Despair finds fertile ground in an indigestible truth. Often, it will not let up until we face these darker truths about ourselves and our world.

There is a singularly relational dimension to despair that comes from a loss of innocence in a world that disappoints our longings for justice, meaning, community, and spiritual coherence. Despair grows not only out of our personal wounds, losses, and disappointments, but also out of our needs for community and a shared sense of meaning—spiritual necessities for which we harbor a profound and aching, though largely unconscious, nostalgia. We despair because, in ways that our forebears could not have imagined, we humans suffer the profound loneliness that accompanies our estrangement from the natural world and its nonhuman inhabitants. Despair finds fertile ground in an indigestible truth. Often, it will not let up until we face these darker truths about ourselves and our world. Unpalatable as they may be, these realities haunt us, intruding into our consciousness when we least expect them. Watching our children at play, we may feel an unnameable pang of fear and despair for the world we are bequeathing them. Like any of the dark emotions, despair can live for long periods of time at the subliminal level, where it must be continually banished from awareness by the readily available distractions of our culture. Despair tells us what we’d rather not know. It asks us to look into our darkened souls and the broken heart of the world and make a journey of descent. These journeys are hard, and we need one another’s company. We need to know that despair is a legitimate emotion and that we are not emotionally or spiritually inferior for feeling it. It is not feeling despair but denying its impact that holds us hostage in a world imperiled by our own actions. ~ Miriam Greenspan