sólo la sed nos alumbra

"And you would think now hope would be tired,
But it's all right.
You would think tired, ragged and oil-brown,
But it's all right.

Since everything's possible,
We will still go,


~ The Innocence Mission, Go.

The phenomenon of an interior renewal, whether occasional or continuous, is a tremendous mystery. We might simply resign our thoughts with an expression such as "well, the sun rises tomorrow, and shall assuredly each day." But that is at best a surface observation, and is insufficient. How is it possible that a barely visible grain of hope becomes enough to move a mountain? What happens in the dark night of the soul when, for a seemingly interminable span of time, thoughts of an apparent tomorrow offer no encouragement- and then a palpable aspiration arises? Sure, my friends have heard my "I hope so's," and "I think so's," uncertain to the same level as my wonder that a newness of life should be delivered to a doubtful person like me. Is it a question of strength at all?


Breaking the bonds of time begin to resemble the ways we can jettison our past's dead wood. In this I am learning how the future lights the present, not the other way around. My natural skill at perseverance would now be little more than status-quo, without a mysterious undergirding force that has not emanated from me. A flickering signal light can increase to a persistent fire within, and beneath what I can hardly describe is the sure call to courage. Now to maintain this spirit. But then as a true paradox it would be subverting to be concerned with the distance ahead and any sort of grasping, rather than to be about the immediacy of being.