Time Warp Tuesdays: Hope, and the End of CSA Season

Kathy over at Bereaved and Blessed is doing the Time Warp Again!  Time Warp Tuesday is the monthly blog hop in which Kathy invites us to revisit an old post from our blog, and think about where we are now, how our thoughts about the post may have changed from its original writing.  This month, Kathy directs us to find an old blog entry about hope:

It might be a post where you wrote about something you hoped for, how hope got you through a difficult or uncertain time in your life or more generally what hope means to you. Then write a new post on your blog about why you chose the post that you did and what has happened in your life since.

I've written a lot about hope on this blog.   Much of it has been around issues of successful pregnancy and finding a new job.  But those posts were not as profound, to me, as the one about last year's CSA.

It had been a pretty horrible year.  Rotten produce.  Weeks on end of cabbage.  And in our own garden, decimation due to all manner of local herbivores.  I reflected on 2011 in general on that post, thinking about how so many people experienced it as a year of despair, uncertainty, and hardship.  And how, during the harvest time, which begins the Thanksgiving/Christmas season, it is sometimes hard to feel grateful.

But I believe now as I believed then that the human spirit is indominable, and that we hope anyway ... because it's in our nature to do so.  And that the hope itself is a gift to be thankful for, even when our well has run dry.

It's now three weeks away from the end of this year's CSA season.  We loved our CSA this year.  Was it perfect?  No; there were caterpillars in the broccoli that destroyed the crop, the squash were mostly killed off by a fungus, and there was still an awful lot of chard.  But a few things happened to make this year different: first, our farmers told us what was going on, so we were able to better manage our expectations.  Second, I have another year of experience under my belt, so dealing with the uncertainty of the harvest (or the bounty of a single vegetable) is a little bit easier.  And finally, our farmers are hopeful people, too; from the beginning, they've been talking about things they're looking forward to doing differently next year.

And that's what makes hope useful.  When we get stuck on the same things we've always wanted, in the same form: that's not hope.  That's obsession.  But when it can open our hearts wide enough so that we might be able to accommodate a different vision of that hope, and work--to the best of our ability--towards that new vision ... well, that can change us.

It turns out that I found a better CSA this year.  It also turns out that I have two beautiful children, that I left my job and am now home with my daughter until  I find something else.    We don't always get that we want, but often, we can achieve what we hope for.

Here's hoping y ou do, too.