A comment made about yesterday’s post, “Just know it will be alright” made me think that phrase might be interpreted as something along the lines of giving up and just hoping the answer to a problem you are dealing with might appear out of nowhere.

What I intended was “just know it will be alright” in the sense of practicing hope:

“Hope isn’t just looking at the positive things in this world, or expecting the best. That’s a fragile kind of cheerfulness, something that breaks under the weight of a normal human life. To practice hope is to face hard truths, harder truths than you can face without the practice of hope. You can’t navigate dark places without a light, and hope is that light for humanity’s dark places. Hope lets you study environmental destruction, war, genocide, exploitative relations between peoples. It lets you look into the darkest parts of human history, and even the callous entropy of a universe hell bent on heat death no matter what we do. When you are disciplined in hope, you can face these things because you have learned to put them in context, you have learned to swallow joy and grief together, and wait for peace.”

Quinn Norton https://www.emptywheel.net/…/it-is-bitter-tea-that…/

To complicate this further, people of faith do wait for answers from the Spirit. But they actively, intentionally listen for the Spirit’s message, and thus do believe it will be alright when they hear and follow that message.

Today’s passage from A Cherokee Feast of Days, Volume Two, by Joyce Sequichie Hifler follows:

Real power is often just knowing when to keep our mouths shut. We have so much we want to say and so many to say it to that it is almost impossible to stay silent.

But silence teaches in a way that nothing else can. The mind makes deep adjustments in the quiet times. True laughter bubbles up from humor too precious for words–and brings with it a joy that dissolves disappointment.

Real, mind-changing power is of the spirit an can clear a path a mile wide through pain. The human spirit fights valiantly, and when it is blended with this power, it comes out like a tiger.

March 31, Joyce Sequichie Hifler