At long last. Mahmoud Kahlil is free.
A lump forms in my throat as I watch him speak. He’s standing with his lawyers on the side of a Louisiana highway, the hot southern sun beating down on his pale face as the news cameras roll.
“No one is illegal. No human is illegal… Justice will prevail.”
The news comes just hours before the summer solstice—the shortest night of the year. And I can’t deny that creeping sense of hope that curls up in my chest like the pea vines in my garden, reaching toward the sun.
Mahmoud is free.
Millions have come out to protest.
The president is deteriorating before our very eyes—his health failing, his mind slipping, his military parade a sad farce.
And yet…
Hope is a scary thing.
I remember the night of November 4, 2008. I was twenty-eight years old, living in California, and I went to my regular yoga class before going home to watch the election returns.
Hope, like electricity, sparked and crackled in the air that night. As my body moved through the familiar poses, it seemed as if each breath ushered in a new world—a bright new world of equality and diversity and honesty.
Hope won that night.
Hope won, and everything seemed possible.
Eight years later, I welcomed that same sense of hope on the night of Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. By then, I’d moved back home to Wisconsin, and I was pregnant with my second child—a girl.
I remember watching a commercial for Hillary Clinton on TV that night—an inspirational montage of young women and girls set to the soundtrack of Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’, and feeling that same great surge of excitement and hope I’d felt in 2008.
My daughter would be born into a world where a woman was president. Truly, everything was possible.
The following day was one of the blackest of my life.
It seemed impossible—impossible, that I could have been so wrong. That the world I thought I knew, the future I thought I understood, the country I thought I lived in… was all a mirage.
Hope and reason and truth had lost—a crushing defeat. My daughter would be born into a world where a predator and a bully stood victorious.
I was devastated.
Since then, I’ve avoided hope. Like a victim running from the memory of their trauma, I’ve pushing it away, doing anything I could to to avoid the inevitable, plummeting descent into reality and despair.
I don’t watch election returns anymore.
I don’t allow myself to imagine that justice really will prevail, because the pain is just too intense when I’m wrong.
And yet tonight, on the night of the summer solstice in 2025, I sit here and I write and and I just can’t bear to uproot that precious little tendril of hope—that fresh green shoot that’s curling up in my chest, gripping my heart for purchase as it reaches toward the sky.
Because if Mahmoud Kahlil can hold on to hope—the belief that justice will prevail—after a hundred and three days of hellish detention and heartbreak. Why can’t I?
Why can’t we all?
And so tonight I pledge:
I will not push my hope away.
I will tend it. I will protect it. I will allow it to grow.
I will imagine a world where a woman can be president, where all people have dignity, where truth and honesty are valued and where justice prevails.
Today, tonight, tomorrow, I will hope.