“Mind cannot follow the story of sorrow if it is tethered to any hope, conclusion or remembrance.”

J Krishnamurti

‍“It’s the hope I can’t stand.”

George Monbiot

They say we must have hope.

I say different.

What is hope? A talisman of failed belief. What we cling to when we lack ideas.

What do we hope for? To continue as we have always done? To escape this world’s predicament? For ‘solutions’ that maintain our privileged convenience? All that is hopeless.

Our way of life is immoral and unsustainable. It is a way of death, the enslavement of others, human and non-human. It’s engines run on raw destruction. The point of no return is vanishing in its mirrors. Why hope for it to plough on now?

Hope distracts us from the necessary work, from our transformation. The longer we go on hoping, the more unsustainable and immoral we will become.

I sense something beyond hope, inviting me into the wild. Do you?

Let’s admit defeat together. It is our last chance to let go and be free. We only have to recognise it, and surrender.

Because isn’t this a blessed failure? That we could live to see the end of endless ‘progress’? That we might finally accept the life the Earth breathes into us, no more and no less?

Give up completely. Then live differently. Only our denial postpones our recovery.

They say if we lose hope we will fail to act.

But the only appropriate act is abandonment. If people had lost hope in the Titanic sooner, more would have survived.

What have we to fear? Losing control? Surely we can give up that grand delusion now? Control is the rallying cry for our war with nature. We hear nothing with it ringing in our ears. What we try to control we disrupt and destroy.

Whatever world we want should not be hoped for. It should be worked for.

So give up hope.

We’ll lose nothing but illusions. We will be better for it.