Coat of Hopes visits East Anglia in climate change fight
Something very beautiful and unexpected happened to me the other day. I had the chance to wear a unique garment that has been visiting East Anglia. This cloak is called ‘the coat of hopes’. It consists of a large long blanket onto which thousands of people have sewn patches representing what they hope for in the face of the climate- and ecological- menace we face.
Let me explain it a little more about this cloak in the words of the song written by the pilgrims who are at present walking this coat around our region:
(Chorus)
Ask me where I’m going
Ask me what is my purpose
Ask me what my name is
They call me the ‘Coat of Hopes’
(Verse)
To Rockland today then East to Lowestoft I’m bound
Worn and walked along my way when those willing can be found
In truth my destination is each person that I meet
The turning of our future is on all our backs and feet.
From this excerpt from the song, you’ll probably have guessed that the words of the first verse of the song change in every location that the coat passes through. It was really extraordinary, while I was wearing the coat, when it arrived in my little village of Rockland Saint Mary, on the edge of the Broads, to hear the pilgrims singing to me in words that mentioned our quiet part of the world prominently. This is one of the many ways in which this remarkable eco-pilgrimage evokes a powerful response in those who experience it. Because I must tell you, reader, that this experience was far more powerful than I had expected.
When fellow EDP columnist Juliette Harkin and I agreed to host the pilgrims for a night as they passed through Rockland, little did we know how powerfully this coat and those who brought it would affect us. For in fact they greatly raised our spirits. Because, a time when our climate is in a state of serious and completely scary decline, the coat of hopes offers…well, a little bit of active hope. Because it shows what is possible.
A small group of women and men walking the countryside and the towns together, encountering those they meet, and offering them the chance to wear this strange, long, heavy garment, which carries upon it sewn and knitted icons of the hopes of the many thousands now who have encountered this coat. It’s such a simple thing really…and yet it works. I wore the coat in Rockland and then journeyed with the pilgrims on foot a little of the way towards Loddon and then Lowestoft in coming days, and as I wore the coat, I felt the weight of responsibility.
The weight that the pilgrims sing about in a later verse of the song. Somehow putting on this coat literally enables one to feel what it is to be warm, what it is to be protected, and what it is to be responsible for ensuring together that that state of protection continues. Up against the tremendous and appalling rising threat that we now all face, which can seem distant or abstract, but that, when we dare to put in the balance against it all those things which we care about, all those things represented on the coat – from bees to stable weather itself, from our children to the rainforest or coral reefs – it suddenly becomes present to you.
This coat has been worn for, wait for it, 1600 miles so far around this country. It is going to be in our region for several weeks more, so if you want to join the pilgrims, do find them via their website https://www.coatofhopes.uk/ , and I really can’t recommend highly enough encountering this coat and perhaps walking in it awhile. Everyone who meets the coat is encouraged to wear it, and everyone who wears it gets sung to in this special way. And anyone who wishes can contribute another patch to it, a small embodiment of their hope for our still Green and Pleasant land:
“What is it that I’m taking to the ones who will decide,
If as a world we’ll do all in our power to survive?
Only pieces of blanket I’ve collected on my path,
With grief hopes prayers remembrances for the lands through which I’ve passed.
“So here’s my invitation, come and make me who I’ll be,
Mark your hopes on blanket and I’ll sew them into me;
A coat that’s made by everyone for everyone to wear,
To feel my warmth and the weight of responsibility we share.”