Generational Hope

Sometimes we get out of our way and find hope.

It’s six thirty in the morning and I let the dogs out, stepping on the patio to take an extra breath of the newly humid air. Grass and other familiar smells tickle my nose, birds chirp with surprise at the sudden seasonal change. Like kindling, smoking then at once beginning to flame.

In Chillicothe later that day I head outside at lunch, intending to do a twenty-minute Peloton walk, but it’s too cold, too windy, too cloudy. Fits and starts, but spring is surely coming.

Everything requires a hack in these times. We exercise to make up for our sedentary lives. We get morning sunlight into our retinas, turn off overhead lights early, wear blue blocking glasses, and refrain from screens in order to resemble circadian rhythms. We avoid processed foods and sugars, replenish our gut microbiome and eat whole foods to approximate a pre-factory farm, pre-refrigeration diet.

We limit our social media time. And set up in-person interactions with friends and family.

Hacks are necessary but artificial and insufficient.

Generational memory is fading and everyday our information is new. But not better. We are fundamentally unchanged for tens of thousands of years. And until very recently we learned only from our family and community, information passed down through millennia. Songs and stories that were hundreds of years old. How to read the land. What plants heal. Clothing and food adapted to our needs. How to communicate wordlessly. How to live with one another. Animals and fish that we hunted when needed and lived alongside when we didn’t.

Hope. Each of us living our own unique and separate lives. Conscious and independent.

Hope. Yet all with the same need for community and love and with room to grow our gifts.

Hope. That there will be more and better.

Hope. That there will be joy and rest and comfort.

A triumphal entry that few will notice.

A hope hack- found in silence and contemplation. And found in deep relationships and with the memory embedded in our DNA that all creatures living and no longer and not yet living come from One.

Holy One, all of life can be learned from Jesus. And from one plot of land. Amen.

Brandon is a member of Peace Church and is forever hopeful.