Day 25 - Hope

This morning as I lay in the blissful half awake state, I vowed today, today I’d look for hope.  Yesterday several things helped me to realize I’d been seeing the glass as half empty.  First, there was a zoom meeting with a friend who told me that she is more hopeful than me about the future. “Good things can come out of this time,” she said.  And then an email from a docent friend with a link to poetry of Kim Stafford.  He’s writing a poem everyday during the pandemic.  You can find his poetry by googling—-pandemic poems project.  Years ago I took a week long workshop with him and I do love his poetry.  The poem below abruptly sent a burst of hope through me, like a flash of light from a firefly or the bright vision of something beautiful.  Yes, we will get through this.

Dr. Fauci’s Smile.  By Kim Stafford

     Now we live for the day

    The good doctor can stand

       At his microphone, his

     Furrowed brow softening,

A modern renaissance beginning

As a wistful Mona Lisa smile

   Slowly ghosts his face, and he

       Speaks the four-beat line

        We got through this.

What does it take to get there?

  Shelter in place.  Lead a simple life.

       Learn how little you need.

           Prepare to smile.

We will get through this and hopefully we will have learned some important lessons from our time of confinement.  Yes, all the deaths and the suffering of so many is hard to bear.   But people are learning ways to cope and even to thrive in the midst of all this.  There are so many heroes among just ordinary common folks—-store clerks, at home mom’s teaching children, friends telling the truth of what they see.  I have begun to see heroes all around me.  We help each other out by sharing what is working for each of us.  One person’s learning can be just what another needed to hear.  And for me suddenly there are many flashes of light out there.  Hope is alive.  Like Emily Dickinson wrote two centuries ago “hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul....And sings the tune without words.....And never stops.”  Hope is there for each of us.  It lies deep within each of us and can come into our awareness if we but call it out and look for it.  I found hope and comfort in talking with my friend and in reading beautiful new poems.