Posts from the ‘Hope / Healing’ Category
Wednesday of Hope – What Is Hope Pinned on?
When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community.
– Anne Lamott, “The Impossible Will Take a Little While,” Plan B
Delicate flowers of the Bristlecone Pine Forest
Wednesday of Hope – Hope in the Darkest Times
Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.
– Vaclav Havel
Though it is dark before dawn, we know that the sun will light up the entire sky.
Wednesday of Hope – A Glimmer on the Horizon
Sometimes we have to do the work, even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.
– Angela Davis
Los Angeles has drained so much water from Owens Valley. I spent 40 years in L.A., so I am aware how we used it. Those tufa spires you see in the image above from Mono Lake, were it not for the water that L.A. has used, they would be under water.
We can be discouraged by the signs we see around us as to the damage we are doing to this sacred place on which we live. But we will not give up hope. We look for a glimmer on the horizon, and continue to raise our voices, and do what we must do today.
Wednesday of Hope – Anything Is Possible
Once you choose hope, anything’s possible.
~Christopher Reeve
Wednesday of Hope – Restoring Hope
We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.
– Pope Francis
Wednesday of Hope – Saving Hope
Because we spill not only milk
Knocking it over with an elbow
When we reach to wipe a small face
But also spill seed on soil we thought was fertile but isn’t,
And also spill whole lives, and only later see in fading light
How much is gone and we hadn’t intended it
Because we tear not only cloth
Thinking to find a true edge and instead making only a hole
But also tear friendships when we grow
And whole mountainsides because we are so many
And we want to live right where black oaks lived,
Once very quietly and still
Because we forget not only what we are doing in the kitchen
And have to go back to the room we were in before,
Remember why it was we left
But also forget entire lexicons of joy
And how we lost ourselves for hours
Yet all that time were clearly found and held
And also forget the hungry not at our table
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
And precious papers left in rain
But also at legs that no longer walk
Or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
And also weep at words said once as though
They might be rearranged but which
Once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
Because we are imperfect and love so
Deeply we will never have enough days,
We need the gift of starting over, beginning
Again: just this constant good, this
Saving hope.~ Nancy Shaffer, Instructions in Joy
Wednesday of Hope – Perspective
The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.
― Václav Havel
