Hope?

Such a hard word. Hope has caused me a lot of hardship in life...hoping with my limited mind for things that are not meant for me...that only help keep me stuck in everlasting ignorance.

Hope - for my will to be done has caused a lot of wreckage. Hope has done a lot of internal damage.

Just now, I realized that perhaps I have been looking at hope all wrong...perhaps hope is not about getting what I want. Perhaps hope is about a belief in a life that has a higher purpose than the one I want.

Recently I have been dealing with this idea that perhaps I am not really happy - that I have just been really super successful in getting what I want. By manipulation and the application of spiritual principles in an unprincipled way.

So what does that have to do with hope?

Well, I am not entirely sure. But I think that I have to have some idea or hope that there is more to this life than what I can think or manipulate or control. There just has to be. Please, for all that is good and holy, let there be something more to this life than me getting my way.

So for me today, hope is a tricky bitch. I have so misused the concept of hope - used for my own selfish ends...that I feel like I don’t know how to use it rightly. Hope being something that I have so bastardized that I have sullied it beyond all recognition.

Yet, sullied though it is, there is this tiny spark of light within all the garbage strewn about all over hope, that shines on with a gleaming brilliance, undiluted by the piles of self trash I have piled on. And that light says very quietly the following:

There is more to you, to life than what you think. The things you wish for, the things you want. They are dead ends. Go beyond your thoughts and wishes. Go to that place you are afraid to go, see where you have done this in the past and trust that there will be light again, illuminating a new path that was obscured by all your emotional trash you refused to clean up.

And that is hope for me...the idea that no matter how many times I fuck it up, I can always begin again, placing principles before personalities. I can go for the love, even when I don’t feel it, don’t want to or am sure love has long since left the building.

Hope shows me the path, one stone at a time and is ever patient with my incessant demands to be given the entire map. Hope shows me only what I need to know at the time and then gently, and sometimes not so gently, folds the map away and tells me to have faith...and hope gives me a belief that I can and will be delivered to some higher purpose, to some place of faith if I just keep trudging.

Hope gets me out of bed each day and allows me to sleep at night...hope is what gently nudges me a long to do the work that I do not want to do...always holding out this idea that if I remain true and steadfast that I can and will achieve some greater way to live this life.

Hope provides the encouragement to go on, not as I did yesterday but with the hand holding compassion of a loving friend - sometimes with a tender embrace and sometimes with a violent shove in a direction I do not want to go...hope is always there to spur me onward to whatever beauty awaits me next. Hope allows for the possibility of things not granted yet, thoughts not thought, love not realized and experiences yet to be had. Hope allows a positive thought to exist in the midst of chaos and pain. Hope keeps us moving forever toward the light.