ERIC WENNINGER

Tag: hope

Be Not So Fearful

March 1, 2025

Bill Fay – Image via Aquarium Drunkard

In yesterday’s newsletter, I wrote about hope in the corners. I opened it with a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. … Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimism and pessimism.

There’s a middle ground, according to Solnit, that exists between being too positive or too negative. It’s the room where hope resides. Maybe we can find other things in that room too.

The cult British singer-songwriter Bill Fay died this past week at 81. I was only vaguely familiar with his work from Jeff Tweedy having routinely covered his song “Be Not So Fearful” (also featured in this scene of the excellent I Am Trying to Break Your Heart documentary).

I read that Fay once said:

I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life—finding songs in the corner of the room.

For much of his life, Fay’s music lived on the periphery. His recording career started in the early ‘70s and abruptly ended only a few years afterward. Later, his career would have a resurgence of sorts after being rediscovered my musicians like Tweedy, among others.

Fay’s comment about “finding songs in the corner of the room” circles us back to something else Solnit writes of hope:

How the transformation happens … recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.

Bill Fay didn’t occupy the limelight and our hope doesn’t have to either. This doesn’t make it any less transformational or less powerful. In fact, it does just the opposite.

Rest in peace, Bill Fay. You can read the whole newsletter here.
Recycled Hope

February 24, 2025

Jellyfish made of recycled plastic water bottles at the Monkey Bar

At the very beginning of 2025, I wrote a newsletter about letting go to welcome in. The Spanish put this idea into action beautifully during Las Fallas de Valencia. Artists create beautiful monuments called fallas in the main plaza of the city that serve as a commentary on current social issues. Then, on the final day of the festival, they set the fallas ablaze in an event called La Cremà (see pictures here)—a symbolic cleansing and renewal of society. I like the idea of letting something go to create space for something new.

Las Fallas will be in full swing soon. The festival takes place each year from the 1st to 19th of March in Valencia, Spain. You can check out this year’s festival map and explore the festival website to learn more about what makes this such a special event (also refer to Rosetta Stone’s guide and this article from Move to Traveling). The following video gives a good idea of the esthetic and emotion involved with Las Fallas.

We tend to welcome in the new year with so much hope for the future. As winter wears on in the colder parts of the world—and as administrations change—that hope can quickly diminish. February, after all, is the worst month of the year. It would seem to make sense, then, that Las Fallas takes place in the spring—a season of rebirth and renewal. Maybe there are some things that we’d all like to see burn and go away right about now.

In Grenada, recycling plastics is difficult. But there’s a group here that’s working hard to change that—they’ve organized a plastics drop-off that happens once a month. We save any plastic recyclables we accumulate throughout the month and when the next drop-off date arrives, we load them up and make the trip. The Monkey Bar also helps alleviate the plastics issue—they repurpose plastic bottles in many of their art installations (see the jellyfish featured above).

Instead of burning away the bad to make space for the good, I wonder if we might just remember the good we’ve forgotten—recycle it and bring it back. Can we recycle our hope once we’ve lost it?

Last Sunday, Angie and I hiked out to Hog Island. Right now, it’s the dry season in Grenada and our trek felt strangely similar to what we’d experience on a very nice autumn’s day in Wisconsin. The leaves are changing colors, ever so slightly—light yellows and browns—and some are even falling off their trees. The temperature has calmed down a bit and the sun hits you at just the right angle so as to create the golden, breezy feel of fall.

Trees were all around us and I was thinking about hope. Sarah Vos, of the Dead Horses, has a song called “Swinger in the Trees” (see full lyrics), that is based, in part, on a Robert Frost poem called “Birches” (see reference). The song ends like this:

All these strangers
Passing by me
But we choose not to see,
Yeah we choose not to see (I wanna be)
Oh, we choose not to see

There is always hope,
There is always hope.
There is always hope (I wanna be)
A swinger in the trees

There is always hope, folks. Choose to see it. Recycle it and reuse it. And, watch Sarah Vos sing about it here:
Untold Histories

February 17, 2025

Street mural in the Barranco neighborhood of Lima, Perú

Earlier this month, I traveled to Lima, Perú. I wrote about it in last week’s newsletter on unity through difference:

At midweek, we were fortunate to go on a tour of Lima’s Historic Centre with workshop participants. We walked through the expansive plaza at the heart of Lima while looking at the beautiful colonial-era buildings surrounding it and the Andean foothills beyond. When we entered Lima’s stunning cathedral, I was handed a little card with a short prayer of unity on it. As I read it something immediately felt wrong. Classical music was gently playing in the background of this nearly 500-year-old cathedral and I sat down on a pew to take it all in. After a while I realized that I didn’t like how the prayer advocated for unity through “sameness” or “oneness.” If we somehow were to achieve unity through “sameness,” life would be reduced to something far less that it actually is. It reminded me of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on the dangers of a single story, where she encourages us to see the multiple layers of people and cultures, and to fight powers that would seek to silence them. Some would argue that the silencing is already taking place. It’s why I’m appreciative of people like Kendrick Lamar, who publicly give voice to a counter narrative, both directly and symbolically. If we’re ever going to get to a place of unity, we have to do so through accepting and embracing “difference.”

This week, I started reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. In the book, Solnit calls for continuous hope and action. And she makes an important point about the past—be it good or horrible—and how it relates to hope:

We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.

I’m encouraged by this—to be fueled by hope as I lean forward into action. In my newsletter, I wrote about other “untold” or, perhaps, “forgotten” histories of Perú that you can read about here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.