What does it mean to speak of hope after we have accepted evolution and realized the web of life cares nothing for our petty human dramas? What does it mean to speak of hope once we have accepted the laws of physics and realized that, because of entropy, the universe is winding down like a top not ascending in never ending progress?
In biology, life and death are not definitive terms. The seed dies into the soil in order to give new life. From the moment of birth our life is moving irrevocably toward death, but when we contemplate a nearby field we can see new life growing out of that which has died.
Far from the fragile ephemeral nature of our own personal lives, our larger ecological life is ferocious. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said that all of us are messengers of a thing greater than ourselves. From this point of view, despair is the rejection of the larger life of which our little lives are but an expression.
Hope means not being deceived by the puppet figures dancing before us in the shape of personal success or failure. Hope is not some desired outcome, but the energy that drives our own hearts and the hearts of the great whales as well. Life pulses not only through our blood but also in the sap of trees, life will be throbbing even in the grass that will grow upon our graves.
Hope means living in the whole. Hope is not some wispy dream that may or may not be realized. Hope is trusting in the creative unfolding of the universe. When a modern human looks at the heavens we now realize the constellations are not the expression of a clockwork precision as thought by the creationists of old.
We now realize the beauty of the night sky consists of random explosions. We are the pale lights of a cosmic fireworks display. Our meaning does not come from arriving at our human goals, but in manifesting what it means to be human beings in just such a cosmos as this.
We were not born into the cosmos, we ARE the cosmos. What appears to us as empty space is the womb of a life process we see in swamps and meteors alike.
Hope is remembering that we are not only prisoners of time doomed to execution, we are also expressions of that wild frenzied life holding more in common with lightening than with what will be left in our graves. Hope is realizing our meaning is not contingent upon the spin of some cosmic roulette wheel and that our life’s meaning can be manifested as fully in defeat as in victory, sometimes more so.