Hope Has Always Been A Verb - New Typewriter Series Poem

I'll See You In The Light

Typewriter Series #274. The NEW poem is below, but I thought we needed this reminder too.

Hope, like love, is a verb. It’s an action, it’s a defiant answer to a forlorn question. Hope is a refusal, it’s an unwillingness to cocoon so safely against pain that we immune ourselves from joy, too.

Hope, it seems, is all there is left to do.

I’m leaving this special Friday post, this never-before-read Typewriter Series poem, free for everyone today, each one of you 12,000 readers, because it’s important, because you all deserve the reminder, the urging, because we all deserve your hope too, because we need it like air in the times to come.

I’ve been quiet over the last week or so, trying to make sense of what just happened in the United Divided States of America…again. It’s been a week of watching the hand wringing of millions turn into the finger pointing of thousands, of blame being thrown in a dozen directions for a quick and easy answer to the “How” of “How the hell did this happen…again?” It’s turned ugly already, as so many are looking for a goat to scape, maybe it was white women, maybe it was Latino men, maybe it was Joe Rogan, maybe it was racism, sexism, grocery store prices, maybe it was Gaza or Israel or Democrats moving too far right or too far left or maybe it was some false projection of strength that Trump has figured out or maybe it was that the glass ceiling is actually bulletproof, everyone, everywhere, looking for a reason.

Maybe it’s just America right now? Maybe this is what this country wanted, maybe it’s because for so long so many have been so devoid of hope that all they know, all they see, all they can register is the contents of their own bubble they have built around themselves. Maybe.

I don’t have the answers today, now the How it happened, not the Why it happened, not the What of what will happen now, and I am sorry for this. What I have, is what I’ve learned (almost always the hard way) in my years on this planet, what I’ve fought to discover, and it is this:

It takes walking away from the safety of our little bubbles to truly find freedom. It takes HOPE to pop those walls.

In a strange twist that now that I write this doesn’t feel strange or twisted at all, the Typewriter Series poem that I was going to share today, is about precisely this. Originally written for someone else who survived more than she thought she could, who had the bravery to walk out of her own survival shelter and into the light of whatever comes beyond, it resonates in so many more ways here today. For us.

I will not lie to you and pretend that the situation we’re facing is not indeed a bleak one, that there is not now and will not be darkness in so many places, for so many of us. I will not lie and say I am not broken-hearted in a billion ways that, for whatever reasons they wish to justify their decisions with, so many millions of my fellow country-people would choose a rapist, a criminal, a liar, a misogynist, a hateful racist, a willing agent of such deceitful and harmful chaos, over a completely competent, hopeful, joyful, qualified woman. Is she perfect? No. Is she better? In every single possible way.

I am heartbroken, but I won’t stop hoping. Hope is the antidote to the apathetic poison we’re being drip fed. Hope is the verb against the defining noun of hate. Of fear. I will not stop throwing “light into that underground channel I lost myself in,” to quote my own new poem below. I will not stop peddling it to you, not stop reminding you that you can choose it too, that you can spread it like a Signal Fire from whatever mountaintop is close enough to climb.

Please don’t build your bubbles, please don’t hide inside them to protect yourself against the sadness that will bounce against your walls. Please don’t forget that you too will be blind to the joy that never gets to grow. Please find a hand and hold it, squeeze it with a reminder that there is always a call for hope, a call for defiant belief in something better than what we’re given.

Please don’t stop caring more, or at the very least, just as much about everyone else as you do yourself, please don’t point fingers, but spread them to allow for more holding. Please remember the staggering light there still is to chase, that if we cannot find it we can still make our own. It takes a spark to stoke a wildfire, and we can be that for one another, we can always be that.

Below is the brand new poem, a gift for you all today. I’ll still be here, every single week, and I hope you’ll stick with me. I hope you’ll support independent writing like this, like me, because we’ll need it more soon than ever before. We’ll need voices of defiant hope, of intentional kindness, of belief despite it all.

For those that are struggling, for those that need an extra dose of that hopeful medicine, I’m here, we’re here, this stunning community. For my LGBTQIA+ friends that are scared, that are calling into crisis centers at record numbers now, reach here, too. For my friends and family that are minorities in this country, for any of you that feel persecuted, that feel at risk, that feel terrified of what’s to come, for those of you who cannot find the verb in the Hope I speak of, come to me, come to us. We’ll warm you back up.

Enjoy the poem, support independent journalism of all kinds, spread hope, spread kindness, and breathe. We’ll get through this together.

Now, the poem, and the audio version of me reading it…I love you all.

And my silly voice, reading it to you: