I did a thing!

Starting this blog I was like ‘let’s keep it breezy and light’ and maybe even practice being a bit funny.

So I came up with the above title and was scratching around for a way to tell the story of getting my long hair cut short. I even wrote the event up as poetry. Why not? Di is a brilliant hairdresser and I always enjoy the conversations we have when it is just the two of us in the salon. But I’m not feeling it and if I’m not feeling it, you won’t either. You might have even stopped reading by now.

I blame hope.

My uni mates agreed to keep me accountable this week to submit work. I hate disappointing people and have been helpfully motivated. I sent my manuscript off to a call for poetry manuscripts and looked into an opportunity, a poetry competition, forwarded to me by my supervisor.

Write a poem about hope.

I’m up for the challenge. I can write on topic, capture an idea, and give it a little kick in the tail for an unexpected ending. This is one of the skills I learned while doing my project. It requires honesty and vulnerability, and my own permission to be myself.

I went to the cafe this morning, as I do every Saturday morning, and wrote about getting my hair cut. The poem contained many things but no matter how I bent the words, they weren’t about hope.

I’ve been reading Writing Well by William Zinsser and rereading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Both books circle back to a basic truth: write what you think, write it well, and tell the truth.

The truth is simple: I find hope difficult.

My poetry, like much trauma poetry, is filled with sorrow, suffering, and pain. Hope is part of survival. You survived the things that happened because somewhere within you, locked deep within your true self, was hope.

Hope that it would stop. Hope that things would get better. Hope that someone might notice and say something, or take you away, or make you into an entirely new person. The body fights for life. The psyche fights for life. Their purpose is to preserve life, your life.

What of hope?

It seems that hope is the core of the person. The thing that not only enables life but nurtures it, expects it, wants it to happen. This makes me think…

The earth’s core is fascinating. A ball of solid iron the size of the moon surrounded by liquid iron (I searched it online) and it is the thing that enables this planet to support life. I don’t know how and am, no doubt, oversimplifying an important and complex system.

I imagine the earth’s core as a place of mystery, like a heart that beats without being told to. Hearts insist on life. This insistence is beyond us, beyond any ability to will ourselves into the world, to will our hearts to beat however we wish them to. It simply is.

Is this hope? Solid iron so hot that life emerges from it? A heart that beats?

Heads up: I’ve hit on a corny cliché.

The earth’s heart and our hearts connect.
Perform the same function.
Follow the same pattern.

Hope completes the triptych.
Three images, one story.

Hope is life.
An energy.
The thing that keeps us going.

There is a theory of hope that it is about being connected to something bigger than yourself, to the thing that holds all of this together, to something many call God. There is comfort in this. You know things will be okay because God is on your side, looking out for you.

But it’s overly simplistic. If good things happen because God is looking out for you, what about the bad? Is God cross? Punitive? Has he stopped noticing? What’s the deal?

Those with hope in God should hold onto it. It is a bleak world without any hope.

I am no further progressed with my poem—question after question won’t a poem make.

Back to my hair.

I had it all cut off. I simply got fed up with wearing it up all of the time. It was boring and I had grown bored of it. To the point that I almost got the scissors out and cut it myself (it wouldn’t be the first time) but Di fit me in and did it for me, saving both her and me a great deal of angst.

And now I wear hats again. I currently have on this cute little number and am looking forward to working my way through my collection of winter knits given that the weather calls for it.

Wait…

Maybe this is hope:

doing a thing in the belief that it might make life better.

Even just a little bit.