Hope! Above all, hope.

I’m doing a lot of thinking about hope these days. Sneaky Pete, the local semi-feral tomcat, hopes I will feed him. Friends who are Christian die, and they hope for heaven. Gardeners (like me) plant and hope for a harvest. People who are downtrodden, fearful, or in pain hope for relief. All the birds hope for a tiny insect or berry.

Annoyingly, even in the negative, we all have hope. When we have no hope, we darkly hope…for hope. Some glimmer that things will somehow change, and go more in our favor.

Hope can be many things to many people: and believe me, it seems to be more than Emily Dickinson’s poem, of which I’ll print the first stanza here:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops --at all--

Although the feathers may seem dim, worn, and at risk for not supporting the creature they support, they are still there. Even in silence, the tune is still here. Even when we think it is the creature that flies thousands of miles across the ocean in migration, that can never hear us or see us or perhaps even be interested in our lives, that steady beat of wings, powered by these invisible feathers, goes on.

I believe it is present even when we cannot feel or even sense it. I’ll be writing about this for a few weeks--come along with me.