a story about fear and hope

It's been three months since my first post. I could prevaricate and tell you the website this blog links to isn't ready, so it's premature to post here until I have that completed.  I could tell you I've been unwell, and very busy. I could laugh it off as typical of procrastinating me; all talk and much less action. I could come up with any number of stories about why I haven't, why I didn't, how come I couldn't even. Maybe some of them would even be true. But none of them would be what I believe.

What I believe is that I have been afraid. Afraid that what I love to draw, to write about, is too childish, naive, enthusiastic for our tenuous times. Too superficial, too privileged, too fatuous. And these are good questions to have; I can't be sure I am contributing in a way that leaves more good in the world than what it takes without first questioning that contribution, without first questioning what it is I take. But I haven't been using the fear as a way to question, I have been using it as a shield against action. Cowardice is an ugly motivation. I'm not proud of it.

I'm not ashamed of it either. I live, I learn. At least some days I do. I believe this is a fragile and fractured world, populated by fragile and fractured people; much wrong is done and suffering endured. I also believe this is a magic and wondrous world, populated by magic and wondrous people; much good is done and joy created. I want to celebrate the good and the joy, and resist the wrong and the suffering. No biggie then. Sure, yep. Stick figure under a rose should totally do that.

Of course it won't. But it does make something in the depths of my belly (pancreas? ascending colon?) feel a little lighter, and if it does that for me then maybe it will do that for someone else, and another someone else, until slowly, and between us all, we create a space large enough to take a few step backwards so we can see our lives a little more broadly, with a little wider perspective. The sociologist Bourdieu called this a margin of freedom, a thin slice of opportunity in our otherwise busy and duty-bound lives where change can be imagined. And where change can be imagined, the possibility for action can be created.

It's a revolutionary idea if you think about it, and I think about it a lot. I believe it is a kind of hope, a pragmatic kind of a hope, one within all of our reach and power, the world over, time without end, amen.  And I believe that kind of a pragmatic hope, naive or otherwise, is a thing worth spending a lifetime drawing stick figures for.

I'm still afraid. I'm just not willing to also be a coward.