Hope with Muscle
Until the last few days of November in Wisconsin, I had been harvesting beets and beet greens from my garden along with kale and calendula flowers. All our harvests were late on the farm, the weather atypically warm.
I am most grounded when I am in the garden. With obvious tasks of harvesting and seeding, with my hands in the soil, my fears and grievings are composted. I remember a few decades ago seeing a slideshow from a soil scientist who projected images of soil creatures, magnified many times, and the images colored to identify different beings. They looked like our imaginings of aliens in futuristic films. None of them were identified. I know the soil is alive with creatures I will never be able to see. And I trust in the life of the soil, that it can sustain me. I will make a commitment to sustain it.
I’ll admit, I was surprised by the results of the US election in early November. How could I be anything but aware of the division (and derision) in our country, in our neighborhoods. I dwell in the swing state of Wisconsin that crossed over into the abyss of promised insanity just when I thought we had a chance of renewal of our promises of democracy.
At 66 years of age, I remember a much different America—one of optimism, where any individual could work toward a better life through freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of belief, and bodily autonomy. I especially remember how inspiring I found our national parks and heritage sites. I understood that they were our American treasures, that they belonged to all of us, and that they were to be protected.
I heard the call and later felt honored to serve as a national park ranger. I also remember how few of us were women in the National Park Service and how we paved the way for inclusion and diversity. (But it wasn’t easy.)
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I grew up in an extractive economy—the largest coal mining valley in the world located in northeastern Pennsylvania. It is the place where the Industrial Revolution began, where anthracite coal met iron to produce the rails for railroads and then power transportation and factories to colonize North America. Heavy on my heart is the deep knowledge that my valley is the place that sparked the hunger for fossil fuels and led to this time of climate change. I know what it means to live on hollow ground and where burning and smoke take away clean air, and mining waste takes away clean water.
It was the kind of place where hope becomes nonexistent. And yet.
I was 10 years old when the ecology movement (later named environmental movement) began in Wisconsin in 1968. I remember that time. I saw the hope of many working for clean water and air through laws intended to protect all of us. Looking outward from my devastated valley, I knew that there was a way forward, and I wanted to be part of the solution. For me, the way forward was in environmental science and working as a naturalist to share deep knowledge of place. My job was to create sensitivity for the more than human world.
I also wanted to find low impact ways of living and reduce the use of fossil fuels in my own life.
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Half a century later, I live and work on an organic farm where our house uses passive solar energy and wood for heat and heated water.
Two months before the 2024 presidential election, my 50-year renewable energy dream was realized when our farm switched to hybrid solar energy. 64 solar panels assembled create a huge black rectangle on the roof of the shed we built to hold them, to catch the sun just so year-round. We have been able to make this dream a reality because of a federal partial grant for agricultural producers like us, and we will work for 10 years to pay off the rest. It felt like a hopeful celebration when the collectors were turned on. They were so quiet. No flash, no bang. Just the beginning of a new and hopeful reality.
I shared my excitement with my life-long farmer neighbors, people who have lived here all their lives, same farm. They are friends, a generation older than I who are rare Democratic voters in their family and in our very strongly Republican rural region. When I first told them about the solar project, they were upset that we would receive a small grant to help with the project, and I’m unsure why. In several conversations I had to explain that our household will pay for this solar installation to be up and running, that we will be paying for it for over a decade until the debt is resolved, and then we will be pretty much able to have electric energy at no cost. The other part that I needed to explain is that our family chooses to do this as a contribution, that everyone in our county who uses electricity will benefit. That the solar energy we produce beyond our needs will be absorbed into our rural electric co-op grid. That even if it is a small amount of all the electricity used, we will still replace energy produced by burning coal. Perhaps if enough of us do this, I explained, the shuttered nuclear power plant on the Mississippi River will stay that way. (This is my hope.)
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I have a tenuous relationship with the word hope.
I keep circling around it.
Is hope, I wonder, the same as inspiration whose etymology is this:
inspīrāre : in-, into; see in– + spīrāre, to breathe.
Might hope mean envisioning the world we wish to create? Imagining to manifestation?—Imagination realized?
Times like these, though, for me, require something stronger than breath to hold onto.
Some lines from a collaborative video poem I was part of in spring 2023 come to me. “Dear Sky, Dear Blue Planet,” captured voices across the country in response to climate change. These lines keep ringing inside me like a clear-tuned bell struck and held:
I feel hope.
I feel hope.
I feel hope.
Not an easy hope, but a muscular one.
A hope I cannot measure
but choose to hold in my chest.
Hope with muscle.
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One of the things that has concerned me for a long while is that in our country we do not have very many places of real conversation, such as widespread public transportation that would give us opportunities to sit next to one another, perhaps help someone onto a bus or subway or train. A chance to recognize ourselves as part of a whole. A chance to listen to one another’s concerns. We lack widespread marketplaces where conversation is an integral part of transaction. We need to come together on things that we obviously share—air, water, public lands where we can restore our spirits.
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Back in Appalachia, a relative of mine says novenas for me. He is part of a religious community I have left, and I’m aware that our environmental, social, economic, and political concerns could straddle a large ravine. When he tells me over the phone that I am part of his daily devotions, I say, “Thanks.” We all need kindness. I may not agree with the giver, but I will receive gifts with gratitude when they are given.
I speak my gratitude aloud every day. This is novena, too. I watch over land that is a major water resource, springs below and around my house feeding the upper Mississippi River. I rise and give thanks to this water that sustains us, listening for its voice. In the current four-year drought, I hear it less. If it is quieter, perhaps I must raise my voice higher and farther. I also believe in tikkun olam—that I have a responsibility in saving or healing the world each day.
As a farmer, a writer, and mother, there are three things that guide my way of being in the world.
First is seeds. Seeds are prayers that I plant. They feed my family and the generations beyond me. Our hands in the soil, turning it over and listening to it is sacred work.
Second is stories. Stories are seeds containing what we believe. They name what we love and care about and guide resilience. When fear and dominance overtake our narratives, we need to reassert who we are through stories of social justice, survival, and earth care. We need to keep building communities of people in our nation and world work to make our planet a good place for all beings, who feed the resilience.
Third is nurturing. I will work for everyone’s children, nourish them with food from the abundant land and teachings of respect.
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We don’t know what’s ahead; we have been given clues that we must rise to protect what we care about.
I come back to hope as muscular. Strong, like the muscle of heart/mind: the great tree within us.
I will continue to speak my gratitude for this aqueous Earth, and I will use the muscle of heart and mind to do what’s needed. For now, what I know to do is to continue the harvest here in this place. To put by the provisions for the dark time of year. To continue my focus on the next seven generations, passing along what I know about this land and what’s important in caring for it and ourselves. How to survive and thrive.
CATHERINE YOUNG is the author of Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal. She lives in the Driftless region of Wisconsin.