Finding Hope

In a journey of life where days are sometimes filled up with exhausted hope and unanswered questions it often becomes harder to look forward to any of the days ahead or smile within the time we are living, the present. Despair seems to build in the midst of doubt and hurt breaks along fault lines in our fractured hearts. These seeds of discouragement can be watered by tears of sadness, resentment, regret and are important feelings in acknowledging the challenges we face and know are real. Life can be a burden where so much sorrow can seem impossible to overcome. If we indeed are the commanders of our fate, there is much to see in a full picture of reality that is really life.

What can come from sorrow that arises from within our souls? Can hope and love emerge from the pain breaking along the fault lines within our hearts? Even though these moments of pain shall pass away, the scars in our hearts and psyches can rest with us for longer. When we're walking along through these stretches of road accompanied by emptiness and grief the days seem to have lost their meaning.

Somehow the resilience needed to return to hope isn't that far away. Hope in the depths of doubt, in the woes of fearfulness, in the fear of helplessness. It can grow as we extend our hands in openness to our own lives, to each other. It is surprising how vulnerability takes us from our fear and towards community. Despair cannot be overcome at once, but as the sun shines, a flower blooms, as a rain drop falls, a rainbow arcs across the sky. Appearing out of nowhere, hope emerges, like flight, sudden and lasting. A moment becoming eternity. The light shines as time moves our feelings to understanding that together as a song breaks the silence and silence captures our fears in an encompassing journey of weaving the threads of heartbreak and tenderness together.

Where A Day Becomes Our Life

A day that's full of color grabs at us. There is so much to stimulate the senses and make it easy to feel fully alive. Sunrises begin our daylight hours and sunsets finish the hours where the sun is fading and starting a new day in other lands. It is a wonder how white light forms all the color that we can see, how six notes create all the music we know, and how each day connects us to every bit of time that has been lived and is being lived. People are out there living tomorrow in Australia from my vantage point in the Northeastern United States.

The roots of our lives that grow into what we see, what we hear, and what we do, create, feel, and know become much more when we bring them together. Like a meal filled with new and favorite foods, a dance with live music brightly playing the rhythms and harmonies, or even a sporting game where two teams compete for the goal of completing their task of winning against their opponents there are places we have in bringing our collective experiences into one place, where the kaleidoscope and panorama of memories form, and where a day becomes our life.

Anyone who has savored the sumptuous flavors of meal brought together from scratch in the company of loved ones may have felt how the variety of textures and voices provide a moment of joy in the midst of all of life's happenings. There are the tales of old, recipes, jokes, hopes, and memories, all forming an assortment of smiles and wonder. Gathered together on holidays and week days, our lives form from what we fill them with. In days where we are reminded of the shock of human suffering inflicted by hands and lives nearby, we need to be alive to one another by being present to our needs for friendship and love. So as we meet our neighbors and friends, try to understand our family, and hear what today has brought, we can see our wounds that have fragmented our neighbor's lives and embrace with the hope that cannot be made alone. We can be together in understanding after we listen, as others may have been there for us, so that we can continue to make a way out of our experiences. This way begins the vision of courage of creativity formed from imaginations and memories to hold the world.

It may be that days before us that make us who we are today, but the present can give us most of all a place to dream, feel, and live in ways that matter to us or ways and those that we want to give a try. I've recently been reminded of the warmth inside that can tingle when the cool air rushes by as I spend another wintry day in upstate New York. The sharing of these ruminations feels like a rambling engine as my experience spins out like yarn being knit or crocheted into something more; a fabric of memories filled with color and connection. In the reaches of any period of time shared, time can disappear, flowing through our hearts as it becomes stories; our way of preserving memory and our connection to the future.


                                        

Hope When It Is Dark

"Why does it take catastrophe to start a revolution?"  - Jonathan Larson

As I write this post winds and rain chase the landscape into a tumultuous flurry of hurricane and storm along the eastern coast of the United States. The potential and expected damage created is a source of uneasiness and uncertainty that strike at different moments in our lives. There can be wonder and curiosity in the midst of great suffering and loss. Devastating emotions or events can remind us about what we hold dear to our hearts, or challenge us to think about what is most important. They can shred our stability and hope into worry and fear, panic and anxiety that make us wonder how we'll ever get through.

How can this suffering be beautiful? Tears fall across our faces and our hearts continue beating with emotion that is fully raw and fully alive. How can this be beautiful if we are left alone? Where is the goodness in life when we are shackled with grief and the seeming never ending presence of calamity? Even as the storm comes and with it, expectation of and then the physical reality of damage we can find hope from the disaster. Some storms come with less warning and then change the course of the lives affected. Still how can any of this create hope, instill love, become strength, or be something positive?

We often light candles after the power goes out and it gets dark. The shining beams come through places of destruction and despair to offer hope and a way through the darkness. The candlelight we illuminate inside provides more than a symbol of promise; it creates a way to see what storms have done, and what can be done together when we share our own lights, our own stories of reality. The light we have may sometimes flicker, but if we trust it with those close to us we will not be alone. We will begin to trust again and stand together as we prepare what has been lost to grow new beginnings and new memories as we all are strengthened by togetherness.

