Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy

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Is there a place where you feel more connected to the web of life? Chapter 12: Maintaining Energy and Enthusiasm But, just as the problems can happen through people, so can constructive responses, says Johnstone, who provides free online courses in active hope:

Each person daydreams for a few minutes about what he or she would like to see in a life-sustaining society.The concept of ‘pay it forward’ is a central theme in Active Hope. It plays a role not only in fundraising to develop free online courses and resources in Active Hope Training but also in supporting a shift in perspective that contributes to positive change in the world.

Many people around the world have participated in Joanna’s workshops and trainings. Her group methods, known as the Work That Reconnects, have been adopted and adapted yet more widely in classrooms, churches, and grassroots organizing. Her work helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth. Joanna had a particularly lucid and disturbing dream. She saw her children left behind in a barren, toxic world. We can look at our pain for the world in a similar way: it is the world system, or Gaia, feeling through us. Like seedlings that need thinning out, we need to choose which visions we support, and then clear space around them so that they have room to develop and thrive.

Chapter 4: Honouring our Pain for the World

The second meaning is about desire. It is this kind of hope that starts our journey — knowing what we hope for and what we’d like, or love, to take place. It is what we do with this hope that really makes the difference. Passive hope is about waiting for external agencies to bring about what we desire. Active Hope is about becoming active participants in bringing about what we hope for. Life-Sustaining Systems and Practices: rethinking the ways we do things, as well as creatively redefining of the structures and systems that make up our society. A useful question is ‘if the story of things working out well, or even not getting much worse, was to happen through me, what part might I play?’” When you fall in love, you feel incredibly bonded with your loved one and at the same time more uniquely yourself, different from anyone else in the world. To change something, we need to first hold in our mind and heart the possibility that it could be different.