Hope

This season’s list highlights articles, texts and other creative and thoughtful offerings which address hope. 

"Hope isn’t something we ask of others, It’s something we have to command of ourselves.”
Amanda Gorman, U.S. Poet Laureate 

Group Related:

Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, 6th Edition, 2020, Basic Books: New York.
We find ourselves returning to this text again and again. Not surprisingly the first chapter is titled, “The Therapeutic Factors”, and the first of these factors discussed is Instillation of hope.

Edward R. Shapiro, M.D., Joining a Group’s Task: The Discovery of Hope and Respect, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 55(2) 2005, pp. 211-227.

Ronnie Levine, PH.D., CGP, FAGPA, Treating Idealized Hope and Hopelessness, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 57(3) 2007, pp. 297-317.

“Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Vaclav Havel

Of Interest:

Irvin Yalom and Marilyn Yalom, A Matter of Death and Life, 2021, Stanford University Press: California.
"A year-long journey by the renowned psychiatrist and his writer wife after her terminal diagnosis, as they reflect on how to love and live without regret." Cover

“promise me you will not spend so much time treading water
and trying to keep your head above the waves
that you forget,
truly forget
how much you have always loved to swim.”
Tyler Knott Gregson from his collection, Chasers of the Light

Minouche Shafik, What We Owe Each Other: A new social contract for a better society, 2021, Princeton University Press: New Jersey.
"Identifies the key elements of a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return.” Cover

"Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you."
L.R. Knost

Podcast: 10% Happier with Dan Harris.
This podcast features a four-session series that explores the meaning of hope, and its role in our current context, as well as some practical strategies for strengthening our hope. 

Elie Wiesel, Night, 2006, Farrar, Straus And Giroux.
“[Night] eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.” Cover

“Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope too, can be given to one only by other human beings.” 
Elie Wiesel

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 2013, Milkweed Editions.
“Nature/Essays. As a botanist, Robin Wall  Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.” Cover

this is the recipe of life
said my mother
as she held me in her arms as i wept
think of those flowers you plant
in the garden each year
they will teach you
that people too
must wilt
fall
root
rise
in order to bloom
Rupi Kaur, from her collection, The Sun and Her Flowers

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Faithful Gardener, 1988, Random House: U.K.
“What is this faithful process of spirit and seed that touches empty ground and makes it rich again? Its greater workings I cannot claim to understand. I only know that in its care, what has seemed dead is dead no longer, what has seemed lost, is no longer lost, that which some have claimed impossible, is made clearly possible, and what ground is fallow is only resting – resting and waiting for the blessed seed to arrive on the wind with all Godspeed. And it will.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“Hope keeps suffering in check.”
David Kessler

In Praise of Reading and Fiction, The Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2010, by Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman.
“His Nobel Lecture is a resounding tribute to fiction’s power to inspire readers to greater ambition, to dissent, and to political action…Vargas Llosa’s lecture is a powerful argument for the necessity of literature in our lives today.” Cover

“Because of your smile you make life more beautiful.”
Thich Nhat Hahn

The following piece of music, Here Comes the Sun, performed by James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma is a beautiful and hopeful piece to conclude our list.