a dollop of hope

Not-goodness has been accumulating in my emotion-bucket over the past few days.

To wit:

• An awesome woman I'm really into needed a few weeks to, you know, think about it. Possible Alf Weeder-Zen, awesome woman. 
• The next day, someone harangued me for five uninterrupted minutes in a very personal way, based on what felt to me like a misunderstanding of my position. I bore it in silence, but felt like fewmets* the entire time.
• A few days after that, someone jacked my car.
• This afternoon, my sandals were stolen and eaten by a dog whilst I played with my son out on the rocks at the river.
• After driving home barefoot, I found I had a message from the Policepeoples, who told me they'd found my now un-driveable car and had towed it to a wrecking yard. The people at the wrecking yard wouldn't answer the phone, so now I'll have to pay not just for the towing, but for storage fees over the weekend -- all for an already rat-bagged and now thoroughly-thrashed car.
• Then I tried to carve a hippopotamus into a pumpkin, and it came out looking like a demon-possessed mouse in the throes of anaphylactic shock.**
• And, oh yeah, nobody's really paying me for the every-spare-moment work I've been doing for so very long now that I can't remember what it felt like not to butt up against fear and failure every single day.

When this sort of list stacks up, I try to cheer myself up with thoughts like, "What's the point of being a starving artist if you don't run the risk of actually starving once in a while?" and "First-world Problems, Amiright?" (Not to mention "How about all those copious, ridiculous blessings you've gotten, every single moment of your life")

It doesn't work.

But then tonight in bed as I read from Barbara Kingsolver's beautiful novel, Animal Dreams, I came across this quote,

"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed."

I read this quote, and it did work.

Maybe it was the context, but I felt a dollop of hope forming in the corner of my eyeball. I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and wrote this post.

So here's to finding your Hope in Art, and maybe even living in it. Sleep well, cruel world.

I'll see you tomorrow -- with a smile.

- - -

*Fewmets are dragon-poop. Don't say I never taught you anything.

** In case you're wondering what a demon-possessed mouse in the throes of anaphylactic shock looks like, here 'tis: