Welcome to
How it began:
My first few posts give more background, but here’s a short version! In spring 2024, I was feeling overwhelmed with the news of the world. I’m a writer* but I was tired of words, so I started drawing instead.
Seemed that decades of patient, thoughtful community efforts by millions and billions of people to build a world of kindness and goodwill could be easily swept by a few greedy, environmentally catastrophic wars and terrible, short-sighted political decisions.
I started to think a lot about “hope.” It felt like a flimsy, insubstantial, over-used word to counter such an onslaught. But also irreplaceable.
The Live Edge
Wanting to clear my cluttered brain, I made a narrow desk out of a local live edge board and I kept drawing.
I’ve discovered that “hope” is complicated and ambiguous. And sometimes funny. This Substack explores “hope” in the past and present, as I expand my horizons, and offer hopeful actions of so many of us around the globe (especially artists!) - our earnest, profound and light-hearted daily choices for hope together.
Welcome to my small hopeful effort, and for exploring hope with me.
* footnote: my most recent book tells the true story of how best-selling spiritual writer and priest Henri Nouwen fell in love with a trapeze troupe in a travelling circus. Twenty years after his death, his literary estate asked me to “do something creative” with his unpublished efforts to write about his experience. Flying, Falling, Catching was published by HarperOne in hardcover and as an audiobook in 2022, and in paperback in 2024. You can find out a whole lot more at https://writersunion.ca/member/carolyn-whitney-brown
To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
Please subscribe to get emails when I post something new. It’s free!
