Hope is an Axe
On wit, weather, and getting through
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.
— Rebecca Solnit.
For days, I’ve been drafting something about the manosphere, and now the sun’s out. Sparrows are nesting in the spikey, out-of-control plant we call Diego. The trees are unfurling leaves so luminously green you could be tripping. Suddenly, it’s light at 7 pm, thanks to the clock trick. Petunias in my greenhouse are flowering a month too early. I leave the house to buy a gift without needing a coat. Sunshine cracks through the transom window above the front door at the angle it only achieves in the first weeks of spring. The angle that means I’ve made it, once more, through the dark. And I feel too peaceful to want to lock horns with the world. So I’ll finish that piece next week.
Free of term-time structures since I lost my university teaching job, I’m surprised to find, as I write this, that tomorrow’s Good Friday. Easter is a beautiful time for me. For many, I suspect, especially those of us who don’t thrive in the darkness. Spring springs upon its annual reminder that death cycles through to rebirth. The Christian calendar mirrors the season: suffering ends, and miraculous good emerges from what looked hopeless.
Spring cheers me most of all as a herald of summer. Summer is my season. In my memoir MS, I’ve been writing this week about my Californian childhood, where it was, to my recollection, summer all year. Looking up the house I used to live in, and the neighbouring houses where my friends lived, including an aspirational real-estate listing which, when I was seven, was simply ‘Suzy’s house’. The only online photo of my favourite home is the deck, symbolic of all-year-round outdoor eating: my dream. California is a place whose weather suited me deeply. The culture, not so much, or I might have chosen to live there, before I renounced my citizenship. But culturally, I’m a Brit through and through: Monty Python, Sunday roasts, Jarvis Cocker, free healthcare, Eric Morecambe, 16th-century pubs, The Globe, and Philomena Cunk. And the whole of British culture — including our humour — seems to hinge on the presence of ridiculous, unpredictable weather.
Temperamentally, though, I’m not happy with this country’s meteorological offerings. I’m a spring/summer lover and can’t get past thinking rain, sleet, and gales as ‘bad’. Though my husband has tried, for 25 years, to school me otherwise: not ‘bad weather’, wrong clothes. Rain is ‘refreshing’. Sub-zero days make you ‘glad to get in’ (yeah, how about just stay in). Windy days are ‘exciting’ and ‘bracing’ apparently, and not just ‘bashing up my plants’ or ‘trying to rip the roof off the porch.’ Last week, the wind finally succeeded in its long-term aims. The roof lantern over the porch is a mess, screwed and taped back together many times this last decade, but last week, we found it open to the sky. Our temporary fix isn’t going to survive another winter, or even another spring gale. The whole structure is unsafe, and we’ll just have to swallow (and borrow) the costs of replacement. This might have brought me down even more than the roof.
But Spring, effortlessly, returns me hope. And the deeper metaphor, too. The cycle of seasons repeatedly shows us that darkness and turbulence always resolve into light. A period of storms and freezing darkness is part of the natural process: necessary for broken things to die, and fresh things to seed. Through Spring, I’m reminded of this fundamental: destruction then renewal is how Nature cleans the slate, allows us to start ‘afresh, afresh, afresh’. This is as true of nature as it is of societies and of individual lives. Personal breakdowns, if they do not sink us, lead to breakthroughs. Post-war Britain brought in the deep good of the Welfare State.
Human progress is more of an upward spiral than a circle, and though we see the patterns of the 1930s all around us, it’s possible, possible, that we, as a whole (with many individuals excepted) are just a little wiser; wise enough to step back from the brink of wholesale carnage.
“Hope is an axe you break down doors with.”
Rebecca Solnit wrote these words about climate change, but they apply across the board. What matters, whether we are looking at society’s mess or at our individual lives, is breaking through despair. Hope in the face of uncomfortable facts is a radical, revolutionary act. It frees us to live, and breathe, and spark into joy.
And what was dormant bursts back to life.
Or if you prefer, you can
Thank you for being here. Over to you:
Do you have feelings about WEATHER?
Favourite season (and why)?
What’s making you most hopeful right now?