Hope perches with us, if we let it.
If it is a thing with feathers (as per Emily Dickinson’s lines), then we experience it singing in stillness and quiet. I don’t want to startle this hope so it flies away and leaves, but when I lose my peace then I know that’s probably just what has happened. In panic, I have startled Hope to fly off. Or someone else may have done that – the words of others in fear can be so unbearably cruel, and loud, and can drown our gentleness.
Love, life and death – we can’t really be in control of all that. But we can take responsibility for ourselves and our little corner of the world, to make it kinder, lovelier, more spacious for one another. More effectively hope-filled day to day.
Last weekend I was on the south coast as a storm hit our shores. We walked around exposed headland and I stood on the edge of a pebble bank that was being bashed by stormy waves, and leant in to gusting wind just to feel the strength of it holding me up so I didn’t tumble down the bank into a crashing undertow – ferocious but somehow on my side.
So I leant in to that storm and chose to believe—as it held my weight—that this is how ferocious hope can be when it is in our favour. Perhaps at times a tiny little creature that ‘perches in the soul’, and at other times it’s a howling wind that holds you up, ‘the wind at your back’ as the old Gaelic blessing goes.
Hope is not vain. Not if it’s about our heart condition, and about values such as love, grace, compassion and empathy. We can very effectively hope for all of these things that make us and our relationships places of peace and shelter, and in turn show up to take part in things that make our homes, neighbourhoods and cities more friendly and safe, and our workplaces nourishing and inspiring.
Hoping for more money or success or fame or whatever, those things I don’t see as hopes so much as desires, and there are machines to crank for those outcomes.
It’s little glimmers.
It’s a gut feel.
It’s a determination that this ugliness is not where the story ends.
For me, hope is a thing that perches in the soul, a glimpse of what you know a situation can be, and when you lose your peace, it’s the presence of a belief that light will shine again. It’s esoteric, but it’s informed by something real that you do know, have experienced, and although temporarily out of touch, know you can feel it again. You get a hunch that this ‘NO’ is not the final word, and even in mystery know that to acknowledge your intuitive hunch that something better and more peace-filled is possible, that’s what hope is, and what I think it’s really for, and that it’s worth holding close.
And that’s why I meditate on this inky word today.
{Today’s Soundtrack: Ry X and Ólafur Arnalds – Oceans}