Hope springs eternal

Is God simply Hope?

Where are we without Hope?

Where are you and I?

Why drag ourselves through the hardship and the tragedy?  For a few all too scarce moments of pleasure?  Maybe.

I’m immersing myself in work just now and trying not to think too much.  But look what happens over a coffee between classes.  Into the vacuum comes the problem of affection: the need to receive it; the need to give it; its proximity to the physical, the emotional and the spiritual; the tangled web of those forces in our lives and the mess they create.

From down in that mess emerge two colours (orange and blue – a particularly intense shade) that link to something lost or hidden in my earliest memories.  When I see them together, such as on a pair of shoes worn on the Metro this week, I feel a key being tried in a long forgotten door.  The door remains locked.

I wander around towns filled with strangers.  Strange towns.  What is home?  A rented room?

I read the final words of “On The Road” for the third and probably last time this week and was hit by just how sad, vast and empty life can be.  It was like a Metro train clattering out of the tunnel into the brightly-lit consciousness.  Poor Jack.  Poor Neal.  Poor us.

The lost and the losers caught in a never-ending cycle of sadness, broken only by distractions that can speak to the soul.

Love embraced and rejected.  Doors opened and closed.

Why so much affection?  Why so much sadness?

I feel caught in a physical, emotional and spiritual confusion.  A mess.  The first of those is a simple fact, being slowly depleted, exhausted, worn-out.  The second is the wild and unpredictable response to everything that crashes around it – a ship tossed on the open waters of life, one minute calmed and comforted, the next minute whipped by dangerous squalls and tipped towards maelstroms of gloom and disaster.  The third resides somewhere deep in ourselves, occasionally speaking in a voice that has no idiom. 

Perhaps behind that voice, somewhere, lies Hope.

Hope manifested daily in an invisible spark between strangers, the universe transmitted in an instant between eyes and then forgotten, and in the dream-coordinator – writer of complex and unpredictable realities that direct fragments of memory as we sleep.  What force controls this world we inhabit for one-third of our lives?  And, actually, who are the strangers we encounter in all their human detail?  Perhaps they come to us during forgotten daytime encounters in streets, shops and Metro tunnels – those momentary glances.

We may come closest to the deepest secrets as we sleep.

If we are lucky, in our waking lives we find someone with whom the wall between each spirit is thinned – a precious thing, indeed.  To be physically alongside that person is like finding home, but spirituality lives beyond the physical and emotional.   Kindred spirits might be anywhere in the world or the universe for that matter –home and Hope existing outside of time and space.  

Home may not, after all, be a place.  Hope might well spring eternal.