I believe in hope. I believe that there is hope and that it is right to have hope but in writing this entry, my main point is more specific: that there is a spiritual need for people to keep up the ing hope word, the gerund, to actively and ongoingly be hoping. Hope can be a word that can be used to express false hope, hopelessness, and can seem like an empty word to a lot of people, really to everyone if used that way, if thought of that way, if internalized that way.

I woke up just now because I had to use the bathroom, a task that's been completed, for your information. When I was previously in bed, thinking about the possibilities I had, to get up, or not to get up, I quite oddly, but honestly, thought for a minute about the laundry box placed precariously on top of the laundry hamper across the room, and it became for me a symbol for what I can do. I thought to myself and this is where it gets strange "I wonder if I could telepathically cause that hamper to fall. It's already quite precarious." Then only sort of half musing for a moment, I was kind of convinced that I might with my mind alone be capable of inducing the box to fall. I guess I have some odd thoughts on occasion about the power of the mind, and my mind, to do miraculous things, overcoming obstacles, or really doing anything that we feel we need to do.

But then, I actively decided not to use my telekinesis to drop the box, for the serious, honest, true reason that there is no earthly need for the box to fall. It was a random idea. And there are a great many things that do need done. That do need committed minds and bodies working hard to do, like saving humanity from climate peril.

This was for me a spiritual moment, a revelation of importance, because I do think there is a need for humanity to figure out how to hope, and to actively remain hoping for our collective future. On a spiritual level, we can hope and remain hoping. It sets our actions in the right direction for us to use our psychic, mental, and emotional energies not from a point of despair, but to use that worst case scenario and hope against it.

I had been feeling despair, in the past week especially. I started believing in climate change when I first watched Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But then it seemed like an obstacle that could be figured out for the better and solved so that humans could retain the important elements of our human civilization that keep us human. Again, I am saying that more important to me than the physical realm (keeping lights on, having refrigeration for our food, or driving cars) is the spiritual realm of humanity (maintaining dignity, honoring our human rights, and hoping).

As long as our physical basic needs are met we don't need a extravagance at all to maintain the spiritual realm of humanity. We do have material needs such as food, water, shelter, and love/community. But we don't need a lot of the things that many of us currently take for granted, and to the extreme. I think simplicity to the extreme is one important step to ensuring that people's hopefulness for the survival of humanity is not a false hope. The main culprit and cause of climate change is two fold: wealthy political/corporate interests are to blame and each of us who live in America or the developed world who use more than our rightful amount of resources need to stop. It's like the fact that Greta Thunberg is an amazing climate activist on a political level, but she also personally is a vegan. We all need to use less.

Actually I am going to say this. I used to dine and hang out at a coffee shop in my town (I don't now because it doesn't make any economic sense anymore.) But there was a friendly staff person there named Dan who I probably am misquoting, but I understood from what he believed that he thought the blame of climate change rests firmly and solely in the hands of corporations and not in regular developed world citizens. I like Dan, but this response is for the large portion of the population who seems to also agree that we individual poor working people don't have a part to do in the climate change problem. But we do. We each have a responsibility to act in civil disobedience if we have to but certainly to commit our lives to changing the dilemma, to live as simply as we can that others may simply live, and certainly to do what Dan already does, to admit there is a problem.

Back to the spiritual, I think we also need to hope if we are not already, and to keep hoping for the common good, so that my teenage nephew and niece live to be older than 40. So that Greta Thunberg lives a good long life. So that I see an older age than 61. May our action, our simplicity, and our recognition of a problem come immediately and let us know we each are needed in solving this crisis.