hope blooms eternal photo captured October 30, 2024
HOPE It hovers in dark corners before the lights are turned on, it shakes sleep from its eyes and drops from mushroom gills, it explodes in the starry heads of dandelions turned sages, it sticks to the wings of green angels that sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye of the many-eyed potato, it lives in each earthworm segment surviving cruelty, it is the motion that runs from the eyes to the tail of a dog, it is the mouth that inflates the lungs of the child that has just been born.
It is the singular gift we cannot destroy in ourselves, the argument that refutes death, the genius that invents the future, all we know of God.
It is the serum which makes us swear not to betray one another; it is in this poem, trying to speak.
I have a file where I save poems for my Friday blog. This one was posted by Parker Palmer in late July and felt apropos for today. He wrote by way of introduction:
“Today’s poet, Lisel Mueller (1924-2020), knew all about the threat of far-right politics, aka fascism. In 1939, her family fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to the U.S., where she eventually won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry.
In this poem, she reminds us that hope is a fundamental dynamic in all forms of life, a way to name the energy keeps creating more life, one small act at a time, even in the face of very long odds.
She’s urging us to be sources of hope, sources of a deep resolve “not to betray one another.” I can think of no line that better sums up what’s at stake in the upcoming election. Let’s keep fomenting new life in any way we can. Much depends on it.”
Yes. I hope, with prayers, for my friends south of the border. For all who are suffering from the destruction of war and weather, illness and death. For us all.
All day I try to say nothing but thank you, breathe the syllables in and out with every step I take through the rooms of my house and outside into a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.
I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work, when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly hair combs into place.
Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute, and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I remember who I am, a woman learning to praise something as small as dandelion petals floating on the steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup, my happy, savoring tongue.
– Jeanne Lohmann –
Whew! I’m glad I’d clipped and saved this poem, shared on social media last week by Parker Palmer. Despite sitting here for a couple of hours writing, and up most weekday mornings to log onto a 7:00 am Zoom writers’ circle, I was ready to power off when I remembered today’s photo and poem feature. This one feels perfect, as it no doubt did for Parker when he posted it.
“I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring/and to the cold wind of its changes.”Alberta springs are notorious for their capricious nature: warm one day, snow the next; north winds blowing strong and cold, drying puddles, and disappearing shady pockets of crusty snow. Depending on the location, here you can ski in the morning and golf in the afternoon. Maybe because we had an exceptionally mild winter, thanks to El Nino, most of us have felt more bewildered than usual by spring’s ambivalent arrival. Toss in a solar eclipse, a new moon, and now a full moon, and yesterday’s collective lack of focus on the pickleball courts – wearing toques and gloves after two preceding days of short sleeves and shorts – might indicate our resiliency, or discombobulation! And that’s not writing a word about everything else going amuck in the world. “Weather and world weary,” would suffice.
So yes, I say “thank you” as I remember I am a woman praising something small…like the three browning hares who’ve taken to nestling under the spruce bough, or up against its trunk, the ones I call “honey bunnies,” happy to see them as they bring back memories of Annie fixated on them as she’d stand at the front window.As I do now.
Thank you to the sun that rises earlier and sets later, every day, now necessitating wearing an eye mask to fall asleep. To the robins I’m just beginning to hear singing their mating song. To the geese honking as they fly in pairs or in V formation. The murder of crows nest-making. Catkins and ice pads.
spring’s juxtaposition
And to you, dear friends, thank youfor being here. Much love and kindestregards.
We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
Mary Oliver Red Bird (2008)
I collect poems that appear in my inbox or on social media. This is one posted by wise elder Parker Palmer in mid March of this year. Is it prescience? Or simply another rendering of Mary Oliver’s astute skills in observation already so evident in her poetry situated in the natural world. I imagine is was cited often in the months following the 2016 American presidential election. It continues to have remarkable resonance there as states swing to vote in politicians and legislation undermining and undoing so much of what we have considered the hard won, inviolable rights of the historically vulnerable, marginalized and disenfranchised.
Today, I think it apropos for my province, mere days after the election that gave to the woman who took over her party’s leadership on a no confidence vote, the mandate to proceed with her view of things. A woman who, just days before, was found guilty of violating the province’s conflict of interest act. A woman who, in the first months of assuming leadership, was publicly apologizing for every verbal gaffe she’d made speaking, apparently without thinking. Or was she revealing a heart that was “small, and hard, and full of meanness.” A heart that regrettably becomes so shaped by empire. A heart that beats in my own chest unless I chose to cultivate otherwise.
