By Jim Heffernan
When I heard Rebecca Solnit had a new book of essays, I had to have it. This book is a collection of 21 essays from the last five years or so. They are mostly about climate change but they also touch on feminism and politics. Her essays are beautifully written. This is her “more than 20th” book. I have 10 of her books.
The title of her introduction is “In Praise of the Indirect, the Unpredictable, the Slow, and the Subtle” summarizes how we should expect change to progress.
One of her essays, “Tortoise at the Mayfly Party” introduces the concept that we expect to be “mayflies”, with change at the pace of breaking news or executive order when it actually comes at a “tortoise” pace, but it does happen.
I’ll close with some excerpts, which I think display the charm of her writing better than I can. I hope I am not too preachy. For me, the most important advice she gives is “get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots”. If that means taking a break, so much the better.
From page 9, “As Audre Lorde said, “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.”
From Page 13, In this book, in essays both for (mostly gathered under the heading “Visions”) and again (in the section called “Revisions”), I’ve tried to map the circuitous routes that change takes, the byways and backroads by which movements have been built and ideas have advanced, the times when no path forward exists-but, as the poet Antonio Machado famously said, “Walker, there is no path; the path is made by walking.” For so many of our destinations, no straight road takes us there. The route is over mountains or through forests and beyond what we know-and it may also be through inconceivable beauty and transformation as well as peril; it may be uncharted, or steep, or take decades or centuries to traverse; we may get there through storytelling, alliance, or the appearance of some unanticipated participants. That’s a declaration of difficulty and uncertainty but also of possibility that I offer as encouragement to keep going.
From page 69, When you take on hope, you take on its opposites and opponents-despair, defeatism, cynicism, and pessimism. And, I would argue, optimism. What all these enemies of hope have in common is confidence about what is going to happen, a false certainty that excuses inaction. Whether you feel assured that everything is going to hell or will all turn out fine, you are not impelled to act. All these postures undermine participation in political life in ordinary times and in the climate movement in this extraordinary time. They are generally both wrong in their analysis and damaging in their consequences.
Not acting is a luxury those in immediate danger do not have, and despair when it leads to inaction, something they cannot afford. But despair is all around us, telling us the problems are insoluble, we are not strong enough, our efforts are in vain, no one really cares, and human nature is fundamentally corrupt. Some push their view like evangelists not merely surrendering to defeat but campaigning vigorously on its behalf. I’ve encountered a lot of them since I began to talk and write about hope almost twenty years ago.
Finally her last essay at page 169:
Credo
11 PM, NOVEMBER 5, 2024
They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save every thing does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.
The Wobblies used to say don’t mourn, organize, but you can do both at once. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who’s upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.
People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South and Central America in the 19 70s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.
Book is 184 pages, published May 13, 2025. Available at Cloud and Leaf Bookstore, Manzanita and Tillamook County Library.
As aways, discussion welcome at codger817@gmail.com