Kate Davies - Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times

Praise for Intrinsic Hope

After many decades of working on the climate crisis, Im someone who hope does not come naturally to every day. That makes the insights in these pages all the more valuable to me, and I suspect to others.

Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont, co-founder and Senior Advisor of 350.org

There is no healing or transformation without hope, yet we are in times of global crisis that breed denial, hopelessness and despair. This deeply wise book guides us in nurturing the intrinsic hope that evolves our consciousness and frees our heart to act on behalf of this world we love.

Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

If you feel despair for our endangered world, read this remarkable book and then act. Saving ourselves and much of life on Earth requires us to take brave and visionary action, but doing that requires hopethe kind that arises from the depths of our own human psyches, from our souls, and from Earth herself. Assisting us to tap this crucial resource is what Kate Davies accomplishes with her love-offering of Intrinsic Hope. This wise, adeptly crafted, inspiring, and practical book deepens and amplifies our capacities as agents of cultural renaissance and executors of ecological regeneration.

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., author of Soulcraft and Wild Mind

Kate Davies book Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times is a fresh and inspirational guide for practicing deep ecology. Her ideas about hope and the tools she offers to nurture it ground us in the Earths inherent goodness and provide a path forward when everything seems to be falling apart. That inherent goodnessintrinsic hopelives within each one of us, as well as in all life. In this book, Kate shows us how to access it and how to take action based on it. I cannot recommend Intrinsic Hope highly enough.

John Seed, founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre and co-author of Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings.

We are becoming aware that the eco-social crisis is not only an external reality, but also an internal psychological, spiritual and moral crisis. In order to survive the increasing devastation, hope is essential. Kate Davies explores the psychological and spiritual dimensions of intrinsic hope and how it can be a light to guide us in these darkening times. Her book contains valuable insights into our inner landscapes and describes the qualities we need if we are to survive and live together on this Earth, full of wonder, beauty and love.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Ph.D., Sufi teacher and author of Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth.

Kate Davies whole working life and career has led to this distillation of intrinsic hope. Her experience as scientist, as Quaker, as mother and activist forged a commitment to reject despair and forge a new, more resilient type of hope. This is a prescription in a book we all need.

Elizabeth May, OC, Leader of the Green Party of Canada and Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands.

To be an activist you have to be an optimist. Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times confirms this conviction. In her inspiring book, Kate Davies explores the state of our planet and the way we can transform our present predicament into positive possibilities. This beautifully written book weaves together the practical with the political, the social with the spiritual and economical with the ecological. It is a remarkable achievement!

Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus, Resurgence & Ecologist Magazine.

Have you ever read a book that is so wise and so important that you immediately recommend it to your friends? Have you ever read a book so full of transformative insights and brilliant aphorisms that you underline and dog-ear and exclaim YES in ink all over the margins? Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times is such a book. In a time of terrible peril, and so a time of deep and debilitating despair, Kate Davies powerfully, convincingly re-invents hope, just when we need it the most.

Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising and Piano Tide, winner of the 2017 Willa Cather Award for contemporary fiction

Being mindful of hope may be our most urgent challenge in the face of growing eco-social problems. Kate Davies points toward multiple ways to activate hope. May her book be read by many who are seeking a path forward into the arena of transformative change.

Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology

Copyright 2018 by Katherine Davies.
All rights reserved.

Cover design by Diane McIntosh.
Cover image: iStock 532520587.
Text: p. xiii YB, p. 17 Dmitry/Adobe Stock.

Printed in Canada. First printing April, 2018

Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of Intrinsic Hope
should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below.
To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America)
1-800-567-6772, or order online at www.newsociety.com

Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:

New Society Publishers
P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada
(250) 247-9737

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Davies, Kate, 1956, author

Intrinsic hope : living courageously in troubled times / by Kate Davies,
M.A., D. Phil.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-86571-867-8 (softcover).ISBN 978-1-55092-660-6 (PDF).
ISBN 978-1-77142-255-0 (EPUB)

1. Hope. 2. Human ecologyPsychological aspects. 3. Environmental
degradationPsychological aspects. I. Title.

New Society Publishers mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision.

Hopelike faith, love, and charityis just a word until the truth of it actually enters our lives, often through a crisis. My own understanding was superficial until, in 2004, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer.

Strangely, I felt more relieved than frightened. Hearing the sentence no one ever wants to hear, I surprised myself with a sense of humorand sass. I didnt battle cancer. I didnt try to get back to anything. I wasnt even trying to survive. Rather, I entered it and dove under the surface of what to all appearances was a successful and meaningful life. I wanted to find my true self, whether I lost my life or not.

With officially less than 50% chance of survival and on the advice of two naturopaths, I began a 6-round protocol of chemotherapy. Because of a dream that said ..., by water I will be healed, Id moved into a basic one-room house teetering on a cliff overlooking Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier. I needed the twice daily 20-foot tides to wash my soul.

If youve had chemo or supported someone going through it, you know it is an indignity. My body rejected it in ways the docs had not before seen. One day as I lay on the floor near the bathroom awaiting the every quarter hour expulsion of the poison, I noticed the absence of something Id had my whole life and never knew it. What left me was like a seventh sense: a sense of the future. I wasnt afraid of dying, of having no future in the future. Rather, I saw in that moment that the future is actually a need of the soul like water is a need of the body. In disappearing, the future revealed itself as a necessary fiction, not a reality. In the absence of this sense of the future, thought stopped. It was not Nirvana. It was stark, yet reassuringly real. I saw that anything we build in our liveslove, learning, work, relationships, and so forthwe must generate sense of the future. Hope is a creative act, a product of soul, will, and imagination. It is projection from within us, not a movie we are watching with baited breath.