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.

Transforming Moments Together

A transformative moment is not always created intentionally. Many of these transcend words in the moment they are experienced. Living within the power of these experiences sometimes takes us away from the control that is our sense of place in life. Such a sense of control leaves us with stability over our choices and our feelings. However when there is a change in this reality; be it something comforting in our lives that is lost or something new and less familiar, we can either feel the experience or run from it. And sometimes these changes can change how we think and feel about life and can influence what we do purposefully create.

For me, these experiences transform my understanding of life. These experiences doesn't necessarily have to be detrimental in order to provoke change or new understanding. Sometimes they can be held in place while the emotions of the moment run deep and the thoughts and inextricable connection of the universe brings you closer to the whole reality of the wonders of life.

Grasping onto to our realities can help us feel how shifting forces and experiences are a part of our own. When I feel this kind of reality, that of many others' intersecting with my own, I know how small I am, yet how integral this feeling is to my humanity. These kinds of experiences are usually brief, yet last in my heart a lifetime.

I lived on Long Island when the World Trade Center towers were attacked in New York City on September 11, 2001. I wasn't in the city to witness the horror, but I felt the immediate reverberations of fear and concern echo across people everywhere around me. I was aware that many competing forces demanded for the attention of the nation as the area around New York became numb with shock and later changed by grief and outrage. I had seen the World Trade Center towers in person and had walked in the shadow of their magnificent height. To hear of their destruction and the death of many lives continued to alter my understanding of our multiple, complex civilizations that exist and interact across our daily lives and histories. 

As the decade changed course from this pivotal day, so did I. I ended up moving away from the area that was once home and become a part of a new landscape. Western New York was culturally and socially different from the familiar on Long Island. And then almost a decade later, I returned to Long Island and New York City for a weekend. During one stretch of time, I wound up being intrigued by the reality that I hadn't been to downtown Manhattan since the attacks on September 11th. In seeing the setting sun fill the gaping hole that once held the site of many interactions that shaped lives around the world, I stood silent. Changed. The words that could have escaped my mouth were removed by the space of time. 

How interconnected we really are. How these realities of wonder, shock, memory, transformed my sensitivities and thoughts of each person. How fragile we are. How our connections can strengthen through understanding. May this understanding be one where we see how each difference is also our similarity, how each uniqueness also brings together our whole world. May this oneness be unifying, not in fear, but in harmony. Let us know that in loss, we remember how this moment was formed from our connected beings and in that new moment may we stand with courage in remembrance and hope for our moments in this shared world.

Ground Zero in Downtown Manhattan - 2009

Special Olympics statue at the State University of New York College at Brockport

Immerse Yourself In Winter

The weather has become cold, the days have become shorter, and everything familiar about winter in the Northeastern United States is here. The familiar grey skies overcast with few breaks in the perpetual ceiling of clouds keep us scurrying around as though hurrying will make the sun shine. Where the depths of winter loom with the joy of holiday song and light behind, we groan and moan, and can't wait for the first crocus to bloom in hole left by the melting snow.

 It is a new year and the first full month of Winter. It is a season where it is easy to hole up and grab our video games, read our books, and watch our movies in an effort to hibernate. For some of us needing warmer temperatures, we need to find any way we can to stay warm. So where do we live in the season where everything seems dreary and ghastly grey?

 In recent posts written about community, the barefoot wonder of community with other people can sometimes bring a mix of obnoxious cacophony and good humor. We cannot live completely alone, but we can take in this cold weather and feel it surround us while we take some time out for solitude to listen. The sounds of rain drops melting snow during a warm spell. The sound of a radiator hissing as it warms us as we watch the spaces around us from inside. To listen and connect to all that is happening even in the midst of silence.

Somehow the stillness takes more time to notice than the busy rush of daily life. It is in its vast presence that nature emerges taking our breath, our life, and forming all of winter with the breath of all living beings. The conifers revel in their chance to show off their needles as people everywhere notice their wintry white covering. Colors are seen as birds that stayed home take flight and fill their air with sounds of their chirping. Stop and feel the presence of the seasonal temperatures grip your skin, expand your soul, and comfort your sense of living. It is as invigorating as it is peaceful. Let the newness of feeling become familiar so that the familiarity can let you engage it with barefoot wonder.*

* Just don't wander into the snow barefoot without a way to warm up shortly afterwards. Hypothermia and frostbite are no way to enjoy the wintry climate. 

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.

A Symphony of Summer

"There is a song, a song without a word,
whispered the wind and I overheard.
It sings in summer showers and the music of the rain,
falling on the growing grain,

There is a song, a song without a word
Whispered the sea and I overheard.
It burbles in the brooks and steams and rivers running clear,
If you listen you can hear...

Listen! you can hear it
Listen! you can hear it
In the echoes of the endless ocean swell.

Treat the earth well..."
- Song of the Earth ~ Tom Chapin


In the morning of a new summer day, a fresh beginning of birdsong and glows of sunshine arrives.  It's a creation of the bursting forth of goldfinches and the buzz of honeybees collecting pollen. In each Summer day the essence of life created in Spring bursts into a blaze of life in the motion of synergy, in the strum of a guitar being played on a front porch as the travelers pedal and whirr past on bicycles, and the fragrant combination of barbecues, sweat, grass clippings, rain, and flower gardens becomes a collage of the senses.

The passage of time seems slower. It's been said to be lazier, but it's a time to let the heartbeat of humanity reverberate in our movement along the way. In a summer of dry weather in the United States, it is a time to hear things differently, to hear the mourning doves crying as the day becomes the cool blue night and to awake and paddle out onto the water and see ducks feasting together just after dawn. It is here we find the uniqueness of each day that forms each year and each life.

