A Reliable Pocket of Hope
Writing For Liberatory Change with guest contributor Lucinda Garthwaite
How can we imagine that things can be different in conditions that aren’t only intense, but are actually trying to eliminate hope for change?
Hi Everyone,
I’m so excited, with today’s mid-week share, to introduce you to the brilliant writer, advocate, scholar, and educator . I first met Lucinda when she was Dean of Goddard College, where I taught in the MFA program for 15 years and where Lucinda earned her own MFA in Creative Writing before going on to advanced degrees in education and leadership.
Today Lucinda directs the Institute for Liberatory Innovation. What’s that! You might well ask. The quick answer is that Lucinda and her team help systems change so that more people can thrive. Here’s a clip from the Institute’s mission statement:
To generate and implement innovative strategies so that more people thrive in an evermore peaceful world, we model and teach behaviors that mitigate harm and ensure it doesn’t persist. We draw stark lines against bigotry and persistent bias. We normalize confusion, honest ignorance, and mistakes. We meet people where they are with compassion. We transform fear into curiosity.
I probably don’t need to tell you that the current vectors in American government do not align with the Institute’s liberatory goals. Like so many of us, Lucinda has been struggling to reckon with the outcome of Nov. 5. But in her newsletter this week, she turned to literary guiding lights Audre Lorde and Prentis Hemphill, as well as the extraordinary Harriet Tubman, for guidance.
Lucinda asked, How can we imagine that things can be different in conditions that aren’t only intense, but are actually trying to eliminate hope for change? Her answer moved and heartened me, and I thought it might do the same for you. So I was thrilled when she gave me permission to share this post.
Rise!
Aimee
A Reliable Pocket of Hope
by Lucinda Garthwaite
Audre Lorde writes, “Do not be misled or by despair, [as if] there’s nothing we can do.”
Over forty years ago, poet and activist Audre Lorde, reflecting on the activism of the 1960s, wrote, “We were poised for attack, not always in the most effective places.”
I think about this a lot, in the context of now; what are the most effective places?
I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, far removed from activism on college campuses and city streets, from the violence against movements for civil and human rights. But I watched it play out, and I soaked it in, and when it was my turn to speak, I stood self-righteously poised, if not to attack, to make my case. I was stubborn in my understanding of why the world is as it is, and what to do about it. I insisted that others were in the wrong unless they agreed with me.
That was decidedly not, I know now, the most effective place to stand.
Lorde said that the 60s were “characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions,” then reminded listeners that liberation is not “a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change.”
The most crucial, most accessible of those opportunities, Lorde wrote, is, “the most important resource I have, myself.”
At the ILI we practice and teach the personal practices of steadiness, curiosity, compassion, accountability, and grace. Our own learning and that of others suggests those behaviors will drive change that means more people thrive, and we’ve found that to be true.
Personal practice is one way to apply that “most important resource, myself.” But there is another depth of practice, another source of hope, I hadn’t considered before. It’s not about how I apply myself in relation to others. It’s in how I relate to myself, and how that relates to change.
Therapist, teacher, organizer, and writer Prentis Hemphill asks a question that stopped me this week: “How could we ever be satisfied by something that didn’t emerge from our own longing?”
I think I thought there was too much work to do to consider my own longing. But Hemphill lovingly disagrees, suggesting that tending to personal longing is a crucial precursor to any external action for change, and an essential source of hope.
Harriet Tubman’s life was a source of both curiosity and insight for Hemphill growing up, “I couldn’t quite understand how someone could imagine that things could be different in conditions that weren’t only intense, but were actually trying to eliminate hope for change.”
Tubman was born in a country and a time, Hemphill writes, when order was kept “by both casual and ritualized public violence, by intimidation, and denial of rights. Masses of people were being indoctrinated by propaganda that created and reified the world’s most recent invention, race.”
I read that sentence again and see how with only a couple small changes it could describe the present. And the lesson of Tubman’s life for the now, Hemphill writes, is that “In the most unsteady and dangerous times, we need our imaginations, we need visions.”
Audre Lorde writes, “Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do).”
There is something to do. Always, forever and irrefutably: No one can stop me, no repression can keep me from practicing steadiness, curiosity, compassion, accountability, and grace. Nor can I be kept from imagining and longing for a different future.
This week I texted a good friend to ask how she was, and she wrote, “I am doing pretty well ... trying to find my own pockets of hope as the world spirals.”
The world has spiraled before, and likely it will again But ways to stop and even reverse those spirals are as close as my imagination, as accessible as my longing, as reachable as my own thoughtfulness, as possible as my own practice. That's a very reliable pocket of hope.
If you believe in the necessity of change rooted in compassion, curiosity, and accountability; if you're eager for new pockets of hope - and if you can, please consider supporting the work of the ILI with a monthly gift of $10.00 or more, or a one-time donation. I promise you: gifts like those make this newsletter and the rest of our work possible. Just click the button below. Thank you!
This essay was originally published as an ILI Newsletter on 12/13/24.
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Thank you Aimee for sharing Lucinda and Prentis Hemphill's work, and that inspiring quote from Audrey Lourde. Exactly what I need to read this week, with a new year fast approaching, with the potential for new hope, despite the dark shadows being cast by the incoming administration. I agree that it all begins with ourselves. And it makes sense to me that any activism we do in the world has to emerge from our own longings. I am doing the work. I believe the light of my own deep internal work to identify my longings and my hopes, for myself and the world, can radiate outwards and that every small change and contribution we make is necessary and important.