Hope is an ethereal yet essential
thing.
“I believe that
imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history.
That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over
experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love
is stronger than death.”
― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Beautiful words. But sometimes the world becomes ashes in your
hands, and what do you have left?
When hope dies, life has a weird way of
giving you its form of C.P.R. or hitting you with those electric paddles.
You see, in a strange way there is neither happiness
nor misery in the world.
There is only the comparison of one state
with another.
He who has been plunged into the deepest
grief later comes to see what beauty he foolishly took for granted before.
That
which he was blind to prior becomes to him a healing scene of rare wonder.
Perhaps wisdom can be distilled into two
words:
Wait and Hope.
I had a silly dream, born of the wonder my
friends in The League of Five had in the thrill of continued adventures in
linked books:
To be able to weave a linked
world of different heroes fighting in a cosmic war that few even realized was
ongoing from one novel to another and have them read and loved was my dream.
Know how many copies of HIBBS,
THE CUB WITH NO CLUE I have sold?
Two. And I bought one of those
for my own Kindle! Ouch!
Some months back it hit me that I
was never going to sell many of my books, much less be popular.
The Father murmured, “There are
worse fates.”
And I contracted cancer
like my mother before me.
Stunned and
fearful, I said, “Yeah, you right.”
{By the way, for all you males
out there – those are the 3 magic words for your angry wives or lovers:
YEAH,
YOU RIGHT.
They will at least not make
matters worse!}
After a very unsettling time, the
Father granted me a reprieve.
A reprieve
is all any of us get.
Our promissory note
on life always come due, and the Postman in Black turns up at our doorstep …
and he has the key to every one of our doors.
Sandra, my best friend, is dying
of cancer.
When she emails me (which now
is seldom for she is focusing on her family and her own fears),
she demands to
know how I am doing in work, how my health is, and how my prose dream is doing.
It seems trite in the extreme to
whine about the Lab Tech who has been actively trying for years to get me
fired.
(It is a puzzlement to all who
know of it and me. But sometimes you
work with mentally unstable people … sadly this one has clout.)
Sandra insists she wants to know of
my books.
She says in this age of
reality programming and Twitter, no one wants to think while they read.
If I enjoy the act of writing, then
write. If 5 people find pleasure in my
prose, then my dream has not been in vain
Life is short and fragile as both
Sandra and I know.
We must be mindful of
the beauty and love that pushes through the cracks of the concrete of a world
seemingly intent on crushing us.
If you want to give me some good news
to write Sandra, buy a copy of
or
If not, that’s all right,
too.
I have learned the importance of
each breath treasured for its own sake.
A
good friend gone far away just reminded me on Facebook of my own words on my Author Page:
“The great thing about being a writer is that you CAN
BE a princess, an astronaut, or a dinosaur.
Samuel Clemens was never taken seriously as a writer
... until he was famous. He wrote ‘You are a crank ... until you succeed.’
People will take you as seriously as you take
yourself.
We must be whole within ourselves -- no matter what
inane nonsense folks think of us.
That is why writers are lonely, for a dream is a
private thing since no one's dream is dear to someone looking from the outside.
Every pioneer goes it alone, but writers are lucky:
they get to take their characters along with them inside their heads!”
It is good to have good friends like Robert to remind
us of who we are.
Have a lovely week, my friends.
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