Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

~Vaclav Havel

my sense of hope is actually an aliveness…

inquiry for today~ and can you be in awe when you are also in despair?

hovering above the abyss

‘There is a story of a woman running away from tigers.  She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer.  When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines.

Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well.  She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging.  She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass.  She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse.

Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.  Tigers above, tigers below.

This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death.  Each moment is just what it is.  It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat.  We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.’

~Pema Chodron