The Thing With Feathers
I’ve been thinking a lot about hope.
I recently had the great good pleasure of celebrating the relationship of two of my best (and oldest) friends, and bearing witness to their commitment to each other and to their community. After the ceremony itself there was an opportunity for folks to share something with the group, whether that was a song, a poem, or a memory. One of the folks who shared beautifully expressed a sentiment that, while I could not have told you beforehand that I needed to hear it, I found lingering in my thoughts for days afterward.
The piece that was shared is, I think, summed up well by the final line, a beloved quote from the Lord of the Rings: “May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
Even as I write this I am a little overwhelmed by the emotion of it all. Not simply of watching two of my most beloved people love each other in the fullness of their lives without any hesitation or apology, but of the hope and the safety they have provided for so many, especially in these times when it feels like safety is in such short supply.
This is the part where… I could talk about so many things. I could rage and cry and rant about the world, about those in power who are killing us daily, about the grief I am numb to but know is waiting just out of sight. But I am tired. And I am not surprised. And I hate that I am not surprised. I loath the fact that I can look at numbers of school shootings in the last five months and am no longer viscerally horrified. That when I woke up this morning and was told that the Supreme Court once again chose ideology over people’s lives, I did not cry or rage or express anything at all. I just… don’t have the energy to feel right now. Because I am not surprised.
Because I, like many LGBTQIA2+ people, am living in a world that thinks I don’t belong and would like me to not exist. I am the donor heart that is being rejected by the body, but without me we will die. And the twist is I am not a foreign object, I belong here as much as these homegrown lungs and liver, but somehow I have become unrecognizable to the rest of cells. I have been living in this body all my life, watching as people with money and power attack my very existence, creating a more and more hostile environment in which to live. So yes, I am furious and devastated that the Supreme Court made the decision that they did. And I am not surprised because Roe v. Wade was simply the last bastion in a keep whose walls are already crumbling. Because they attack trans children and the parents who raise them, they ban queer books, and we continue to see rising rates of homophobic and transphobic violence; these things are all related. There have been so many canaries in this coal mine the ground is awash in yellow feathers. And yet some folks are still surprised.
It would be easy to be angry at people who I perceive to be… not paying attention. Who don’t have the same perspective as I do. And part of me is, and another part knows that anger is misplaced, that it’s easier to be angry at people I can see rather than people who are 3,000+ miles away. So I try and think about hope.
What is hope, anyway? Is it an emotion? Simply a feeling of optimism, of wishing for a certain outcome? Or is it… more than that. We seem to ascribe a whole lot to the idea of hope, giving it a power that few things can claim. There seem to be different kinds of hope, just as there are different kinds of love. There’s the small hope, the everyday hope, the “I hope it rains tonight” or “I hope I didn’t burn my toast.” Then there seems to be a weightier hope, the kind that serves as the light (as Galadriel says) when all others go out.
Does hope need to be attached to something? To a certain outcome? Do we need to hope for something? Or is hope itself enough? And when does hope become faith? Does faith require paradigm, dogma, or prescription? Or is it the opposite? Does faith require the absence of hope? Is faith what you have when you have lost hope? I don’t know. I feel like I have so many more questions than answers, and so few things that give me hope. But for now I am focusing on the little hopes, the things that make life sweeter, the immediate physical manifestations of good.
So, what gives me hope? What do I see in this world that makes me… excited to wake up tomorrow?
My cat chasing rainbows
My sister’s freshly baked bread
Watching Critical Role
Watering my bonsai
Counting buttons with a six year old
My best friends getting married
Reading The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
And sometimes I don’t even really feel the hope, but I know it’s there. Sometimes there are too many things to feel and the system just gets overloaded. But, like the grief, I know that the hope is still waiting just around the corner. And chances are grief and hope will be standing there hand in hand, waiting patiently for me to catch up.
And in the end, as Samwise reminds us, it is only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass.
“It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo : What are we holding on to, Sam?
Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”