We Rise, Undaunted

In defiance of the world seemingly filled with hot garbage

Out with the old year, in with the new. There’s nothing magical about the new calendar, but it does make a handy place to hang resolutions about ourselves, proposed changes to our world, and a reflection point on the previous swing ‘round the sun on this twirling planet. As I’ve been contemplating reading history, and the importance of encouraging the next generation to absorb it’s lessons that they can at least be somewhat conscious when they begin to repeat it, looking back into the near-history of 2023 makes sense. Whether I want to look at it, or not.

On the personal level, it has been a year of great changes for me and my family. The stressors of that have kept me inward-gazing for much of the year, absorbed in survival and care. Only the biggest global shifts have caught my attention, and held me for a time grieving with Israel, for one. The human capacity for cruel violence is breathtaking at times.

The capacity for kindness and sacrifice is, as well. I cannot dwell in one without the other.

History tells us the phoenix rises from the ashes. Whether those ashes are the violent disintegration of an entire society, or the slow dry dust of a people forced to abandon their home in time of dire drought, an end waits for all. Yet, in the end is the beginning. We can, if we teach history, learn from the past. We can, if we have children, see the world have potential for becoming renewed and beautiful again.

I grew up in the shadow of mutually assured destruction, of a certainty that the next war would shatter the planet and when it was over, no green things could grow again. There was, the demagogues and pedagogues agreed, no hope.

And yet… we have war again. War that spins the same messy tale of mud and blood and pointless death while heroes leap up in defense of their brothers-in-arms, or the innocent people who may again sleep unmolested in their beds safe at home. War that has not turned the forests to ash and the desert sand to glass. Humanity is capable of restraint, on occasion.

And so we rise, undaunted. We rise, haunted, by the knowledge of the past that colors our perception of the future. We know, you see, that the phoenix does not have a happily ever after. Death and taxes we always have with us. In the face of inflation, recession, and the prospect that what seemed like an eternal idyll crumbling away, we know the phoenix will fall, and we fear it.

Which is the wrong way to look at it. Oh, I know. I know there’s no ‘right and wrong’ in this postmodern world. There are no eternal truths. There is no good, and no evil. I’ve read history. These are the arguments that crawl out of that dumpster and make a generation dumber from time to time. What if, instead of resisting the urge we all have to find beauty in the world, to have love and make babies, to leave the world a better place than we found it… what if we allowed hope to rise, the last escapee from Pandora’s Box? The purification of the fire burning away all the dross and leaving only the elemental kernel of the incorruptible?

Biologically speaking, we are only here to bring forth the next generation. Humanly speaking, we have great things to teach that generation. We are not the phoenix, whose song dies when the child is born. We can speak into the future. We can teach that hope is the thing you find when you dig, with blistered hands, in the wreckage of the present fires that consume the dreams you had as a youth.

Seek out what is good, what is true, what is incorruptible. Bring forth beauty in all it’s ineffable forms. Deny those who would espouse a world of gray futility or of black despair. This is not the future. There is, yet, another rising of the sun, another swirl of seasons in a panoply of color and joy and the ringing of children’s laughter to bring in the New Year. When the ashes settle after the fires, the soil is nourished and rich green growth springs up again, in time.

At the end of all things, there is hope. There will always be hope.

“Hope” Is the Thing With Feathers

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

—Emily Dickinson

We rise, we fall, we rise again, from all that’s come before us.

We know, we fear, we cannot stay, and none can restore us.

Yet hope still sings a soft-heard song in the far-off dawning

Another day, another year, and in our despair the pawning

Of all that is joy, and good, and beauty must come due

A debt unpaid and unpayable, if nothing is true.