a flowering, multiplying thing by Mike Keller-Wilson

Hope is hard. We imagine it must be planted in the rich, wet earth, sheltered from frost and hail and the scorching heat of middle-day.

These days, our hopelessness is casual, reflexive. The Amazon? What a nice memory. Polar bears, you remember them?

That’s what they’re counting on. Your hopelessness is a metric; it drives stock sales, gets dished out as bonuses for oil executives. They eat it pearled and glistening, like caviar. It’s intentional, processed from factory smoke and river sludge. They melt it down and, once the slag has cooled, slap a 100% recycled sticker on. Those fuckers can’t have my hope.

Maybe it used to be the thing with feathers, but now hope is a houseplant, fragile and prone to wilting. Bring it inside, decorate its pot with little painted mantras, with the faces of your many loves. Make an altar for it. Peer down at the little hope leaves in your scraped together moments of quiet, warm mug in hand, shoulder against the cool of the window. Spot a new shoot unburying itself and searching for the sun.

Now look: The ozone re-knits its holes. Bald eagles dot the trees along the riverbank again, preening in the January wind. Wolves have returned to howl through Yellowstone and so the elk are forced into the older growth and so the willows grow thick and so the beavers can dam away and so the fish spawn in shade and so the bears multiply and so the ripples go on past counting. The world is a choice.

But humans are a disease, a pest. The world would be better off without us. That’s what they say, even the children, as we’ve taught them.

Fuck that.

Hope is a flowering, multiplying thing. Spread that shit around. Gather its many seeds; form a ball of dirt and dreaming. Cast it into your manicured suburban lawn. Grab a neighbor and make another. Launch a fleet of hopeful clods over the rusting chain link fence in the middle of town, watch them roll through the abandoned lot until they pile against a mound of gravelly earth and yellowing weeds. You will want to dust your hands, to smile at a job well done. Don’t. Don’t wait for rain or spring or providence. Find a way to water those fuckers yourself. Work for it. Think of your many loves and your potted altar and pour yourself into the earth even as you feel its tendrils rooting in your heart.

Mike Keller-Wilson lives and writes in Iowa City, Iowa. He is a founder & co-editor-in-chief of Vast Chasm Magazine. In his day job, he helps students and teachers develop their talents and tries not to share every dad joke he thinks of. Find him on Twitter @Mike3Stars or at mikekellerwilson.com.