around us, but we don’t take time to develop the connection. A hope chest could remind us to take the time. Hope gets us started and motivates us. Hope is a habit. The more you allow yourself time to ponder and be still, the more you become able to feel the spirit that holds hope.
Sometimes we have been hurt so badly we can’t believe good things will ever happen. I knew an unemployed woman who had a great job lead but kept putting off making the phone call. Why did she do this? Why do any of us sabotage ourselves like this? Because we feel we need to save hope. We can’t afford to lose it. We forget that when we’re in touch with the spirit there is a replenishing of hope. We forget the saying “This, too, shall pass.” If only we could see the good in the most painful times and know that there are happy days ahead.
When we’re feeling that sense of hopelessness we can develop hope by writing about the good things that have happened to us. We can list our gratitudes. We can remember how it was before and how it is now. We can remember lessons learned from hard times and realize hope is there, that someone is watching out for us.
“To keep the lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.”
—Mother Teresa
Listen! Shelter Surrounds You
You’ll find me in the wind, the seed,
in the elephant’s triumphant roar.
I am in the pearls of your elders,
the dirt on the far side of the moon,
the ice under the coats of Jupiter.
Naked person, listen to the hawk’s cry.
Didn’t you once see five hawks
careening against the dawn.
I have been humming and hammering
through the years you took to bed, in the moments
you let life fly from your hands
to live your life again, simple days
of cooking and dancing to the radio
What else is there really?
This is you. You can ride the pony
to enter your own life,
be buried in your own clothes.
Your flaws can be touched and loved.
Janell Moon
There are many ways to prepare yourself to write. One way is to be silent and let your attention focus on your body and your imagination. It’s a technique I call gazing into the waters.
Gazing into the Waters
1. Take several deep breaths into your “belly.” Pay attention to your breathing, in and out.
2. Focus on the top of your head and slowly shift your awareness down your body until you reach your toes.
3. Imagine yourself descending a stairway while counting from one to ten. Feel your body slowly stepping down. Imagine yourself arriving at an entryway and moving through it into a place you find calming, perhaps a quiet garden or sandy seashore. What surrounds you? Where do you sit? What do you see? Use your senses to sharpen this special place: sounds, fragrances, feelings, body sensations, something to touch, something that beckons. This is a place to use over and over until just the thought of it calms you. From this place you can explore anything.
“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.”
—Barbara Kingsolver
Exercises
1. Write about your hopes for yourself, your family, and the world.
2. Using the technique gazing into the waters, see what might bring you hope. Do you hear birds chirping? Do you see the buds just beginning to peek through on the trees? Is the snow covering the earth like white wool? What does your special place say to your spirit? Write down your experience using the technique of streaming.
3. Open a drawer and take out several objects at random. Using these, write about your willingness to hope. For instance, you may take out a stamp and scissors; using gazing into the waters and streaming, write about the stamp as a symbol of sending your spirit the message that it is safe to hope for a force that cares for you. Or, you may write about why it wouldn’t be safe to hope for this. The scissors may be a symbol that it is time to cut off with something, someone, or some thought. Explore what that might be.
Day 3: Faith Makes It Possible
My mom is a cloud watcher. She says clouds remind her that there is something spacious and grand beyond her understanding. She uses their comings and goings as a sign of faith: good days coming, some stormy times, some dull days. Sometimes, when she sees the clouds looking like kangaroos hopping across the sky, she knows a change is coming. She writes a prayer to her spirit each night before bed and keeps a prayer journal. She enhances her faith by just looking up to the sky.
Sometimes, after a long night’s sleep, I wake up with a bounce and an enhanced faith of the spirit in my life. Or, I may enjoy the way the mustard plant makes the grass on the side of the highway glow a neon green and use this as a reminder that the spirit is all around. Always, there is a poem waiting to be written.
Faith is what is believed even without evidence. It tells us that there is more than what we know and that good will come again. Often it is a difficult time that leads us to faith.
Other times, something so joyous and wonderful happens that it could only be a gift from heaven. However faith comes to you, it will enrich your life.
We don’t have to believe 100 percent that it is possible to live in faith; 51 percent is plenty. As Mary Jean Irions says in her book, Yes, World, “Faith is not being sure. It is not being sure, but betting with your last cent.” It is enough to move toward the belief that you are a part of the whole.
Today we’re going to write to explore our sense of faith. I find that it’s useful to find symbols to help you hold faith. Seeing a morning glory might remind you of childhood wonder. Write about that. Or, perhaps you find yourself imagining an attic in a wonderful old country house, with good smells all around. You might write about how a certain smell can make you feel more spiritually connected.
Arlene, who lives in the Sonoma wine country of California, told me at dinner one Saturday night that she loved living there in August, the time of the crushing of the wine grapes. It was a “memory smell” of her grandfather, to whom she turned for comfort as a child. She has a grape leaf journal and writes what the leaves, her symbol, have to tell her each month.
“Faith hasn’t got no eyes, but she’ long-legged.” —Zora Neale Hurston
What symbol might help a belief in your spirit as you allow it to bud and blossom? Listen to the wrens and write about faith.
Exercises
