Hope: Transitions

In keeping up with our series on hope, we decided to challenge Andrew Welch, a frequent past presenter to continue that conversation around the keyword of "transition".

To be honest, "hope" is not Andrew's strongest suit, nor does that aspiration appear to dominate the current predictions of other systems-thinkers like himself. However, he loves a challenge and looks forward to sharing his latest thoughts on a world, a consciousness, a mind, and perhaps even a congregation in transition.

Watch the gathering here

First Reading

"Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable."

- Rebecca Solnit

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

Second Reading

"The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition."

- Stephen Jay Gould

Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History