In her words of Welcome to the Spring 2025 Newsletter, Laurel wrote: … ‘I feel to share something with our readers that touches on the ENERGY of HOPE. Elm Grove Sanctuary was founded as a Centre of Hope. Hope – not a nebulous term but rather a most affirming and proven necessity for the future of each one of us and our precious planet’. This got me reflecting on hope for myself.

Like Laurel, I think of hope as an actual experience we can have within personal relationships. It is not just an idea or an expectation. It is an energy within relationship. Those of us fortunate enough to have had good enough parents, or firm friends, or people we looked up to who affirmed us, will know the experience of hope. It can sustain us even in moments when despair comes knocking. We can internalise relationships that have given us hope and feed on them within ourselves.

I think hope can also be cultivated by our own intention and initiative. I think this is what effective spirituality is all about. I think within our culture that intention has now become very important. Hope is generated in a living, personal world, not an impersonal physical or scientific world; and that is not deprecating science in any way. It is just a different way of thinking. We human beings have just about completely surrounded ourselves with a mechanistic, electronic world that is demanding all our attention; while the living world in which we were created is under critical threat and serious neglect. The challenge is: how can we put life and spirit back into nature and relate to it personally, and not only as something objective over and against us that we manipulate according to our own will. How can we act again within a living world of personal encounter? Martin Buber famously championed our relating to each other as ‘l and You’, rather than ‘I and He, She or It’. How can we draw more of the world we interact with into the ‘You’, without denying the ‘He, She or It’. Can we begin to think of that Mountain as a Person, or that extraordinary Tree that is so unique and particular. Can we dare to think of it as a ‘You’. If we do this from the heart, let yourself be aware of the hope it can help you experience. You will really see and hear Tree and want to name it.

For myself in my own spiritual explorations contemplating and meditating are not enough if they don’t include a sense of personal relationship that I in some sense act upon, whether it is engaging a representation within my own mind or an actual presence in the living world around me that I address in some way. Many may not follow me in that. I am very attracted to what I understand of the practice of dadirri. As I understand it, there is a different ancient background to the practice that has relationship built into it; deep listening to country. It is hard to feel down if you are looking up; that’s why the gods live in mountains. The ancient associations that hang around contemplation and meditating on the other hand are about withdrawing into ‘nothingness’ or the world of theoria, contemplating mathematical logic or Platonic forms rather than relating to the living world around us. Make of that what you will.

Electronic mechanical bots, on the other hand, are poised to take over the world of therapy and counselling. They are being sought out by lonely people. That is how cut off many now feel in our cultural world; they seek relationship with something they know is not really living, is not really real, while the natural world they barely see cries out with life that is no longer personally felt. How might Elm Grove Sanctuary Trust engage this extraordinary turning point we are all facing? We need more than hope as expectation; we need the Energy of Hope that comes from within living relationships.