Hope

These are trying times … a difficult road lies ahead. I am beginning to understand how to live with hope … whatever hope may be. Poet Emily Dickinson wrote: “Hope is the thing with feathers, That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all.” These ethereal words brace me … carry me along … and so, too, the spiritualist Matthew Fox: “Hope is a verb with its shirt sleeves rolled up.” I walk the road that is ours to travel … I look aloft … perhaps to see hope perched in a tree … my shirt sleeves rolled up.