Hope in the Dark
Offerings

Hope in the Dark

Tuesdays from 7 to 8:30pm

Drop-in Community Reading on Zoom
Tuesdays from 7 to 8:30pm Pacific
January 21 - March 4, 2025
We will not meet February 18
Given freely — donations warmly welcome
Join us: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/97932637709

Beloved, I invite you to join our next Community Reading, which will be Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

Haymarket Books says: "Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book."

Longtime community member and activist Jessie Raeder turned me on to this incredible little gem of a book, which has long been a place she turns when despair begins to creep in. The Guardian calls it, "One of the Best Books of the 21st Century." Just after the election, Jessie led an online reading inspired by our Reading Circles of the past two winters. I took part and have found tremendous solace and not just hope, but a new understanding of the very nature of hope. Thanks to Jessie for weaving with me in this way – and allowing me to share her name: "Community Reading" is such open, inviting language, isn't it? I'm excited to share this with you now.

All reading will take place together, aloud; no preparation is needed. We will read for about an hour and discuss for about a half hour. Yes, darling, you can come late to a session, miss a week, drop in just once, join partway into the book, leave your camera off, and just join to listen and discuss without being a reader. Come as you can. There is something so tender about being read to live. This is for solace. This is for hope. This is for endurance, and thriving.

This event is freely given. Your choice to donate supports my ability to share teaching in widely-accessible formats.