Finding a starting place to write about anything, let alone hope and how to gather a greater sense of it when your words have run dry is something that takes time; it takes thorough searching and often exhausting effort. It comes in brief glimpses, but maybe if I can collect enough of these pieces, I can fit their edges together into something more - a clearer picture of how to go on through hard times when the concept of hope feels shattered and distant.
The glimpse of a "why" - of hope - I encountered recently was through a reflection author John Green made around the Emily Dickinson poem we all know and love so well. It caught in my mind, however tenuously, and that is enough to be a starting place. While I have been reviewing quotes and passages on hope, waiting for one to give me the breath to write again, it was this unexpected reminder offered by an individual I've never met, but have long felt I know personally just through the work he and his brother have done in creating community and sharing their experiences.
The poem discussed is as follows (for those who do not know this Dickinson piece):
“Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me."
Emily Dickinson
The following reflection from Green has felt like the first sort of thing I have been able to relate to in any meaningful way of late. The reminder that “the tune without the words” may “never stop at all,” but that doesn’t mean that sometimes we can no longer hear it above the roar of everything else. It is there, hard as that may be to believe. Now we do the best we can to find our way back to it.
I cannot claim that reflection as my own - the meaning is not mine, but taking it up as a call to carry forward, and translating it through my own experiences of late feels like rain to a river bed - something to start…
While I logically know in my worst moments that hope is still out there even if I cannot feel it, logical knowing does little to change the deeper feeling of distress; in that sense, it matters very little beyond being a basic way to challenge one's thoughts that feel like "The Truth."
While Green's reflection and Dickinson's poem offer something similar to the logical knowing that hope is theoretically out there even if we have no present sense of it, it provides this perspective in a way that is easier to feel and hold close through hard times. Perhaps it is simply that it avoids this sense of "well you logically know better" that often just feels like shame. There's no judgment when hope is explained as a song still and always playing, even if we cannot hear it at this moment.
If hope is a tune that is still being sung and I only need to listen for it, it no longer feels like something I need to generate within myself, by myself. Like starting a fire with no kindling and only dampness, that task of manifesting a spark from nothing seems like impossibility. If hope is something I only need to tune myself into the frequency of, that feels potentially achievable - at least a starting place.
So how do you find the song of hope still being sung somewhere in the distance?
You wander and you keep wandering. You spend hours each day on micro expeditions made of wandering without a direction. The tune you follow is your own heartbeat, made in time with each footstep.
You come to the ocean again and again, only to be cradled against her expanse and the bluffs behind you. You look out and wait. The cold bites at you, but there is some sense of warmth here. You cling to it. The tune you follow is the rise and fall of the waves, the ocean dragging her fingers across the pebbles of the beach.
You wind through the forest following deer trails, searching for some sign of a northern saw whet owl. Finding nothing, getting up the next day and doing the same. Spending hours in an underground world of creeping vines and twisted trucks, a far away world from the city around you though they exist side by side. You stumble upon lost objects in odd places, and if a saw whet owl is unlikely, sometimes you are lead to the most unimaginably perfect moments, face to face with yet another barred owl. Another forest friend, tucked away from the world. The tune you follow is fretting robins, the darting of chickadees, and the silent time that you can spend sitting with a beautiful creature.
You sit present in meetings about change and hope for the future even if it feels far away at present. The tune you follow is the ideas that seem to exist like almost imaginably solid concepts, floated between people still passionate (like you once were and could be again.)
You disappear into the moss-covered forest, moisture permeating every pore of substance, hanging in the air like a wet blanket. The tune you follow is the steady fall of raindrops on sword ferns, the song of a newly rushing river, and the salmon who swim their lengths - finally able to come home to rest and give the cycle over to the eggs they lay, ending and beginning again all at once.
You sit in the busy-ness of places you were once busy too, being present to the people you love. The tune you follow is Moonlight Sonata played to the echo chambers of hospital walls. Busy-ness all around, and the beauty of Beethoven briefly held in the sterile air.
You come back to trying to write, trying to create, trying to capture moments of the life around you through photographs. The tune you follow is the click of a shutter and the comforting weight of your camera in hand.
You listen to the voices of those who love you and those whom you love. The tune you follow is their hope for you, even if you feel far away from feeling it for yourself at present.
- S.
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