A Dot of Hope on the Horizon

Venus a bright dot
in cerulean dawn sky
hope on the horizon

Yesterday’s agreement to open the Gaza border to aid is like Venus this morning: a dot of hope dawning. President Biden reminded us that rage is not the way forward, that ordinary Palestinians are not Hamas, that all citizens deserve protection. Amen!

Every morning, I post a haiku and photo with a short comment on social media. (Technically, the text is a haibun, a haiku followed by a short bit of narrative.) This morning I had Israel and Palestine on my mind After I read Heather Cox Richardson’s excellent newsletter summary of President Biden’s speech in Israel and the agreement he brokered to begin sending aid to the two million Palestinians in Gaza who are not Hamas terrorists, but who are suffering the consequences of this renewed war, I felt hopeful for the first time since horrifying the Hamas attack on Israel.

So when I saw Venus, traditionally the planet of love, shining so brightly in the eastern horizon, I felt a glimmer of hope.

Not a passive sort of—”oh, good, now someone will figure out how to end our problems”—feeling. A sense that perhaps this is a positive change in the international weather, a tailwind that will gather and give new power to the cumulative efforts we are all making to spread love and compassion and active goodwill across the world.

I believe in the power of collective action, in the grace and healing we can each enhance with our individual actions. I believe that what we give is what we get in the longer term. As I have written in other places (an essay called “Picking Up Roadkill,” and in Walking Nature Home, my first memoir),

A civilized society is created as much by our private, every-day acts as it is by the laws we pass and the contracts we sign: our personal behavior sets the model for what we expect of others.

In other words, we create the society we want to live in, every day, as we live our lives. We may not live in Israel or Gaza, or Ukraine or Sudan, or other places where wars devastate both humans and the land we depend on, but we can act in ways that strengthen that glimmer of hope.

I realized two things this morning: one was that I have been writing and posting these daily haiku/haibun and photos on social media for about 17 years (I’m not sure exactly when I started), which means that I have posted around 6,000 of them. And two, they are my version of a gratitude journal.

Gratitude journaling is having a kind of moment in the sun right now, perhaps because the world feels troubled and broken and a lot of us are searching for ways to not despair.

I’m generally a happy person, but when times are hard, it’s not easy to maintain that positive outlook. I tend to distrust easy solutions to anything—using sunny-faced emojis and writing platitudes aren’t going to make me happy or the world a better place—but the research on gratitude is pretty clear: spending time thinking about what we’re grateful for has positive effects on our mental and physical health.

An article in the Harvard Health newsletter sums up recent research, including a study by psychologists Dr. Robert A. Emmons of the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami where the three groups wrote daily, one about things they were grateful for, one about irritations, and one about things that affected them, positive or negative:

After 10 weeks, those who wrote about gratitude were more optimistic and felt better about their lives. Surprisingly, they also exercised more and had fewer visits to physicians than those who focused on sources of aggravation.

So a regular practice of finding gratitude and recording it is worth pursuing. That’s essentially what I am doing by noticing a moment in my day that fills me with awe or delight or peace or hope, or anything that makes me stop and smile. And by sharing it with you all, I figure I am multiplying the benefits—for us all.

So, six thousand or so photos and haiku/haibun later, I hope I am providing the dot of hope for all of you that seeing Venus shining bright above the dark eastern horizon did for me this morning.

Blessings, Susan