Breathe. Hope. Fight.

I am not a go-gently-into-the-night kind of person. I am more a rage-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light kind of person.

You know me through my writing or because you, well, know me. So you know that I have very little patience with performative claptrap and New Age aphorisms and bumpersticker sentiments that I believe substitute feeling good for doing good. For years I have scoffed at “Visualize World Peace” (the “corrective” bumpersticker reads “Visualize Whirled Peas”), thinking: If you want peace, buddy, you damn well better stop visualizing and start working for it.

Last night, lying in bed listening to the hiss of rain and the soft sound of Sarah Blondin’s voice on InsightTimer, I heard her say: “Keep hand on heart, stay quiet in mind, breath slow and long.” Good advice, I thought, go tell that to the people of Ukraine. Go tell that to the folks who got their termination emails last week. Go tell that to the trans kids.

In the midst of this sweet meditation, my mind was anything but quiet. It is so very easy to be filled with fear and disgust and anguish, with despair, with anger. With hopelessness. All the while lying safe and warm between flannel sheets listening to the hiss of rain. The anger—my anger—fought against the calming words. Why should I feel calm? Isn’t calm an express train to complacency? Then I heard these words: “Breathe space into your heart.”

And, a split second before my judgmental brain had time to dismiss this as pabulum, my body took over and I felt that breath, which is life, open up inside me and stretch my heart. Not, of course, the four-chambered, fist-sized circulation pump behind my ribs, but rather my metaphorical heart, the part of me that is located nowhere and everywhere, the part of me that loves and grieves, the part of me that, right now, like you, is in pain.

I breathed space into that heart, and in that expanded space came--to my surprise--hope. Yes, hope. Not a starry-eyed vision of hope. Not hope expressed as bumperstickers or lawn signs. But sturdy, tough, rugged hope. Hope as the unshakable foundation for the work in front of us.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.