A New Word for Hope

I can't stop thinking about this morning, and the new White House website, and that stunning poem, and the 400,000 people who've died from Covid, and police brutality and aspiration versus reality and what it is that keeps us getting up every day and not becoming completely immobilized by cynicism or grief.

And it's each other, I think, that keeps us getting up, keeps us willing to hold hope, no matter how tattered, in our tired hands, and the fact that every one of us was once a child and most of us have children in our lives in some way or another, whether they're small still or fully grown or gone too soon, and then I think of love and the future and these other words that are too big almost, big like a 12-lane highway where everything is going too fast and you just want to pull over to rest a little, and maybe when you do some kind soul offers you a cold drink and you chat and realize you each have so many stories, stories that have shaped us and sometimes distorted us and we squint at the sun and wonder about things like truth before setting out on our way again but this time finding a new way to get where we're headed.

I want to use my time here to remember and repair and reckon and write, to connect to the generations before ours and all the ones that will follow, to be connected to so many other beings, bodies and minds and voices, in service of something greater than our own small agendas. And this means beginning again without forgetting. It means looking ahead without overlooking the pain this country inflicts. It means finding a way to stay tethered to something that is a synonym for hope but maybe doesn't even have a word yet of its own.

Maybe it means we need to create that word, and that world, together.

Here's to going forward.