“Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops — at all — ”
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
With Hope
Anne Lamott has a piece in The Washington Post that I very much identify with. The essence of it is that even with all that is happening, that has happened, she still has a strong sense of hope. She says this, after quoting Emily Dickinson:
Really? High, piping birdsong that never stops?
This is very nice, but in the past four months, few of us have heard chirps and whistles. With the theological understanding of a bright third-grader, I am probably the most hopeful among my friends, with a cranky optimism and decades of teaching Sunday school under my belt. Still no birdsong, no trill of the dark-eyed junco, no chirp of the backyard sparrow. Instead, nearly every day I have felt tapped lightly, as if by an arm of the pygmy octopus, which weighs about an ounce, like a cherry plum. Tap, tap.
I feel that tap, tap, too. And then she concludes with this:
Something’s happening here, and I wish it would speed the hell up. Our role will be to spill peacefully out into the streets, when we get our marching orders. It is still cold and will be for a while, and we’ll need the warmth of heaters and fires for a while, the light of the little sunrises and sunsets we create in the fireplace, but I tell you, something is rising, unscripted, elemental, incremental. It always does, right about now, like clockwork.
Don't you just love good writing? It may be the thing that saves us.
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