It has been a devastating summer of heat and drought, but the rains have come, and we are finally seeing temperatures below 100. This Wendell Berry poem speaks about belonging to a place and finding hope there.

A Poem on Hope

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,

for hope must not depend on feeling good

and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.

You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality

of the future, which surely will surprise us,

and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction

anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering.

The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?

Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit

our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded,

the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope

then to belong to your place by your own knowledge

of what it is that no other place is, and by

your caring for it, as you care for no other place, this

knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth.

It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask

for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land

and your work.  Be still and listen to the voices that belong

to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields.

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.

The world is no better than its places. Its places at last

are no better than their people while their people

continue in them. When the people make

dark the light within them, the world darkens.

-Wendell Berry

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