A day for hope

The sun is shining; temperatures are above freezing; snow is melting! Eternal springs the hope that spring may return. To realize that, in the nadir of winter, bear cubs are being born while the mother is in hibernation; that many animals and birds are in the beginnings of mating and nesting season; that life is in preparation to continue, is more than enough reason to hope.

Maria Popova has shared a wonderful quotation by Rebecca Solnit on the idea of hope:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.

sunshine brings hope of melting frost

Photo by J. Harrington

The quotation above also captures something I learned late in life about meaning and the future. Once I believed that meaning was something out there that we needed to find. Instead, I now believe the meaning is something we create through what we do and how we do it. I no longer accept that what the future holds  is some independent given but something we create through each action we take each moment we live.

Tomorrow may bring the return of cold, cloudy, snowy, dreary weather that makes the return of spring seem hopeless. It won’t, however, cause the bear sow to abandon her cubs; the great horned owl to abandon her eggs and nest; just as it shouldn’t cause us to abandon our efforts to make a better life for ourselves and those who will come after US.

An Old Story

By Tracy K. Smith

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 

 

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful 

Dream. The worst in us having taken over 

And broken the rest utterly down. 

 

                                                                 A long age 

Passed. When at last we knew how little 

Would survive us—how little we had mended 

 

Or built that was not now lost—something 

Large and old awoke. And then our singing 

Brought on a different manner of weather. 

 

Then animals long believed gone crept down 

From trees. We took new stock of one another. 

We wept to be reminded of such color. 

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