Spring’s Invitation to Hope

 

 

“We have no guarantee what will happen in the future, but we have hope. That’s what keeps us going.”

Tweet from the Dalai Lama May 7, 2018

Dear Friends,

A New England Spring is a feast for the senses! The slow greeeeening of the grass, the peeps and chirps that greet the sun, the fresh air with just enough moisture, the tiny little leaves getting a little bit bigger: all a welcome experience and testament to the promise of new life! This particular Spring comes after a prolonged winter; we sometimes wondered if Spring would ever come.

Nature is a great teacher of hope. The seasons do change, the living things follow their “primary directives” of foraging and growing, the sun moves across the sky – day after day. Hope is played out before us, as the dull, brown branches are slowly filled in with shapes and shades of green… once again…year after year.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to share a day of reflection with folks carrying a grieving heart. We used Spring’s  unreliable patterns as a metaphor for the uncertainty of grief. We walked the grounds of Mercy by the Sea in a Celtic way of seeing, with a direct “link between the eye and the heart,” and breathed in the new life all around us. We opened ourselves to hope. That is my reminder to you today, friends, the promise of hope. It is steeped in the magic of Springtime, it resides in the skin of a newborn babe, it appears when our eyes open each morning – inviting us into the gifts of this day, of this moment.

This is not to say that pain, frustration, betrayal, and grief do not exist. The Dalai Lama knows this, you know it too. The question is, where do we place our trust? What is the foundation we choose to stand on when living through life’s challenges? Those who face loss are forced to confront this question, which is especially difficult during the tender time of sadness and vulnerability. But it benefits all of us to pause and explore our personal understanding of hope…to imagine it’s texture and shape, it’s depth and resiliency, it’s heritage and it’s legacy.

I close with this message from Rainer Marie Rilke. Let it join your collection of quotes about hope. Let it remind you of the substantial and sustaining qualities of hope that are available to you…now…always.

“Have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to cherish the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.”

With lots of love from a hopeful heart, Lisa