If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider— lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, 1998
Two weeks ago, wise elder Parker Palmer shared this poem with an incisive commentary on Russian president Putin’s “bloody, power-hungry invasion of Ukraine,” while imploring his American readers to demonstrate bravery by confronting the anti-democracy darkness wielding its way in their country. I would add, around the world.Moments ago, doing a quick scan of the today’s news, I read that over 400,000 Ukrainian citizens have been forcibly taken to Russia, many to be used as hostages in the battle for Kyiv. Too, that more than half of Ukraine’s children have been driven from their homes, with their mothers, to take refuge in neighboring countries. As I wrote last week, I hardly have words. What I do have is a silent scream that could shatter if I gave it full voice. So instead, I will do as Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes implored earlier this week, “Dear Brave Souls: Now would be the time for prayer that uses everything you’ve got: muscle, fervor, rigor, verve, pounding down and raising up…”
May we all be brave in such ways. May we be awake for the darkness around us is deep, lulling us back to sleep.
Confession #1 – I’m writing this post with a wee bit of a champagne buzz. That bottle of Veuve Clicquot my husband bought for New Year’s Eve, when we thought we might be celebrating with friends, stayed chilled until this afternoon. Taking advantage of the brief break in the past twelve day polar vortex, he had just returned from visiting the horses at the stable, and I from walking Annie, when he suggested we pop the cork. Lovely sipping as we watched the weather turn, a north wind blowing steady, bringing another artic cold front, and reminisced about warm winter vacations, our last being the fabulous time in Andalusia in February 2019. Too, remembering today is the 42nd anniversary of our departing Ontario to drive across Canada to make Alberta home. Salut! Then, he asked what I was looking forward to this coming year. Hmmmm…
Confession #2 – I can count on one hand the number of new year days when I’ve felt “happy.” Typically, I feel a familiar free-floating anxiety in my belly that yesterday I admitted is fear. Fear of the wide-open expanse of unknown that a new year brings. Fear compounded by two years’ living in the acute uncertainty with the pandemic. Fear with knowing the clock ticking with age, mine, his, parents and friends. Looking out that same window earlier today, I made this photo as it captured the feeling of me standing on the threshold of a new year.
I’ve long known that I need time with transitions and thresholds. That fear companions and tethers me on the threshold until I exert myself and take that first step across and into the new. Then curiosity and commitment, together with my enthusiasm for life and appreciation for its innate and diverse beauty shore me up and propel me forward. Today, I’ve seen evidence of others who feel a similar tentativeness with the new year.
Helen, a blogger kindred in her age, life stage and perspective, we often echoing each other in our themes and simpatico in the wells from which we draw inspiration, wrote today:
“Over the past week, I have read many new year reflections. It seems that many of you, like me, are also stepping hesitantly into 2022… much like stepping onto a frozen pond, not sure if the ice is solid enough to hold me.”
“Skating on Thin Ice,” in Ageless Possibilities, January 2, 2022
And from an online contemplative community, one of its members courageously called out for prayers of support to help her navigate the edges of depression – a familiar-to-her mix of aging, seasonal affective disorder, and her introspective, reflective, sensitive nature.
My husband offered that in finding those kindred to me in what I notice, value and how I show up, I see more evidence of what might be called this “counter cultural” take on the new year: not so much happy but tentative, uncertain, fearful. I smiled when I read Parker Palmer’s New Year’s Eve Facebook post:
“New Year’s Eve is a curious fiction, isn’t it? As the ‘old’ year flows unimpeded into the ‘new,’ the hoopla we make at midnight seems just a tad over the top for one more tick of the clock.”
Parker J. Palmer
My champagne buzz has passed. I’m thinking about what’s at the root of my new year’s fear. That while “covid compounded,” there is more to it. I come, as did my blogger friend, to grief. And I know that means it’s about dying, and disappointments, and deaths. Too, about beginnings that are always about endings. And about resolutions, which are typically made from perceived deficiency are inevitably doomed to fail and begin a cycle of disappointment, if not worse.
I’m thinking back to how I answered my husband’s question. How I looked out into the snow-covered trees and felt gratitude for so much, including this moment of returning freeze, the seasons I witness through this window and trees, the memories of times and places further afar.
I told him I look forward to returning to my practice of rising before dawn for that hour or so in silence before he wakes, to sit and watch the new day. To return – perhaps – to journaling (though I give myself a pass as I’ve been writing many words on many other pages these past many months.) To planting little container gardens of greens come summer. To writing a compilation of poetry. To more time, as much time together, healthy in our “pack” with Annie. And that for my family and friends. Yes, I have a yearning to travel, even some plans that I hold lightly. But more than anything, to hold myself lightly. Tenderly.
“Nothing spectacular,” I said. Simply to be thankful for all I have and all I am.
“We look with uncertainty beyond the old choices for clear-cut answers to a softer, more permeable aliveness which is every moment at the brink of death; for something new is being born in us if we but let it. We stand at a new doorway, awaiting what comes… daring to be human creatures, vulnerable to the beauty of existence. Learning to love.”
A Wabi Sabi Life 