Do you know the myth of Pandora’s Box?
Here is a good telling of it by the podcast “greeking out”. It is made for children but I love this podcast.
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/zeus-the-mighty
My basic version is this.
Zeus was mad so he made the first woman, Pandora, and gave her a terrible gift to punish mankind. (there is way too much to say about the patriarchy here, but I don’t have time so please just bear with me)
So because Zeus was really mad he took all the ”bad” parts of life; plague, death, famine, war, etc. and he stuffed them into a jar (over time this has been translated as a box). He gave the jar to Pandora as a “wedding dowery” without telling her what was inside and with the instructions that she should never open it. THEN because, again, he was very mad he also endowed her with insatiable curiosity. Zeus is a dick.
Eventually Pandora did open the jar and the second she did, all the bad shit flew out into the world. She gasped and quickly closed the lid. She wept, because who wouldn’t.
Then there was a realization there was one thing left in the jar…at the very bottom…it was hope.
OUCH
What a terrible story..and also what a terrible truth.
Hope is often all we are left with. When we are hit with trauma, doesn’t it seem like hope is the bruse that forms in its wake? It hangs about… taunting us, or at least telling us that the story isn’t over.
I feel like the world has been reckoning with hope a lot lately. We are somewhere in the pandemic, and all the loss and division and judgment and grief are free in the world. The jar is open and pain is running amok. Those of us still standing, are standing with hope. It may seem dim, or heavy, or hard to access, but I assure you hope still resides in the world like a residue of all we have been through.
I should say, I don’t think hope is good. I think it may be just as evil and painful as the rest of the contents of that jar. I used to think that hope was what carried us when we were low, but I know better now. Grief has taught me how cruel hope can be when it is pointed at the past or something impossible. No, I don’t see hope as a positive or negative thing anymore. It just is a thing I can’t seem to shake. I rip off the lid, turn the jar over and over but hope seems to be stuck to the bottom.
Hope is an inevitable part of the human experience. https://poets.org/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254
Hope is here, still, after all the terrible pain and sorrow ….it lingers.
And so I have an idea… it is less about how to find hope in dark days, and more about what to do with it.
Any ideas?…