terms hate tries to claim is the natural order of things.

You have things that matter to you. You cannot protect them by spending your life drinking in anxiety. If you want to fight against hate, if you want to resist evil, and fight off apathy, you need to find ways to keep hope alive.

One good place to start is with some fuzzy socks and your own secret book of hope.

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Thank you so much for reading!

Be the poetry you want to see in the world!

Cheers,