Community Gathering & Reading

Dear Friends,

I’m going to be blunt: I’m in a place of despair, and I want to talk about it.

September… we were going to host a town hall. I decided I didn’t want to host a town hall. What (of the world’s many woes) would we even talk about? And what, at the end of the day, would it accomplish? The thing that has actually been on my mind over the past several months, and the question I keep coming back to is how do I leave a place of despair, and move toward a place of hope? What would that even mean? And I realized the best thing I could do for myself was to ask my community to gather with me, to eat some soup, and to help figure it out.

Maybe you, too, are in despair, and despite your desire to see no one and go nowhere, a community gathering would be good for your heart too. Or maybe you’ve made this journey toward hope and have some advice for the rest of us. Maybe you just like soup. I’ve invited some friends and community members to write rapid responses (whatever that looks like) to the proposal that hope is a verb, it requires action, and the action comes from a belief that those actions matter. Meanwhile despair, hope’s opposite, is the enemy of action. Why take action when nothing we do matters anyway?

And so friends, I hope you’ll join us at The Theatre Centre on September 23rd. I’ll be hosting (because doing stuff matters!) and we’ll have soup and other foodstuffs to share. We’ll hear some words from some wonderful minds, and my hope is that we’ll each leave that night with a personal action in mind that we will take into the world, because it matters to someone. And even if it just matters to you, that’s enough. But ultimately, the most important piece of the puzzle of this gathering is that we gather.

— Aislinn