More on hope--

Hope is still the topic du jour and Emily Dickinson is still the guide--her last stanza (see last week for the first) sits with me on a regular basis.

1. I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
2. And on the strangest Sea—
3. Yet--never--in Extremity,
4. It asked a crumb--of me.

Some of you may not know my first professional training was as a writer, and a poet, over half a century ago.

When I first read this in the late 1960s it evoked harsh cold environments and Seas about which  I know nothing--like the Bosphorus, whose name fascinated me, or the Inland Sea of Japan. Now? I read chillest as also maybe a land that is quiet and still and Sea as something quite different. And extremity have changed from one of my limbs to hard times.

I do know this: in all of the hard times I face now and have faced in the past, Hope has indeed never asked anything of me. Not whether or not I believe in it, or have it, or resent it. It simply is. It still sings the tune without the words even in the darkest times, it still begs of us to join it.