Freedom and Active Hope
Autumnal Equinox 2025
“It is the responsibility of free [people] to trust and to celebrate what is constant – birth, struggle and death are constant, and so is love…. and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change….change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not – safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope – the entire possibility – of freedom disappears.” — From The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin
At the Autumnal equinox I continue to contemplate the importance of working creatively with the energy of difficult emotions, particularly grief, anger and fear in these increasingly stressful times. As that daily focus continues it has proven essential to the ability to respond freely and creatively to life’s challenges, to renew the sense of active hope that makes joy possible. Thankfully, many methods, guides and counselors are readily available to remind us to engage and sustain that practice, in books, online and in person, starting with how to engage the remarkably difficult practice of pausing to breath, feel physical sensations, and momentarily shift attention away from stories running on a loop in our thoughts, to refocus on whatever is beautiful, kind, loving or generous in any moment. Stopping to notice, even briefly, also creates space to nourish gratitude for the presence of that one beautiful moment, reconnecting a grieving or angry heart to life in a way that makes it possible to hold the truth of the challenging situation right beside it. Consistently stopping to notice, feel and nourish gratitude when uncomfortable emotions surface rewires habit synapses in the brain and opens a hidden door into courageously creative responses to life’s challenges, which then send ripples of hope out to touch and inspire other hearts.
Without gratitude, life’s joys pass in a flash and are gone, taken for granted as simply the way life is supposed to be. That sense stems from the deeply unconscious narrative behind Western culture, based on a belief that planetary life is like a collection of machines that need to be efficiently directed and controlled by human beings, who can only find happiness through accumulation of materials imagined to be infinitely abundant by virtue of “natural resources,” which exist solely for humanity’s purposes. This deeply internal story utterly devalues and separates nature from humanity, constantly sending us out in search of new excitement and things in order to feed the “engine” of joy that makes life worth living. That story tends to accuse anyone who is unhappy as having something fundamentally “wrong” with them. Western cultural narratives would like us to believe that any alternative way of paying attention is fruitless because we are born into a gigantic and necessary system of institutionalized control and top-down authority that extends from God in heaven on down through the power hierarchies of religious, corporate and governmental institutions. In that story, if we follow the system’s dog-eat-dog competitive rules we will be fine, meaning happy. If we’re not fine/happy, then we, individually, are to blame for our suffering and must either be fixed, punished or both.
That anxiety and depression-inducing perspective is based on the fundamental illusion that our bodies, and every other form life takes, are fundamentally brutish, solid, separate things, rather than utterly beautiful, complex and mysteriously intertwined systems within systems of ever moving, changing elements that unavoidably influence each other as they interact, a way of understanding life that physical and social scientists have been studying and revealing for decades. Living from the harsh and limited, fear-based perspective of the traditional Western cultural story, however, conditions adherents to believe that humanity is in a war for survival and only those who move fastest and most aggressively, no matter the cost, will be the ones most likely to succeed in making a living and raising a family. Slowing down enough to feel the body and notice the flow of thoughts and emotions is dangerous from that point of view, because anything perceived through our bodily senses, the natural system that rises from within the whole evolutionary process of the planet, is considered so disconnected from the purity of spirit as to be “dirty,” if not repugnant, and certainly not trustworthy.
Life-giving joy, love, curiosity and true courage emerge, however, only when thoughts and activity slow down enough, even for a short time, to create the mental space to notice and reach for whatever feels heart nourishing as it rises in the body’s physical sense experience of that moment. When that can be noticed, the separations we perceive, even the dualities of good and evil, ugly and beautiful, powerful and weak and on and on, reveal themselves to be part of a vast illusion. We can sense in moments when we pause the flow of thoughts that we are not actually separate in any way from any part of life. Anyone who considers the readily available insights that organic chemistry and quantum physics have provided can learn that after we die our body’s atoms and energy continue to creatively engage and connect with the ongoing living system of the planet in a totally mysterious way that no story can adequately explain. In the end, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, as FDR reminded the generation facing down Hitler’s horror show, and I would add that fear itself will also pass, as does everything in this living dance of Earth. Bringing as much love, care and compassionate action as we can to our own tiny dance in this miracle of life is essential and all that is ever needed. Love rises with gratitude and love is so easy to give once experienced because it multiplies itself, giving back through the very act of giving.
Noticing whatever element of love and/or beauty is available in any moment ignites the desire to nourish life, to live no matter how challenging it may be to survive in that moment. Only when that window of awareness can remain ajar after repeatedly pausing in the mad rush that cultural conditioning encourages us to continuously engage, can the depths of the wonderous mystery of living be noticed and explored; from the healing beauty of the forests that silently hold untold wisdom, to the incredible resilience of the oceans when they’re protected from human mechanistic extraction machines. As I’ve said before, anger and fear have their place, although with practice they can be taught to sit in the backseat of the car of personality, leaving lovingkindness, for ourselves, for others, and for all living beings in the driver’s seat, once we learn to continuously listen to the pulsing flow of life through our bodies and minds before acting.
The more we can nourish gratitude, the more we can also attend to fear, anger and grief with gratitude for what they show us about care and concern for what we love, and the easier it becomes to remember the amazing gift it is to have a chance to be alive at all. That deep sense of gratitude, when married to the energies behind fear, grief and anger, creates the possibility to transform them into a fierce, fearless form of compassion, something Joanna Macy called active hope, something that rises in hearts that have courageously moved through despair to discover the freedom that comes with acceptance of the unending challenge of being alive. We always have the option to choose to feed beauty, joy and resilience with our intentions and actions, rather than continue to contribute to life’s destruction by remaining loyal to an outdated and increasingly destructive story of what it means to be human and alive.