Painful realities are hard to bear especially as suffering seems to grow and affect multitudes where communities fall apart and homes are ravaged. We often question whether or not we should stand strong and work to overcome when afflictions may appear to come more and more often. The candle we lit may go out, we may lose our voice, our heart may become overwhelmed and life may change with tragedy and wrongdoing.

Disaster may strike, but if we light the hope and the way or find someone that has already done so, we can stand together in friendship as our candles can warm the lives of those around us, as our candles light our hearts so we may feel ourselves giving and receiving in the unity that comes out of brokenness. It is then we can remember the continued strength that is found when we trust ourselves enough to rebuild and grow stronger from the scars and the pain that we faced in understanding that pain will always affect humanity. This is how the night ends while hope and love become the new light of dawn. With a song that comes from one heart that reaches our souls and becomes a chorus of light and hope from the soul as we empower one another in times of human need.

E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many, One

Sometimes I look at the lives around me in the depths of reality today, the depths that come from the places I walk, I hear something quieter than the breeze. I hear a heartbeat that beats on a day that takes its place in a string of years and seasons that have created me to help shape the experience of today. I see the inspiration that struck wonder as it filled my eyes as a child and feel the shiver of joy that life is greater than my own experience. It sometimes shapes the spirit of the experience of a team, a country, a family, a friendship, that together we are one, and together we can be alive and make the future out of this. A future that can be harmonious if we dream and act together, if we hear the heartbeat of our neighbors and trust them to hear our own.

The trust and vulnerability in connection from community to friendship is fragile, yet precious as we feel or begin to sense the togetherness that helps us feel our embrace. It is difficult to know this depth even imagine when we have often known fear, despair, loneliness that has been bred from disappointment, discouragement, and exclusion. We know that exposure may take us further down the road of pain that we've known. So how can my life and your touch a life where we may see the hint of a smile? How can we build community and friendships when we have only been disappointed?

I think hope and heart can be grown from vision and feeling. Feeling that life isn't always the sunshine of smiles and laughter, but sometimes the numbness of past trauma haunting our present. Sometimes it is the continuous rainfall that floods our feelings and overwhelms us with discouragement and washes out the work we have done together. When a tragedy caused by human hands shatters our community, does it fracture everyone irreparably, or does it give birth to healing?
Healing that creates a scar to help us remember what we have gained, what we have grown, and taught by one life who's ripples still touch our lives as the memory of a life is carried always. We can sing and hold those close to us, and even those we have just met, to continue to build on memory and what we have.

These are the roots that can hold the soil where we grow together. Roots are the friendship and connection where we grow. Tears of remembrances and sunshine of continued hope and an embrace grow and help enrich the community that has blossomed from shared memory. Fear is real, but hope is true, where we hear the voices we have together. Voices from the soul that we feel growing from scars and wounds, and also from new beginnings, from forgiveness and from our lives shared with friends. There, barefoot, we can feel and hear the melody with the rhythm of our heartbeat join in community. The spirit of unity begins with one heart, one friendship that is shared over a lifetime, and one collective experience of unique perspectives and beginnings that are always the continuation of our growth.

Smiles That Change the World

"I say why all the loneliness and why all the fear,  if it's up to me there'll be none of that here."
Joe Crookston

A smile offers a little bit of sunshine that is not only lasting, it can very often begin or create a connection that can spread to all of us. When words cannot be found for appreciation, comfort, delight, pleasure, excitement, and often hope, a smile can be the expression of our feelings for such moments. It is in gladness the present becomes real, and the present becomes our life forming experience that changes our lives; often for the better. Like a birdsong evokes the first breath of dawn, a smile can be that instant where darkness starts to fade into the light.

It is this mystery that cannot be held, even for a moment. Like water running through our hands, we have the moment to create something that is for the moment. Smiles offer a consoling, knowing welcome, an agreement in unison, or a sign that the fearful have seen a light at the end of the tunnel. Even when despair lingers and confusion swirls into our minds or causes chaos in our lives, a smile is that breath of fresh air that becomes understanding. Understanding that there is more than all this sorrow, loneliness and fear.

Joe Crookston sings from his soul, evoking his desire to leave a better world for the generations that will inherit what we leave behind. He doesn't want what he has seen others or maybe even himself face. That's why he sings and asks why we have all the anger and greed that are the seeds of war and poverty. The injustice that tear us apart rather than bring us together can begun to be reconciled with a smile, with a seed of hope from a hand of welcome and embrace.

Yesterday in becoming better acquainted with one of my neighbors, I felt his warmth not from his words, but from the combination of words of friendship and the gentleness of his smile. Once affected by a smile, we are never the same, we feel it in the roots of our heart as we know our lives matter that we too can take the smile we received, and offer it to another as night becomes day and the moment becomes ours briefly to create a way of healing out of this fear and into jubilation and peace.

The sunlight of dawn reflecting off the water as its light spreads everywhere; like a smile spreads hope.