spacer

HOPE
Pilgrimage Volume 30, Issue 3

How do you experience hope? Where do you look for it? What do you do when the “song of hope” cannot be heard? Essays, Poems, and Stories by Red Bird, Aaron Abeyta, David Ray, Pam Uschuk, Brian Doyle, Paul A. Lacey, and many more fine writers.

“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.”                                ~Emily Dickinson

“When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.”                           ~Anne Lamott


Cover Photo by Melanie Rijkers / www.mery.com

From the Introduction by Editor, Peter Anderson

"Hope, as I understand it, bears little resemblance to the kind of sunny-all-the-time optimism that turns away from anything resembling the shadow; nor is it about choosing to dwell in some rosy vision of the future in lieu of accepting what is. In the same way that an honest experience of faith includes periods of doubt, so too an experience of hope is known in part by our inability, at times, to feel its presence. We are able to discern our own experience of hope in part because we know what it’s like to be without it. . . . "

From Bees Born of Tears by Laura Resau

“...After the conversation with my poet friend, I looked up demacrada in my dictionary. Emaciated. What he meant was spiritually emaciated. I tell myself that life is a series of little deaths and rebirths--part of yourself dies; a new part is born. But what if some essential part of yourself disappears, and there’s nothing to replace it?”


Photo/Friends of Peace Pilgrim
www.peacepilgrim.org

From Words Along the Way--Peace Pilgrim

“We are all cells in the body of humanity—all of us, all over the world. Each one has a contribution to make, and will know from within what this contribution is, but no one can find inner peace except by working . . .for the whole human family.”

"Inner peace is not found by staying on the surface of life, or by attempting to escape from life through any means. Inner peace is found by facing life squarely, solving its problems, and delving as far bepossible to discover its verities and realities”