Today is an important day...
It's my wife Sally's birthday. So that's a given.
On her birthday she and (through her influence) I always look out for snowdrops appearing. With warmer winters they have been appearing earlier and earlier over recent years, and so they have been out in our garden, and all over my facebook feed for weeks now. So their appearance on Sally's birthday doesn't really have the same significance any more. They previously were signs of the coming spring - the very embodiment of hope in fragile floral form. Now, because of their appearance coming earlier and earlier, the more pessimistic among us might see them as a sign of the coming climate catastrophe that humanity has brought upon itself.
However, this morning I took the attached picture of a small clump of snowdrops that I always look out for under our front hedge, which has an apple tree growing through it, right at the gate, beside the busy main road. I noticed that they were out yesterday, but it was only when I took the photo today that I noticed the fallen apples in the undergrowth beside them. These windfalls have been a boon to bird and insect life and, together with the fallen leaves contribute to replenishing the soil which allows not only the snowdrops, but the much larger apple tree to grow... So this picture for me captures the complex nature of hope. Wider forces are at play. Things die and decay. Not everything is necessarily rosy. But life and beauty goes on and should be appreciated and cultivated.
Today is also the formal launch of this year's 4 Corners Festival. For 11 years now it has made celebrating Sally's birthday on the day a challenge... And this year we thought that we had escaped the clash when we moved the festival back to the first full week in February. However, we then realised that "Late Night Art" in Belfast was tonight, and that seemed the appropriate time to open our photography exhibition, for the second year organised in conjunction with Westcourt Camera Club, at ArtCetera Studio in Rosemary Street. So, once again Sally's birthday celebrations have been deferred... although if truth be told she was actually planning to go out to a new choir she has joined anyway!
The title of this year's exhibition is "A Culture of Hope" and is a collaboration with a number of local groups and services supporting minority groups and people who have arrived in Belfast from other countries. Director of the Westcourt Centre, Cormac McArt said:
“People can expect to see images and stories reflecting the journeys of many cultures and communities now resident in our city. The exhibition will share narratives of trauma, suffering, resiliency, connection, solidarity and ultimately hope for the future."
All of this reflects the wider theme of this year's festival - "Our Stories: Towards a Culture of Hope."
This was, in part prompted by the lack of hope being expressed over the last year because of the political impasse, which (we hope) has only recently been resolved, leading to the possible reinstatement of the assembly in the middle of this year's festival - I wonder how that may colour some of what is said in the next 10 days?
Hopes that 2023 might have seen Belfast and Derry jointly celebrated as European Capital of Culture was one of the many casualties of Brexit, but Belfast City Council have launched "Belfast 2024" as "a cultural celebration" to
"bring about transformational change for Belfast and... facilitate the city to build its creative capacity to better understand our identity, our relationships with each other and our place in the world."
Our festival is one of the first in 2024, and whilst it is not a named partner in this initiative, our aim is to share stories that will help to cultivate a culture of hope...
Rick Snyder, a well-known American psychologist, did extensive research on the building blocks of resilience and noted that whilst hope is an essential component, it must be "cultivated" because as Brené Brown comments on his work in her early book "The Gifts of Imperfection"
"hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process... Hope is learned!"
Brené Brown “The Gifts of Imperfection” p89
Snyder suggests that we learn hopeful, goal-directed thinking, that sustains and nourishes us in the face of difficulties, from the people around us, especially our parents.
So today, is an important day: Not just Sally's birthday, and the launch of our 4 Corners Festival (Check out the full programme and book your FREE tickets here), but it is also the first day of the rest of our lives, when we can commit ourselves to cultivate hope in our own lives, not only for our own well-being, but for the sake of wider society and those around us, many who ultimately may outlive us.
Yesterday, at an event which included information about wills and planning for later life, one of the contributors mentioned the much quoted proverb
"A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they know they’ll never sit."
He attributed it to an un-named Roman philosopher, others have suggested it was Greek, or Indian, and offered variations on a similar theme, (see Blessed Are Those Who Plant Trees Under Whose Shade They Will Never Sit – Quote Investigator® for a comprehensive investigation of its origin), however, like most proverbs, the origin doesn't matter, the truth of it does.
Hope outlasts us. So let us sow seeds of hope and celebrate it wherever we see it.
Selah
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