HOPE...

It’s yet another rainy day- and the last day in August. September always seems such a
demarcation, a beginning of a new chapter: the beginning of the end of the summer, when
we feel the wheel turning again, kids are back at school, new courses begin, change. As a
child this time felt more like a new year than January ever did. I am hoping for a sunny
September, for a surprise after this most rainy August, as we still have our ‘summer’- holiday
ahead in Cornwall! I hope for sun and even some swimming.
Hope is an interesting one. There is the ‘beacon of hope’ and the icon of hope’; we put our hopes in people, projects. We do what we can and hope it will work out. Sometimes its easy to hope because we have evidence of things that have worked out; sometimes one hopes against all odds and at times we struggle to keep hope alive. Hope seems like an important inbuilt force that keeps us going, that moves us towards a better space, whatever this might mean. When we find it difficult to hope we rely on other loved one’s to remind us or to hold hope for us.
The daffodil as a symbol of hope speaks of spring, the dove delivers a branch of new life. The magical transformation of the butterfly reminds us that sometimes we just can’t see clearly: what looks like an ugly state might be the last moment before something magnificent!
Chuang Tse :‘What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.’

Whenever catastrophe strikes, we look for signs of hope: the toddler that survived under
the rubble of the earth quake, or the calf they found under a heap of carcasses during the
culling following foot and mouth disease. After this they stopped the cullings.

Listening to Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention in Denver this week, it was clear how much of an icon of hope he has become! Holding the hope of so many people for change, big change- and speaking like a visionary, painting a picture in bold strokes. A black president in itself a symbol of hope for change. Of course he has to show he can deliver, but it is such a fresh breath of air hearing such vision!

It seems hope has to do with faith and vision, yet in the famous painting of ‘Hope’ by Watts (1886) in the Tate, Hope sits blindfolded and bent, holding on to a lyre with only one string left; her world shrunk, holding on one last string…. This is not cheap hope: it’s trying to survive on one note, on one last something- hope against all odds. Such a moving, internal, tender image! Sometimes an action of hope might be as small as picking one string to create some sound that might comfort. And then maybe at some point Hope can take off her blindfold, look out at the horizon and move from her small golden ball!

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