“The heart of Tao is immortal,
The mysterious fertile mother of us all,
Of heaven and earth,
Of every thing
And not-thing
Invisible yet ever-present,
you can use it forever without using it up.”
(The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu translated by Brian Browne Walker,
St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1995, #6)
The news of the day is urgent: floods, earthquakes, and fires create enormous suffering around the globe. In the United States, we see greed, ambition, and cruelty frequently eclipse the pursuit of truth, justice, and freedom in a torrent of human-made conflicts here and abroad.
In the meantime, digital clocks are everywhere, reminding us every minute of every day that time is passing. To avoid being left behind, we feel pressured to “keep up”. We learn to equate our value with our speed — the faster, the better. Our fear is that we are running out of time.
I long for a new vision of hope.
The language of Tao describes close to what I call “God”. The “mysterious fertile mother of us all” comforts me, invites me to slow down, to see a wider perspective.
In a recent episode of her podcast, On Being, Krista Tippett interviewed Joy Harjo, a musician, visual artist, and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, who is also aformer Poet Laureate of the United States.
This interview expands my sense of hope during these chaotic days and I will refer to it throughout this post. (I encourage readers to listen to the full interview on the podcast:
On Being with Krista Tippett: Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6, Jul 3, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000715626215 (This material may be protected by copyright.)
Krista Tippet introduces Ms. Harjo, saying:
“She has composed a glorious life out of very hard beginnings. But from the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives.
She calls it the whole of time, W-H-O-L-E.
When she does that, she reminds me of Einstein, the way Einstein reimagined the reality of time, which is quite different from how we perceive it with our senses. Time… is relative, not fixed. Seen at a deep level, it’s not a compartmentalized past, present, and future. Past, present, and future are all happening, interacting with each other all the time.
We actually know this. We experience it constantly in our thoughts and in our hearts, in our lives. But the way we structured the modern world and our daily lives hasn’t caught up with this fundamental reality.”
Traditional cultures view time differently. Time is seasonal, cyclical, generational. This view of time is echoed in our religious traditions.
Krista observes:
“It is the understanding of time in Martin Luther King Jr.’s evocation of the long arc of the moral universe that bends towards justice. And it is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it, never lost it.”
Joy Harjo presents us with a vision infused with beliefs and images from her Native American family. She links her foundational hope to an expansive sense of time. Her culture measures time generationally. Her teachers instilled in her a vision of time spanning seven generations, encompassing three generations of ancestors—parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, historically and toward the future. She learned to appreciate children as the “rudder of hope” and to cherish all children as our children. The history of generations pierces our lives in the present and shapes the generations to come.
My mother’s mother was a Russian immigrant. She, her 3 sisters, and their mother fled Russia around 1920 and arrived by boat in New York City. They settled in Chicago, where a large Russian immigrant population had settled. My grandmother and one of her sisters had extraordinary cooking skills. They made their way in this new land as caterers.
I was born decades later. My grandmother had given up professional cooking long before. But my most vivid memories of her are working tirelessly in the kitchen, preparing food that was elegantly served on a lace tablecloth. There was enough food for the many Russian friends who gathered for celebrations several times throughout the year.
Her life lives on in me. I learned to cook and care about food presentation because of those childhood experiences. I pass this on to my children, who pass it on to theirs. Along the way, we are all influenced by others and our experiences. My son, for example, worked in restaurants for nearly a decade immersed in the preparation and service of food. Another son loves cooking as a hobby, constantly trying out new recipes. Threads of my grandmother’s life weave through all of us.
Neuroscience has determined that, in the human brain, the cerebral cortex handles higher-level processes, including language, memory, reasoning, decision-making, forming values, and developing a sense of time. This is where we develop “the capacity to reflect on the past and envision the future.” Hope is a capacity that is developed in the brain. And our brain, barring injury or illness, can continually learn and develop new capacities. This is what neuroscientists call “neuroplasticity.”
Until now, I did not link hope with a sense of expanding time. Yet, intuitively, perhaps we experience this. For example, life seems to slow down as we gaze at a beautiful sunset. For just a moment, “all is well”. Or, when during a time of suffering, the welcome touch of a friend or loved one offers great comfort. In their touch, time seems to slow down, and a sense of relaxation emerges. These experiences leave us feeling more calm and, with a glimmer of hope, however fleeting.
How can we intentionally expand time toward enlarging our sense of hope? Krista offers the following “thought exercise” which was passed on to her from her teacher John Paul Lederach, passed on to him from his teacher, the sociologist Elise Balding. It pairs beautifully with the teaching from Joy Harjo:
“It is called the 200-year present, and it’s a way to cultivate a reality-based, longer sense of time and ancestry and the possibility that comes with that…
First, take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and the oldest person you can remember holding you, holding you. Calculate back to their date of birth, their year of birth, roughly.
Second, bring to mind the youngest person you have held in your arms and the year to which they might live, which is a fascinating exercise in a century in which it is projected that people born in the early part of this century might well in great numbers live for an entire century. The span of time that you will be able to calculate from these two, from this date of birth and this projected date of death, is going to be roughly a 200-year present that is very tangible, a 200-year present that your life on this earth spans, that you have literally touched and been touched by. See how this stretches your imagination, which we have explored as so powerful.
See how it stretches your sense of the possibilities of the imprint and agency of your span on earth. It doesn’t make what we stand before easier, but it absolutely makes it more spacious. And that is a great gift.”
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
~ What inspires you toward hope, especially during these days?
~ Are you willing to try the exercise given above by Krista Tippett? If so, what did you learn?
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To contact Joy Harjo:
To learn more about Krista Tippett:
https://onbeing.org/series/podcast
To listen to the podcast quoted here:
On Being with Krista Tippett: Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6, Jul 3, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556? i=1000715626215 (This material may be protected by copyright.)
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