Tough Hope
What do we need to survive summer, with its altered schedules, unrelenting heat and water undrinkable without ice? Well, we need Hope.
The only thing to remain, lodged in the mouth, was Hope.” – A.E. Stallings, “Ajar”
I collect quotes about hope, like the poem above, about the myth of Pandora, but they can’t be saccharine. Hope is a bitter candy that becomes sweet in the sucking. For years people tossed this four-letter word my way, thinking they offered a life preserver, but it felt like an anchor, miring me stuck. Until the hoped-for happened, what was I supposed to do all day? Even without hope there was still tea to brew and poems to read and write. Gradually I began to see hope as the doing of these very things. That kind of hope, the doing kind, is best expressed in Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet.
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