Juneteenth Meditation on Hope

Yesterday was Juneteenth, which commemorates the day the last group of enslaved people in the United States found out they'd been freed. This was two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Thinking about this in the context of meditation, there is an interesting overlap between hope and possibility, on one hand, and the concept of Beginner's Mind, which we practice in meditation, on the other.

When we sit in meditation, we're cutting through our habitual thoughts and our, seemingly very solid, assumptions. We're practicing resting in the moment, just as it is, without knowing what will happen next. It is in this uncertainty that hope and possibility reside.

As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book No Straight Road Takes You There, "...if you already know what's going to happen, there's nothing more or nothing else possible, a view that often leads to disengagement and passivity. But mostly we don't know... Hope in this sense is just the recognition that in that uncertainty there may be the space in which to move toward the best and away from the worst of those possibilities, that the future is not...a place that already exists, toward which we are trudging, but a place that we are creating with what we do and how we do it (or don't) in the present." (Page 3 of my 2025 edition.)

Not dissimilar to Shunryu Suzuki saying, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few."

Can we practice opening up to possibility and then acting with hope and vision.