Every day, we said, every weekday, we will post something. We will call it The Daily Dose. Art, links, news, poetry, opinion pieces, rants… We’ve run a free writing class and posted grants, we’ve analyzed events, written stories, created videos. Our brand is hope. We have no other choice, and hope is our choice. Hope is our politics. Hope is our strategy.

Here is one of the most radical forms of hope I’ve encountered and learned from again and again: the blank page. We open it up. We commit to speaking aloud our fears and our flailings and the ways we see what we can no longer turn away from. And then we stare down the blank page. We mark it up, fill it up. Smudge it. Ink it. Beautify it. Explore what is possible and what we didn’t know was possible.

When we are broken and defeated, we start there, and build an arc. When we are confident and encouraged, we forge a path. When we are at odds, we build a bridge or, when necessary, a barricade.

We show up. That is what the blank page and the commitment to keep coming back here every day has taught me. We show up. And because we have to show up, we ask ourselves questions whose answers we do not know, but whose answers we need to survive. How are we going to do this thing, together? we ask. We ask ourselves and we ask each other and we ask you. And what the blank page teaches us is that if you ask the question and you stare down the vibrating, silent possibilities of its vast terrain, answers will come. Answers will come to you. To me. They must.

So much depends on asking the right questions. The questions people are afraid to voice. The questions we’ve been shamed out of asking. The questions too easily dismissed or believed unanswerable or phrased in a way that cuts off conversation, and song, and the dance of dialog, which is lower-case-d democracy, the people-in-the-streets democracy.

Ask the questions. Stare down the blank page. Watch the green shoots of your answers butt their way through the baked-hard soil and the loamy earth, through the gutters and the cracks in the sidewalk, through the fences being built that will fall again, through the places they’ve drawn imaginary lines, to keep people out, to keep people in. Watch the answers grow from nothing, tiny acorns becoming massive oaks. This is where hope begins.