I can taste fall in the air, its chill tempting me to remain wrapped in my quilt later than I should. So I bundle myself warm and return again each morning to my desk, to welcome the words I know will arrive. This morning words are like minnows, schooling around my ankles, tickling their way onto the page. I sit at my basement desk, looking up toward light that filters past late summer flowers from a sky that is clear and blue. When people told me that writing was a frightening proposition, I nodded, and thought I understood what they were talking about. How often my life confronts me with the disparity between what I know and what I truly understand.
In my window well, along with the industrious spiders, a toad drops in to keep me occasional company. He has been here three times before, leaping each time with persistence against the screen, startling me. Or he sits on the concrete lip of my window with meditative quiet, as if watching me. Sometimes I think he's gone, only to find him blending with the chunks of bark that cover the ground outside the window. But then later, when I peek out to see where he is, he is not just camouflaged; he has disappeared. How? This morning my answer arrived when I saw him inching, Spider man-like, up the corner of the window and frame, scaling a smooth surface I thought was impossible.
I have begun a conversation with some friends about what it means to hope. I knew the definition, but wanted to see where the word came from. This is what I found in the Online Etymology Dictionary:
hope
O.E. hopian "wish, expect, look forward (to something)," of unknown origin, a general Low Ger. word (cf. O.Fris. hopia, M.L.G., M.Du. hopen; M.H.G. hoffen "to hope" was borrowed from Low Ger. Some suggest a connection with hop (v.) on the notion of "leaping in expectation."
© 2001 Douglas Harper
Hope is in frightfully short supply these days, and misunderstandings of what could sustain its weight abound. What does it mean to live in a forward, expectant direction, with the piercing sadness and crippling fears that life in this world inevitably brings? And what happens when we put our full weight onto a dream that itself offers no promise? What else is there? Once I might have been quick to offer what I knew; I am learning to embrace what I do not yet understand, to be present to the is, rather than the ought.
Monday is my deadline to have the first draft of my novel finished, something which still feels like I'm still six inches shy of scaling the impossible. And yet I have this knobbly-skinned visitor to remind me that there is a deeper magic than fear, leaping against my window to surprise me. Hope thrives in the unknowns, when life escapes my control. What a beautiful, terrifying thing. I am on a journey toward hope; writing is one of my means of discovery. I write because it exposes my unknowing, and because when I do, something inside of me leaps.
