“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”

My Year of Essays continues with this collection that I bought from Haymarket Books over a year ago. This is my third Rebecca Solnit book, and even though it was published in 2004, it resonated strongly for me. (She does a lot of hand-wringing about the then-current political landscape, at which I could only shake my head at Past Rebecca, knowing what the future held.) The thing that really stuck with me was this idea that hope is a key trait of activists and advocates. It’s not exactly idealism, and it’s not blind optimism; instead, it’s a persistent determination that consistently acting from our values will shape the world. She speaks eloquently about what she calls “the dark,” which could be felt as a sort of bleak despair in the face of dire circumstances, but she reframes it as the dark of the womb, where a baby is full of potential before they emerge. Beyond the dark could feel new and scary, but that’s where possibility takes form.