With the recent passing of the spiritual and ecological visionary Joanna Macy, many have acknowledged how indebted they are to her for being a beacon of light in an increasingly darkening world. One of her best-known contributions, amidst the ongoing polycrisis, was to weave her work in Deep Ecology, Activism, Ecofeminism, and Buddhism into a radical approach to our planetary predicament titled Active Hope.

A few years earlier, the public expression of hope had taken on another hue. Accompanying the rise of the young charismatic senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope dared to revive the American dream as a multidimensional, inclusive movement toward radical political and social change. I remember the wave of collective ecstasy that accompanied his election — the sense that humanity, for a fleeting moment, could feel itself part of a shared possibility. It was a reminder that hope, when embodied and collective, can stir a deep memory in the human spirit — a yearning for coherence, justice, and renewal.

Yet beneath even these grand civic and cultural expressions lies a subtler current — what I have come to understand as Existential Trust. This is not the brittle belief that things will turn out well, nor the fragile optimism that depends on circumstance. It is a lived confidence in life itself — a felt knowing that existence, however uncertain, is ultimately trustworthy. It is the quiet conviction that life moves toward coherence, even through chaos; that consciousness and creation are still, somehow, in conversation.

Ordinary hope falters in the face of exhaustion. Optimism fades under pressure. But this deeper trust endures — not as sentiment, but as being. It is the current beneath all currents: the rhythm that continues to pulse through life even when faith seems lost. To live from this trust is to rest in the assurance that the universe remains a fundamentally generative event.

Active Hope as a Doorway

If Existential Trust is the deep ground of our belonging, then Active Hope is the way we learn to move in rhythm with it. Active Hope becomes the training ground of trust, a lived practice that strengthens our capacity to stay open, to act with integrity, and to align with the regenerative intelligence of life.

Active Hope is a muscle of perception and participation that deepens through use. Each time it is enacted, it creates a subtle groove in consciousness, a neural and energetic pathway that remembers coherence even in chaos. Over time, this repeated turning toward life becomes a pattern of being and behaving. It trains the soul to look for what is life-giving rather than life-denying — to sense renewal and potential even within great confusion.

This realization was recently reinforced through a conversation with futurist and mythologist Krystina Dryza, who spoke of what she calls Mythic Hope. She reminded me that in all great myths — even through devastation and descent — a seed of renewal always survives. Mythic Hope requires no reassurance of the dawn; it persists through the darkest hours of story and time. In this sense, hope is less a feeling than a posture of participation — an act of faith in the creative continuity of existence.

Such practice does not manufacture faith; it reveals the deeper foundation already present — the unshakeable goodness at the heart of existence. What begins as effort becomes instinct. Practiced long enough, Active Hope reconfigures our interior architecture — replacing reactivity with receptivity, despair with participation, resistance with responsiveness. It is the art of aligning one’s awareness and actions with the regenerative pulse of life itself.

The Ever-Present Creative Urge

The so-called polycrisis is not simply evidence of collapse; it is a summons — a planetary initiation asking each of us to meet complexity not with fear but with creative power. Every disruption — ecological, political, or personal — becomes an invitation to enter the deeper rhythm of life’s regeneration.

When goodness, truth, and beauty are genuinely contributed rather than merely performed, participation changes texture. The impulse shifts from control to contribution, from problem-solving to pattern-sensing. Active Hope might be perceived as the act of joining creation in real time through life-aligned interventions. Acting in concert with the ever-present creative cosmic urge connects human intention to the deeper substrate of the universe. It awakens a felt belonging to all of life, to all of existence — past, present, and future — for all beings, for all time.

Such recognition grows from a subtle intuition — a quiet knowing that we live in a biofriendly universe, one that holds being and nothingness, birth and death, decay and renewal, within a single continuum of becoming. To feel this is to know that one’s presence actually matters — to sense oneself, for a moment, as being in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.

Being, Becoming, Belonging

Before the universe expanded, there was only Being — shimmering potential. From that nothingness came Becoming, the dance of unfolding forms. Through their meeting, Belonging emerged: the recognition that everything participates in and is entangled with everything else.

Every breath, every act of care, every shared moment of meaning continues that 13.8-billion-year unfolding. The roots of Existential Trust live here — in the simple awe that we are conscious, that we experience the capacious gifts of the senses. Consciousness itself can be understood as a continuation of the Big Bang’s creative pulse, the universe turning toward itself through awareness. To feel and sense this is to belong again — to Earth, to cosmos, to each other.

When belonging is felt, action shifts. It moves less from anxiety and more from alignment; less from striving, more from stewardship. Hope mutates into Existential Trust — becoming less about what might happen and more about how we inhabit what is.

The Subtle Physics of Relationship

Existential Trust is muscular — embodied, not abstract. It moves through coherence: between word and deed, between one being and another. Each time integrity with life’s origin is embodied, profound trust travels, crossing unseen distances through immense invisible entanglements. This is how the phenomenon of Existential Trust moves the world: through our willingness to participate in, express, celebrate, and co-create the inherent goodness of life.

Such coherence might be called a subtle physics of relationship — the way resonance, attention, and intention shape the field between us. Hope is not transmitted through argument but through alignment. When that alignment holds, even briefly, something in the collective fabric of creation brightens. The unseen architectures of existence are reinforced and strengthened.

The Field That Holds Us

The practice of Active Hope and the cultivation of Existential Trust form a living current. They do not belong to any one person or specific movement; they move through the spaces where extraordinary openness, curiosity, courage, and humility dwell. They activate coherence as well as the courage to act without certainty and the humility to trust that life’s intelligence exceeds our best-laid plans.

In this way, these rare qualities and principles are less an emotion than an ecosystem of participation. It is how life continues to know itself through us. When we enter the field of Existential Trust, we take our place in the unfolding story of a creative universe learning to become conscious of its own becoming.

An Invitation

To practise Active Hope is to invite Existential Trust — a partnership with life’s regenerative intelligence. It calls for coherence between inner orientation and outer expression, for the courage to act without certainty and the faith that participation itself renews the world.

Active Hope is not optimism about what is; it is faith in what could be — because there are still those willing to become the kind of beings capable of creating it.

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This article was first published on Medium, October 31st, 2025