Hope -- my one word for 2017

"Hope" flickr photo by mclcbooks https://flickr.com/photos/39877441@N05/25915383181 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Hope for Gus' health--
Hope for our children's education--
Hope for our country--

This post, outlined in my head, half written as a draft for a number of months, now briefly summarizing thoughts I've discovered and uncovered. For I believe that hope will enable possibilities, often ones we've never imagined or ones that seemingly now appear so distant.

C. R. Snyder’s work from the University of Kansas at Lawrence, shows that hope is a function of struggle. (http://www.onbeing.org/blog/courage-is-born-from-struggle-brene-brown/) And as I witness Gus' epic struggle with his MS, I hold hope--
Like John Steinbeck:

Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. (https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/30/john-steinbeck-new-year/)

And as I consider the seeming trajectory of our nation and our public schools, hope, as Synder says will be "the fuel". The fuel to help us reach our aspirations and our dreams-- those of a meaningful public education for every student and those of a democracy in all of its idiosyncracies and beauty that not only prevails but thrives.

To Snyder, hope reflects the interaction between your goals, your sense of personal agency, and your pathfinding ability. It’s your ability to link your present to imagined futures. After all, much of life is contemplating, pursuing, and completing goals — what you might colloquially call dreams — and hope is the fuel that gets you there.
(http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/is-hope-good-for-you.html)

Hope

    

It hovers in dark corners

before the lights are turned on,

it shakes sleep from its eyes

and drops from mushroom gills,

it explodes in the starry heads

of dandelions turned sages,

it sticks to the wings of green angels

that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye

of the many-eyed potato,

it lives in each earthworm segment

surviving cruelty,

it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,

it is the mouth that inflates the lungs

of the child that has just been born. 

It is the singular gift

we cannot destroy in ourselves,

the argument that refutes death,

the genius that invents the future,

all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear

not to betray one another;

it is in this poem, trying to speak.

    

~ Lisel Mueller ~