I noticed it happening the beginning of May.

Normally optimistic people were starting to wonder if they had fooled themselves for too long.  Was humanity coming to its end? Was it time to accept the apocalyptic vision of the world reaching the end of a particularly bad cycle and that a crash and burn was not only inevitable but necessary?  Or was it just time to stop following the news and turn away from social media? We had the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saw natural disasters like wildfires, drought, flooding, and record heat; global supply chains for food and fuel being affected by both the invasion and the environment; the return of polio, the outbreak of Monkeypox in addition to COVID; the mass shootings in the US – in particular the shooting at Robb Elementary seemed to be telling us to give up and let it all burn down. This isn’t a work of fictional or a dystopian fantasy movie. It is real and it’s still happening, but the good news, like those dystopian narratives, hope is the driving force and it also exists in the real world and in real-time.

Below is a collection of seeds of hope from some people and their works that inspired and lighted candles when the world went dark in the past. They are what inspired me in late May to create this podcast.

Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

EM Forster, “Howards End”

Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

Bertrand Russell, The Science to Save Us from Science, The New York Times Magazine (19 March 1950)

History is indeed our best accumulated record of change, and of how our species has borne up to the shocks. It is a record replete with flood, famine, disease, exile, resource depletion, abuse and war. But it is also a golden repository of thought and action, a specieswide playbook for resiliency, recuperation, and even reinvention in response to societal disruption, moral failure and collapse.

Dr. Tiya Miles, historian and professor of history at Harvard,
“When Everyone Around You Is Talking About the End, Talk About Black History”
Feb. 13, 2022, The New York Times Op Ed (February 13 2022)

Neither of these will perish into nothingness, just as they didn’t arise out of nothingness

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

…my whole life is coming down around my ears. Every dream, every hope I ever had for the future is broken around me and I don’t know where to turn. It was in the place that God said ‘do you still trust me? Do you still believe that I have what’s best for you?’ It was in that moment that I understood ‘Hallelujah.’

Timothy Donley, retired Retired Marine Corporal, “Meet a real-life Band of Brothers”, CBS Sunday Morning

My grandfather the blacksmith, who, when being kicked by a horse caught the hoof and then calmly turned to me and said, “Most things that try and hurt you are just scared or confused…

Craig Johnson, author

If you want to change the world, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud.

William Harry McRaven, retired United States Navy four-star admiral

People get discouraged. They should remember, from me, it takes courage not to be discouraged

Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor for the United States Army in the Nuremberg Trials held by the U.S. authorities at Nuremberg, Germany.

When we sing together, we create together, and it was one of the most negative things about the pandemic is that we were no longer able to share breath. There is something that is just primordial, something that just takes us back to the beginning of humanity – is that we are sharing breath.

Rhiannon Giddens, “Rhiannon Giddens relaunches the Silkroad Ensemble”, NPR

I deplore to have lived at a time when man’s law is to kill. The love of one’s country is a natural thing but why should love stop at the border; our family is one, each of us has a duty to his brothers, we are all leaves of the same tree, and the tree is humanity…

Pablo Casals

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Maya Angelou, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Oliver Sacks, “Musicophilia”