The spirit of togetherness surrounds us in nature and neighborhoods. In a field of wildflowers and shrubs I passed on a bike ride recently, a cloud of goldfinches and starlings begin chirping flying over the flowers and filling into the sky with color. Their songs distinctly unique, even in unison, can give us a sense of community with nature, with those we love, with the places we live.

We hear the passage of the trains as they roll through our communities and see the jet streams that connect us all through the skies. These sounds, echo with our heartbeat as we move with being. The being that can be felt with our bare feet, the untapped experience that ultimately adds a picture or aroma to our existences, to our lives. The movements of this symphony are found in the screaming of young children flying on swings as they take off and feel the exhilaration of the moment, the fiddles singing into the night as dancers and old friends gather to feel their souls together, the quiet melody of a choir singing the memory of those lives who have been a part of ours but are now memory, and the walks with loved ones where we cherish what is held with dear trust and grown in the minutes of laughter and wonder.

As the last full month of summer draws to an end, its sunset is not the foreshadowing of nightfall, but the transition into Autumn. The fall leaves and period of change, of settling, and final foraging of the summer's warmth before we bring out the blankets and hooded sweatshirts. Summer will be missed, but the symphony continues and evolves as new instruments join the flock to continue each measure in the harmonies of the harvest.

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.

A Story Told Is A Life Shaped

One of the first gifts we are given is our voice. It is with our voice that our individual place in the history of humanity is understood by others and hopefully, by our selves. With the voice we're given, we forge an identity that becomes our very sense of what we're going to bring to life over the years we walk across this planet. As children, we are often exposed to the ways others live, the environments of our world, and the people who are our family and our neighbors. It is in a story we find others, we find life, and maybe most important, we find what we connect to.

Growing up, I heard stories that were illustrated by people acting out the actions that tell something about life and as I fell asleep while they were being read by the tender baritone that my dad was given to share with others. During this time, I connected to music that had lyrics formed into stories told as they were sung to a guitar strumming and a banjo twanging. It was the music that had its roots in the soil of gardens, its range across the heart of humanity's experience as the sun rose and set, and that found me connecting to others that are part of life with me.

In a story, we can grow with characters, hear the rhythm that pulses daily in our hearts, recognize our dilemmas and struggles, and continue to ask questions that lead to discovery. We tell stories to children so they can expand the images they have of life in their minds. Imaginations are formed through what we tell them through expressive, vivid, imagery that broaden a perspective and permit a new understanding to form and later be shared to the collective experience that is humanity.

Once a story ends, our place that we put in it, doesn't have to. A part of the story can light a flame or plant a bulb that we can kindle or nurture until it becomes a deep inspiration. We can sometimes only see other parts of life through story. In words spoken we can hear a story in harmony with illustration or in the rhythm that connects our lives to others.  The stories in our hearts from families, friends, other cultures, give meaning and color to the very purpose of life. Their essence touch our soul, reach our minds, and give depth to what we reach for when we sing together to unite as one people in a shared, similar experience, or awareness of what we can do to share life and a light through for each other.

In the story, we see the journey becoming the pages we illustrate. How we use our voice allows us to tell our story as we travel together. We need not tell the whole story of our lives. We can tell the parts that make us who we are, where we are, as we become alive as we relate and understand in new ways in new light whether it's firelight, flashlight, fluorescent light, sunlight, moonlight, or candle light. This is the light of a story, no matter how dark, that we begin to speak out of as our voice becomes part of our stories.

A story can be our bridge to the meaning of our lives built from imagination,
connection to reality, and new understanding.

Every Person Is A Gift

This could also be phrased, every life is a gift, though a person becomes who they are by living their life. It's hard to imagine a world with seven billion people, seven billion lives and so many more that have lived on this giant blue planet. It is impossible to meet every person who is alive during one's lifetime, but it is possible to meet people who will change us, even if we meet them once and never see them or hear their voice speak to us again. When we see how people touch us, we can see how they gave us a new perspective, bring us together, allow us to smile, take time to be there, teach us something or show us part of life we had never seen, we can see what that person means not only to us, but to life itself.

Behind everything we enjoy is a person who helped form a song, a meal, a memory, a hope, or our very existence. There was a person who you didn't know that well who smiled at you. There was a friend who challenged you to do something you didn't know you could do until you did it, and then you realized how much it changed your life. All it takes is one person to realize how life changing another life is. We each have a wealth of experience from different places, different people, and different perspectives. Currently we have over seven billion of these to teach us, laugh with us, move us, and be a part of our lives.

While there are people who have hurt us, betrayed our trust, and threatened our sense of who we are that may not seem like a gift, they have things to teach us about adversity, reconciliation, and strength to overcome and rise above. For the challenges in life have been said to be there for a reason, they ultimately take us to who we will become, and who we need to be for tomorrow.

It is said that life is short, but it can be extended if we live moment by moment aware and mindful of just how exceptional life is. There are plenty of hardships that can make us appreciative of what we have, and show us how we need each other. Even the strangers in our life can offer pieces of existence forming the garden of life. It's hard to imagine, but many times in our lives, we are strangers to many people, and by giving others the benefit of the doubt in conversations we may have only one with them, we may receive something similar in return. Call it karma, what goes around comes around, or kindness, the person you meet briefly tomorrow can be a gift if you let them show you what life is going to be at that time.

  Standing in the water at Jones Beach State Park. 

Sitting in a park along the Genesee River.

The people in the photos above are people I never met, and may never see again. They may or may not have been a gift to me, but I'm sure they are to other people.