Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul -
and sings the tunes without the words -
and never stops at all.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
and sings the tunes without the words -
and never stops at all.
- Emily Dickinson
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
When I was ready to go back to my writing, another tragedy occurred. And then another, and another. The chemical plant explosion in Texas. The escape of three women held captive for years. Three women's murders in the city where I live and extensive searches by so many people to find their bodies - one is still missing at this time. The growing horror that Assad's war against his own people included the use of chemical weapons. Wild fires in the SW and repeated storms pounding the NE and the Midwest. The protracted winter here with snow falling still in early May.
I was puzzled at my reactions to all of these events and my inability to write about them - my usual way to work troubling things through. And I was puzzled by the seeming lack of connection between all these events - other than violence, both human and from the natural world.
Then the huge tornado ripped through Oklahoma City and I had my answer. I have four members of my extended family living there. This event was very personal for me. It was with much relief when the instant connection of email and texting got word to family here that everyone was all right.
Connection. This world in which I now live is linked instantly to my life. I can watch events around the world on the Internet and TV news while these events happen.
In one way, this shift has been gradual- so subtle that unless I push back my memories to ten or twenty years ago, things are simply as they are now. But remembering the succession of shared party lines on telephones to reliance on letter-writing to answering machines to email to smart phone texting has changed my life and the lives of millions of other people.
Our means of connection have been altered in radical ways. Now I sit at my computer and write, then post that writing on line to be read by people stretching all over the globe. If anyone had told me just a few years ago that people in Russia (and elsewhere) would be reading my writing, I would have had to take care not to laugh outright in that person's face.
Coupled with this magic of technological connection, global travel has altered our cultures dramatically. Whether you actually travel to once-foreign places or enjoy stories of others, who have been blessed to travel - this is not our grandparents' world! Nor the world of my childhood where going to the next town 28 miles away to shop for school clothes was a major event.
The isolation of my childhood small town has been transformed into connections non of us once dreamed possible. No longer am I concerned only with the death of a neighbor just down the street or celebrations of weddings and baptisms with people close to me Now I listen to screams of children in a grade school as a tornado collapses their school. I watch marathon runners and spectators whose limbs are torn off their bodies. I bleed for the violence in Syria. And suffer with families who search for loved ones.
Would I want my old world back - and live in a town of 3000? No way! But this present world in which I live demands a re-balancing within myself. How do I live with the pain that confronts me daily - without it destroying me? How do I stay informed in a global world - without isolating myself from its horrors? How do I make decisions about the ways I can support others in need - without stretching myself to some breaking point?
And most important of all - how and where do I find hope and joy in a world that at times seems to have gone mad?
Yesterday I was invited to a neighbor's high school graduation party for his eldest daughter. Cars were parked up and done the block. The table was laden with food. The were more small children than I have seen in a long time. When I asked the daughter what she would be doing next in her life, she shyly said she was going to a state university to study nursing. Oh, and did I mention everyone there had immigrated from Ethiopia? There lies hope.
Earlier I celebrated a birthday with my granddaughter who has just finished her first year of college. A week ago her older brother helped me make the transition from a PC computer to a Mac - before he heads off to graduate school in a distant state. Both of them with their dreams for the future. There lies hope.
I shop at a grocery story that has food from many places - not the meat-and-potatoes diet I grew up on. I take a continuing education class with people who have traveled all over the world. Every day I encounter people who have come here from elsewhere. And from my own traveling "round the world" I know that almost everywhere I have gone, I encounter people from here who have chosen to live somewhere else. There lies hope.
And the ubiquitous smart-phone! After I crossed the hurdle of learning to use it and discovered for myself how texting creates another connection for me, I watch people with this little device making connections never before possible. Some people argue that our devices have distanced people from each other. Yes, that is a risk. BUT calling people from wherever you happen to be is a connection that did not used to happen. In the not so old "olden days," you had to have that umbilical cord attached to the wall - and long distance was only used for emergencies. There lies hope.
As Joan Chittister says, There is no such thing as a private life in a globalized world. To paraphrase Huxley's phrase of a brave new world, it is a strange new world in which we live. Whatever lies ahead, we will suffer the pain of our connections - and celebrate our hopes for the future.
