On Christmas night, the first night of Hanukkah, and my sister-in-law Karen's birthday, we light a bunch of candles. This included the ones on Karen's birthday cake. After she blew them out, the candles, one by one, re-ignited themselves, a trick of their design. So we sang "Happy Birthday" a second time and had her blow them out again.....until they sparked into tiny flames again. Ken carried the cake to Liv and me, who both had December birthdays, and we all sang "Happy Birthday again. Of course, after we blew them out, they still tried to light up again, although more slowly this time.
Such is life, we might say. Even without trick candles, what's not ready to be extinguished finds a way to keep going.
This gives me a lot of hope in the last week of a year that has sparked a whole lot of dread, fear, and trepidation in many of us. But I tell myself: scrappy weeds find ways to push themselves up through cracks in cement driveways and wind up chain-link fences toward the sun. Kitties we swore used all of their nine lives leap off the refrigerator and miss, crashing into the floor, but behold, some cats have ten or 36 or dozens of lives. Numerous people I know with stage four cancer diagnoses were told to pack their bags for the afterworld, but they're still alive, a little shaky from all the chemo over the years, twenty years later. Life is a plucky thing, doing all it can to keep living in so many unlikely circumstances.
When I think about hope and what it really is or isn't, I think of little flames that come back even without much prompting (maybe life itself is sometimes a trick candle). Real hope seems way more like a practice than a specific result: we show up and do whatever we can to make our lives or families or homes or communities or work better, and sometimes what's beyond our control takes hold. People sign up for the workshop we didn't think would go. The plumber tell us that it's actually a minor problem that will cost a fraction of her bid. The initiative for affordable housing, despite lobbying from moneyed interest against it, actually gets approved by the city commission. The disappeared dog is found in a neighbor's yard seven miles away. The prodigal child, now in his 30s, finds true love.
So often, what I hope for, what you may hope for too, is way out there against the odds, but we can't help but lean against the apparently impossible wall, working and hoping for a way through. I remember in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and people rejoiced in their others' arms, not just in Germany but around the world. I remember times my children faced life-threatening injuries or illnesses: my oldest son was born kind of purple and wouldn't breathe on his own at first, my youngest son was in a deadly car accident when he was five. Both emerged with barely a scratch for one, a missing tooth for the other. Fresh on my mind is how we bought the land where we live and got it in a conservative easement to protect it from development in perpetuity after decades of people telling us it couldn't be done.
Yet every one of these examples is a there-but-for-grace-go-I story, and like you, I've experienced some of the opposite and I've witnessed good people suffer tremendously from what might have been changed in the nick of time but wasn't. There's so rhythm or rhyme so often for where, how, and if we're find enough light to see our way through, or even how and where to step next. But at our best, we can try to be each other's flashlights.
Speaking of which, so many celebrations this time of year speak to finding and making light in the dark: from kindling the candles of the menorah, another one added each night, to holding a single candle in the dark on Christmas eve while passing the light around and singing "Silent Night." Kwanzaa, Solstice, and so many other observances are about, among other things, light.
As I sit here writing this, we're tipping toward nightfall on a foggy day, but out the window, downtown Lawrence glowing with lights spun around each tree. That's what I love about now: how we can behold and amplify the beauty that light shows us.
Charles Bukowski of all people has a poem, "the laughing heart," that shines a light on all this, telling us:
be on the watch
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
Yes, we need to be on the watch for what comes into being or returns to us to say, look, there is light somewhere.
Love you, Caryn! Your light shines so brightly