Hope

I can't decide if I love it or hate it when I run across other writers who've thought or said something similar to what I've been pondering because they usually say it so much better! But Jan Myers in her book "The Allure of Hope" describes her heart growing up in the desert southwest, and it echoed in my own heart as I've spent so much time in my mountains this week. Her words could so easily be mine:

"The threshold between mountain splendour and desert wilderness was a place of refuge for me. It didn't offer relief, but it did offer great comfort, an understanding of the wild places into which my heart was asked to travel, even as a young girl. History and future seemed swallowed up in each moment that I lingered on that cliff; the place seemed to tell me that my history and future were not going to engulf me any more than would the river valley. Rather something of the chiseled beauty around me might actually be built into me, too, if I allowed my heart to respond...

I was at home there like no place else. It was writing hope in me...

In deep nighttime darkness, the landscape provided a young woman a place to weep and wonder as the glittering sky hung low above my hurting and questioning heart...

Along the way this place has had the stregnth to hold the scenes of my life, like liturgy and ritual. Along the way it has nudged me to the conviction that my heart could stay open, my sould alive, even in the face of piercing disappointment, lengthy barren seasons of the soul, an uncertain future. Along the way I'm compelled back to the posture this beauty calls me to, back to the open-hearted stance that such dreaming requires of me.

Hope finds me."