Here we be

it is time

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giving way

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the wheel turns

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high and low

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adrift on dry land

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i lay me down

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at a loss

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death gives rise to wings

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cutting the cord

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continuation

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our family tree

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carrying on

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here we be

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hope
calligraphy by Janith Hatch

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About this series

The Oxford English dictionary defines hope as “a feeling of trust." I've described it as my superpower. Hope has kept my head and heart above water for some time. Among other things, it helped me survive the isolation of growing up rural and queer. I came to trust that if I could see possibility, I could keep going.

Older now, I've discovered that sometimes I have to leave behind a hope, that the time for it to manifest passes. How does one give up, and still carry on? Grappling with this gut-check of a question, I found myself working with images that reminded me of the months after my mother passed. It turns out that the heart of my question is about loss and grieving. In my experience, grieving is the way in which you find yourself anew in a place that is also radically altered. Getting there often involves looking for a way out, looking for the thing you lost, and/or just lying on the floor weeping because the pull of gravity is too much. You come undone, and pass through days like a ghost. In this permeable state, you also start to feel how the world keeps reaching out to you. The sound of a bird, the touch of a hand, the brightness of a sunrise reaches through the fog and you rise to meet it. That reaching? That, to me, is hope. It is the world reminding me that I am a part of it, and it is a part of me.

My mother wrote a haiku, only the last line of which I can now remember: “Death gives rise to wings.” What I think she was talking about is the way that letting go allows us to rise to meet the present. This is the moment that will see us through, not all the ones that came before or any possibility of one to come. Sometimes the present moment is a hard one. Like this one, where things that we hoped for and even began to see manifest are being taken away—bodily autonomy, trans and queer rights, affirmative action. In making this body of work, I was reminded that hope doesn't come from within me and it isn't mine to give up. It is in the web of relations, human and otherwise, that makes up the world. It is in the letting go and carrying on.