Sounds Of Hope From Within
It’s spring where I live, although there’s still two feet of snow in the nearby woods. But the equinox has passed, the days are becoming warmer, and the birds are singing their nesting songs. If you woke up from some long coma this morning, you would recognize the signs that deepest winter is past.
Of course that’s only true if you have some sense of this place and the way seasons move here. If you don’t know snow, you may not see the way it appears so differenly from when it fell. If you haven’t heard the silence of a subzero midwinter, you might not recognize how loud it is to we who have wintered in this place. The subtlelties of the landscape are manifest to those who have watched, and nearly indecipherable to those who have not. And this is true of every geography on Earth. Yet how we see and understand our relation to these changes varies greatly across place and people.
We are part of the geography, the ecosystems. We are one of the species that stir differently with the seasons, even if our attunement looks very different from place to place, person to person, and people to people. (We forget that our species is not the only one that notices, that watches the changes in behavior.) And we sometimes underestimate how we signal to one another that a time for change has come.
Even within our individual bodies, those ecosystems of micro- and macrobiology, new seasons stir. Among the cacophony of voices that sing of transformation and signal the changing of the seasons, your soul, too, sings of becoming. You, without exception, add to the legacy of a ecosystem that goes on.
And the rest of us, peoples of roost, road, riptide, and rock, find the sounds of hope from every part of the whole.
(listen to this poem for free on Patreon)
Sounds Of Hope
Having stayed alive this long,
you know the voices of life,
the sounds of hope.
You know to turn your face
to the sun when it comes out,
to enjoy the softness of socks.
You know to hush when the breeze
rises the boughs and
to inhail as long as you can
when the pines are baking.
But have you heard, yet,
your voice? The one
the birds listen for?
Have you felt the soft warmth
that comes from your core?
Have you felt the hush of another's
body in your embrace?
You, too, have this long
kept us alive. Your voice
the sound of our hope.
And we turn our faces
to your brilliance.
- Bjørn Peterson
(Read more poetry for free or become a patron at patreon.com/bjornpeterson.)
What does this poem mean to you? What phrases or images stand out? How does your voice speak the sounds of hope? Where have you recognized your brilliance?
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