Ross Gay — Hope Portal, Episode 7

Ross Gay is a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings another way of wisdom to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us. And that we have to tend to that as fiercely as to what is broken and what we’re called to make better, what we’re called to make more just. Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight is fuel even — and especially — in times of great challenge. This is something we can practice moment to moment, he teaches, through every ordinary day.

Journaling prompts for Session 7

Give your curiosity and your journaling during this week over to a practice of delight. As you move through your smallest interactions, look for moments/sightings/experiences that bring flashes of light into your day. Do you notice “unambiguously pleasant public physical interactions”? What is pleasant and sweet and tender?

Can you feel how attending to delight as seriously as hardship nourishes a reality-bending imagination and passion for justice and hope that is as joyful as it is fierce?

We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE.

A Possible Way to Organize This Experience

Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group.

For example, you could:

● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful.

● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow.

● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words.

● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune.

The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.

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