Where do you find hope?

"I want to send a message of hope to the world" says my ego, my little self looking wide eyed and terrified at the mess served to me by the media, my stomach too sore from digesting too much and forced fed I feel I can't take any more. My friends, each dear person whom I love, all grasping and reaching to send messages of hope or cries for help out into the ether. People changing their pictures to french flags in armchair solidarity in the hope that they are making a difference.

Hope. When I was 16 or 17, I can't remember exactly how old I was, I met a spectre of a teacher from another age. He whispered in my ear "give up hope it's toxic". This message came through time and time again throughout my 20s. Give up hope. Give up hope. And naively I took it for a negative message and tried to ignore it.

Now I can see the wisdom in it. I don't believe that hope itself is a bad choice but I guess it needs some refinement. If "hope" betrays the present moment in favour of the belief that tomorrow will be better then all it serves to do is draw us off balance tipping forlong into an unknown future in denial of whatever this moment brings to be acknowledged.

The present moment presents us with the gift to grow and live but by living in hope we are rejecting the gift in favour of fantasy. And ironically the very future we seek is likely to be forever just beyond our grasp.

Hope is toxic when it lies in the future. Let us never pray for a better future! Let us pray to be alive to the moment, now, today in faith that in doing so the course of destiny shifts and changes.

Hope is not found in the machinations of the human mind. For all our cleverness and knowledge humankind is not managing life very well. All these displays of solidarity splitting us asunder, me and you, us and them, them and the other them. Fragmenting like a broken mirror into a million pieces and distracting us from the great lie which is that we are ever separate at all. There will surely come a point when the great rock of humanity is ground down into a billion billion grains of sand and we will come to see the rock-ness in our nature.

Hope is toxic when it is out there, outside of us and in the future. Do not seek there for hope! Hope is healthy when it lies within us, when we take time to check in with our still beating hearts and ebbing flowing breath. Hope is not a vector, it has neither time nor destination, it is a still point. It is unwavering. We need not search for it but stop. Be still and remember the unity of all things and there authentic hope rises.